Jesse Singal

Book title and author: The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills Jesse Singal. Reviewed 9-15-23.

Why I picked this book up: being a psychologist I was interested so I chose to read it.

Thoughts: I watched a discussion between this author and an atheist, neither of whom I could see myself hanging out with as this author said he is vey liberal and labeled himself as “on the left.” The author is a investigative journalist.

This book covers a wide range of domains, and I read his implicit bias and I understand we are all biased but also know the importance of consideration of the source to understand where fom whee the person is coming. In this book Mr. Singal covers things like Seligman’s Positive Psychology, super predators, soldiers at war, grit, the self esteem movement, financial sexual disparity rates, “social racism,” replication crisis. Overall I took his writing as rather anti-psychology.

Why I finished this read: overall this book was negative or maybe I see his book as skepticism that came off yo me as negative . He is from Boston which is a negative in my book because there are a lot of extra liberals and I am conservative.

Stars rating: I rated this book 1 of 5 stars and would not recommend buying this book because there is a big fist for people to walk away with a negative view from what psychologists put out. I understand there are some bad things psychologists put out but also so quality things put out too.… (mais)

يقدم علم النفس الحديث رؤى جيدة حول السلوك البشري وحلولاً ممكنة لبعض مشاكل المجتمع الخطيرة. لكن الكثير من دراسات علم النفس التي تنشر في المجلات العلمية تحوي ما لا يستهان به من العيوب، وعندما يتم بثّها على عيوبها وأخطائها في الثقافة الشعبية من خلال وسائل الإعلام، غالباً ما تفهم على نحوٍ خاطئ وتحيد عن صلب الموضوع المدروس.
يتبنى المؤلف موقفاً مشككاً للغاية في هذا المجال، ويجادل من خلال التحليل النقدي لمفاهيم علم النفس المؤثرة بأنه لا ينبغي أن نتسرع في تصديق الخبراء. فعندما تدخل الأفكار نصف المخبوزة إلى تيار العوام، يمكن أن تضر أكثر مما تنفع.
تحب أدمغتنا القصص البسيطة والتفسيرات الأنيقة والحلول السريعة، فنبسّط العالم ونعتقد أننا فهمناه. لذلك، من الصعب إلقاء اللوم على علماء النفس لمواصلة البحث عن قصص بسيطة منمقة والتزامهم بها. القصة الجيدة تأتي بنتائج أفضل، وتحظى بالاهتمام الإعلامي. وبمجرد تسليط الضوء عليهم وعلى أبحاثهم، والحصول على التمويل وإجراء المقابلات والعروض التقديمية، يصعب عليهم الابتعاد عن مسار سردهم والاعتراف بأخطائهم.
يدعو الكتاب إلى الإصلاح في علم النفس، والتوقف عن الوقوع في فخ القصة البسيطة الجذابة، فالسلوك البشري وجميع المشاكل المرتبطة به معقدة بشكل لا يصدق. وغالباً ما تتطلب المشاكل المعقدة تفسيرات وحلول بنفس قدر التعقيد. أما الحل السطحي السريع—وهو عنوان الكتاب—فليس له وجود هنا.… (mais)

Almost as s a public service, Jesse Singal has investigated numerous famous frauds of social/behavioral psychology. These are the fashionable, authoritative life hacks that can be described in cute memes or no more than a simple declarative sentence. The kinds of hacks that have made millions for psychologists, and continue to, long after they have been proven wrong if not totally bogus, and even after their creators have admitted as much. It is a delicious overview of what is wrong with psychology and why its credibility bounces along the zero level. They make his book, The Quick Fix, a great, animated read. For some, it might even prove embarrassing.

Psychologists are always on the prowl for the quick fix. How to improve performance, limit gaffes, be more sensitive, more effective, more confident, more prominent, get the promotion or the raise, and so on. It has led to fad after fad, endless books by sudden experts on the topic, whole armies of life and career coaches, and numerous fortunes. But in essentially every case, to put it kindly, it’s not true.

Singal begins with self-esteem, a trend America has taken to unimaginable extremes. It is now institutional practice to assure every child s/he is not merely unique but the best possible person that could be. Everyone gets a medal or ribbon. Everyone is a winner. Everyone, to cite Garrison Keillor, is above average. My own favorite example came from Europe, where OECD evaluations of high schoolers showed American students trailing badly in math, reading, history – in every category except one. They led in the world in self-esteem. They have enormously high opinions of themselves, that does not translate into academic excellence. But it is self-esteem that parents and teachers emphasize, and that is therefore where they excel.

Singal traces the self-esteem craze to one man, a mid-century California politician named Vasconcellos, who grabbed it and promoted it for all it was worth, and then some. It got studied and explored and promoted as the instant, costless and most effective fix to make every American the best there could be. Courses and textbooks now abound on the subject. With self-esteem, anyone could do or become anything they wanted, with success all but assured. Singal says self-esteem “was able to catch on, offering a straightforward solution to a constellation of problems that are not, in fact, straightforward to solve.” The result is a population that is single-minded, single-focused, selfish, self-centered, self-indulgent, uncooperative and entitled. And not particularly successful. But every parent knows the most important thing to drill into their children is self-esteem, because it will make them successful, happy and excellent people. Self-esteem is the shortcut to the top everyone wishes they had known about.

Unfortunately, no studies show this works.

Another quick fix was labeling certain adolescents “super-predators”. Libraries of books have been written by newly self-anointed experts about how crime has fallen or risen based on the number of super-predators that birth rates and socio-economic trends predict. There were dire predictions for massive gangs of murderous thieves around the millennium, while another famous book claimed the opposite: that their numbers had shrunk to insignificance thanks to the availability of abortions in that era.

Super predators are the invention of John DiIulio, the one who predicted the plague: “500,000 boys who will be 14 to 17 years old in the year 2000 will mean at least 30,000 more murderers, rapists, and muggers on the streets than we have today.” That his prediction did not come to pass has not stopped the term itself from entering the lexicon of crime, politics, socio-economic levels or of non-profits. It has become accepted and assumed throughout the realm. Presidential candidate Bob Dole employed it as a scare tactic to drum up votes. This despite the fact no one can point them out and the jails are not filled with them. In 2012, the Supreme Court invalidated the concept. Nonetheless, fear of super-predators is a very real condition that is exploited by numerous industries.

Next up is power-posing. Amy Cuddy launched a hugely successful career claiming that body language is the pathway to success. If you look the part by the way you carry yourself, people will bow to your superior position. Cuddy and Martin Seligman have parlayed this simple, false thesis into a multimillion dollar business. No less than the American armed forces bought into it to create super resilient soldiers, immune to Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. We can see how plainly badly that has worked, but that has stopped no one and nothing from making it a requirement. The Positive Psychology Center at Penn State University is Seligman’s legacy of a psychological fad gone wild. It has proven itself ineffective and unprovable everywhere, but it’s part of numerous institutions now, so it’s here to stay, making armies of consultants wealthy.

There is a similar path for Angela Duckworth’s “grit”. Grit is the toughness and perseverance to see a job thorough. You can see it in certain schoolchildren and workers. They stand out and achieve far more. They can overcome poverty, dsicrimination and lack of privilege because of it. Notice the ones with grit; they will be the ones who succeed above all others. Duckworth “proved” it in studies she conducted. Unfortunately, no one else ever got the same results. As Singal gently puts it: “The evidence for her strongest claims about grit’s efficacy, though, still hasn’t arrived. Almost two decades later, it has not been established that grit is a genuinely useful concept that tells us much that we didn’t already know—or that it can be boosted, anyway.”
Remarkably, Duckworth has openly admitted to the faults in her work. She acknowledges grit is not what she claimed it to be. And it is certainly not something that can be manipulated or massaged into being. You can’t teach grit. But once again, the term has become so ingrained, it is automatically accepted and believed. We seem to be stuck with it.

Harvard comes in for a severe tongue-lashing over its IAT, the Implicit Association Test. By pairing positive and negative images and statements with images of blacks and whites, Harvard claimed it could tell anyone how racially prejudiced they were, even if they believed they weren’t. Test takers have been shocked at their own results. The school claimed that implicit bias within comes out during this simple test anyone can take online.

What it doesn’t tout is that the results vary so widely they are useless. The same person taking the test twice in the same day can get results that are clean or dirty. It is in no way dependable, scientific or valid. No one has ever proven its measurements or parameters. It appears to be simply arbitrary and capricious, without scientific basis.

Unfortunately, implicit bias has become the way Americans talk about racism now, as if it were scientifically proven. No matter how many times or in how many ways it is shown to be invalid, implicit bias appears to be here to stay.

Finally, The Quick Fix has a chapter on nudges, another term that has suddenly become permanent in society. Only this one works. All kinds of companies and governments have been experimenting with nudges to improve results of a blizzard of different programs, from financial to behavioral. Watching how humans operate, as compared to the desired results, can lead the innovative to adjust their signs, their forms and their procedures to get the desired outcomes. It has even been used to get men to urinate in the bowl (They put a sticker of a target where it would result in the least splashing). Nudges have made a measurable difference.

Oddly, at least to me, Singal spends most of the chapter criticizing nudges for not being able to tackle the big jobs. There appears to be a criticism industry around nudges that scolds them for being a workaround rather than a fundamental or structural change. But in a world where political will is in short supply, and inevitable compromises lead to unsatisfactory results, a simple nudge can make the difference between measurable change and more of the same. Singal himself gives the example of a message on photocopier screens that encourages users to choose double-sided. This results in whole forests of paper not being wasted, annually. No legislation could achieve that effect. Nudges are above all, cool. And unusually effective. Tearing them down because they don’t actually restructure inefficient systems is not productive.

Singal doesn’t just leave it there. His research into original studies, meta-studies and criticisms has allowed him to see the weaknesses throughout. Psychology’s problems can be generalized as corruption. In psychology, it is far too easy to simply ignore data that does not fit. It is acceptable in psychology to keep secret the data used in the test. Researchers can change the goal of their paper to fit the outcome. Precious few studies have been successfully replicated by others, calling the original into question. Generalizations from barely acceptable findings lead to whole new industries based on them.

In a science like, say, medicine, any of these would kill off a new treatment or drug or procedure. In psychology, they are the ticket to best-selling books, TED talks that sell thousands of those books, consulting gigs with Fortune 500 companies, and of course, invitations to spout opinions based on these hacks on tv news channels and talk shows.

And they know it. Singal cites Daniel Drezner who posits two general modes in which academics and others present ideas to the public:
“Thought leaders” are very confident, not particularly analytical or critical, and tend to focus on their “one big idea” that they are convinced can change the world. “Public intellectuals,” on the other hand, see things in a somewhat more nuanced, complex light; they’re more likely to critique ideas they see as lacking, and are generally skeptical of bob the framework of “This one idea can explain the world.”

Singal doesn’t simply prove how badly these life hacks perform. He also has a chapter on how psychology could simply be reformed to function as real science. He points out that the trade journals focus on the strongly written efforts. Unsuccessful trials never see publication. Same for weak premises. Authors are allowed to change their theses according to the data they collect. Searching journals for data therefore brings up only dramatic successes, not the real world of everything else. These things and many more can be cut off at any time, if only psychology had a governing body that could set the standards and sanction transgressors.

Singal ‘s writing is delightfully approachable. He injects his own experience, including failures, into the text. I particularly like that when he cites an expert a second time (a hundred pages later), he reminds readers they have seen this name before, in reference to some particular situation back in chapter one. Very helpful. His gentle style lacks the aggression his findings would normally command, making the book far more authoritative than doctrinaire. It all makes for a great package.

The Quick Fix is an object-lesson in buyer beware. Readers should be skeptical of the quick fix, but especially in psychology, where bogus tests and solutions can wend their way into the school system, corporate Human Resources departments, and cause career-ending moves resulting from their misapplication as factual. It is as least as valuable a psychological tool as the many fads it debunks, only it’s more fun to read.

David Wineberg… (mais)