The Read: Jesse Singal, The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
I think two reasons: first, recommendations from some social media conversations (that included the book’s author) and second, because I have been grappling in current writing with the misuse of social science to guide institutional and governmental policies and initiatives.
Is it what I thought it was?
Yes. It’s very accurately titled.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
I have a sort of fantasy of reading it with a broad interdisciplinary group but it would likely spark some bad feelings and bickering.
I also used to have a fantasy idea of a reading group or series of short interviews where I’d ask someone from every discipline who was basically a mainstream practitioner of their own discipline (e.g., not someone who was a dedicated internal critic of it) to talk about what they think the #1 weakness or failing of their discipline was. This book reminded me of that fantasy—I feel as if that kind of self-examination or reflection is good for the disciplinary soul and it helps spur us to be more responsible in how we think about our interaction with wider publics.
It’s also a useful book for something I’m writing now, as I’d hoped.
Quotes
“Our society’s fascination with psychology has a dark side: many half-baked ideas—ideas that may not be 100 percent bunk but which are severely overhyped—are being enthusiastically spread, despite a lack of hard evidence in their favor.”
“The spread of half-baked behavioral science can’t be explained apart from the present state of American political and intellectual life. The country has suffered from decades of rising inequality paired with interminable political dysfunction, and as institution after institution has seen its legitimacy crumble, there’s been an ever-intensifying focus on the individual.”
“Within psychology, particularly social psychology, these tendencies have given rise to what I call Primeworld, a worldview fixated on the idea that people’s behavior is largely driven—and can be altered—by subtle forces.”
“It is increasingly clear that Primeworld simply hasn’t delivered. Over and over, it has been shown that the interventions its members favor simply don’t warrant the hype they generate, and there’s strong reason to believe that they fail because they neglect to attend to deeper, more structural factors that are not easily remedied via psychological interventions.”
“The self-esteem craze, then, can be seen as the confluence of two powerful currents in American cultural life: the long-standing belief in the power of positive thinking and the more recent belief that people needed to address their deep psychic wounds.”
“As the head of the state government’s Ways and Means Committee, Vasconcellos controlled the US budget purse strings. If Smelser piped up too much—if he said, Hey, that wasn’t what I said at that meeting!—it could bring his institution a lot of grief. So he trod a middle ground: in private he told the task force the truth, but in public he stayed quiet after his message was muddled and willfully misinterpreted by the self-esteemers.”
“In future fads, the pattern would repeat: the reforms that ask the least of us are often the ones most apt to go viral.”
“DiIulio and his colleagues never even fully defined what a superpredator was, except, in essence, a young person who does really bad things and who doesn’t appear to exhibit remorse. This is a common phenomenon when half-baked ideas go viral; these ideas are often characterized by a certain conceptual fuzziness.”
“Like so much else, the opportunity to live a moral life is distributed unequally…How would a truly thought-through theory of superpredators deal with this reality and apply it to questions of punishment and proportion?”
“And yet it doesn’t seem the research that calls power posing into question has gotten nearly as much public attention as the early claims in its favor. That, as always, is the problem.”
“It’s quite striking how similar Presence and Lean In are on this front; they can both be seen as feminism for an age of fracture, geared at a professional audience. Both almost entirely ignore the possibility of repairing institutions in a manner that would make them fairer; instead, it’s the job of individual women to act in a more stereotypically masculine way.”
“A decade and a half after the concept’s [grit’s] introduction, 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.”
“To her credit, Duckworth has been significantly more candid and transparent than other researchers who have found their ideas under scrutiny, and she has been generally open about the limitations of the research.”
“So arguments that implicit bias has itself been ‘debunked’ certainly go too far; there are strong theoretical reasons, and some empirical evidence, pointing to the evidence of implicit bias. The problem is that the test’s proponents leap too far in the other direction: they argue that implicit bias likely plays a major causal role in generating racial discrepancies in America. There has never been nearly enough evidence to justify such a stance.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
One of the things that strikes Singal really has always nettled me as well, which is by the time these kinds of policies or therapeutic packages arrive as ready-made products available for individual and institutional consumption, they’ve been systematically stripped of their intellectual histories. That process is mostly not conscious dishonesty—it’s more a kind of by-product of entrepreneurial energies. So “self-esteem” once it became a kind of dominant presence in materials aimed at schoolkids, corporate executives, diversity consultants, etc. had completely lost the link to Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden, to the Esalen Institute, and thus of course any sense that what was being touted as a rigorously documented research finding had lost any connection to what it started as, which was an intensely ideological position backed by a kind of faith that it must be true—and that it must explain everything that seemed like unjust socioeconomic hierarchy. And deeper histories still vanish just as thoroughly (in the case of self-esteem, Singal points to the New Thought movement of the late 19th Century and Norman Vincent Peale, for example). I get nothing but quizzical annoyance from health professionals and others touting the benefits of wellness when I point out that it is a rebranding of Stoicism and Buddhism and in the rebranding has lost the philosophical richness and complexity of both.
Singal also documents something that I think is not limited to social psychology, which is a tremendously unhealthy relationship between post-1945 American civic and public institutions and expertise (both in the academy and outside of it), wherein experts acting as entrepreneurs (even before that was a fad managerial gospel) manage to get a major institution (often associated with the government) to “investigate” some sort of single-cause reductionist pseudo-social science idea, which then creates a sort of penumbra of legitimacy for that idea and creates a kind of market for it that small consultancies, businesses and experts of the make then cluster around parasitically and amplify. The only very small thing I can say about the current false hysteria about critical race theory or “social-emotional learning” that concedes some vague point to that hysteria is that aspects of both (CRT in how it is operationalized in some DEI consulting, social-emotional learning in how it informs certain kinds of workshops or training programs) is part of this long pattern. But there are plenty of nostrums and programs coded to the right or far-right that follow the exact same dynamics—some entrepreneur takes an idea out of a richer, more complex, more nuanced context, systematically distorts it to make it simple and appealing to some ideological predisposition, cuts it off from its intellectual roots, and then sells it to governments and institutions that like the sound of the idea, which then draws a swarm of small businesses and consultants looking for contracts.
Singal gets at something important, which is that at least some of the harm that these kinds of fads cause is not direct through the interventions they advise, where a lot of the activities they lead to within organizations are just sort of meh no big deal, not the least because of their faddishness—there’s a clear date of expiration on any given episode of pseudo-social-scientific policy. The harm is more abstract and ideological—they encourage an avoidance of actually-existing complexity, they serve as an alibi or a distraction from the real source of serious problems, they waste a lot of time and money. I also think they create a kind of alienation within institutions where people who are frustrated by the appropriation of more complex or nuanced bodies of research or who are annoyed by the entrepreneurial clamor of workshops and training sessions and consultant reports are put in the position of being treated at best like grouches and at worst like thought criminals merely for pointing out the problems with whatever the latest fad entails. That’s an especially bad look in academic institutions, where the entire mission is supposed to be driven by a respect for complexity and for the critical appraisal of research claims. I really vibed with the California official who got frustrated with the push for self-esteem who said it’s a bad precedent to replace training programs based on research with training programs based “on somebody’s opinion”. But this is as Singal notes how these viral trends operate: they put people who can and ought to debunk the trend in the difficult emotional position of being killjoys and grumps, or they create buttressed and protected situations where no critique is allowed or no critique can be heard or processed.
Another thing Singal gets at that’s been eating at me more or less ever since I did my own research on claims that the representation of violence on television aimed at children caused children to behave violently is that each one of these kinds of simplistic fad psychological arguments that calls back to lab-based research represents a prediction about outcomes that should be strongly visible at wider social scales already (or a prediction about expected outcomes if the policy or intervention is adopted as recommended). So with the argument that an increase in the representation of violence on children’s television causes increasing violence by children that carries over into adulthood, that was a prediction that the children watching television during that increase in violence would cause a spike in the incidence of violence and violent crime. But all the advocacy groups, both academic and civic, insisted on attributing rates of violence and violent crime among young adult at the moment they were doing this research to violence on television, when in fact they were talking about a population whose childhood television-watching was from ten years earlier, when it was allegedly less violent. And the prediction bombed out—the kids watching the more violent television were less violent as they moved into adulthood. But by that point, the fads are always over and nobody who profited from them is ever called to account for just how bad their predictions were.
Singal is also careful to separate the useful interventions that are based on at least some rigorous empirical research from the useless fads—cognitive-behavior therapy separated from self-esteem promotion, for example.
Sometimes the interventions are destructive, too—Singal’s chapter on the concept of “superpredators” and what that led to in terms of the justice system is devastating. It also reminds me of how a particular kind of fad social science logic tends to metastasize and infilitrate all kinds of institutions that have interventionist projects or mindsets. Around the same time DiIulio and allies were selling the “superpredator” argument, I remember coming across people in big development organizations working in sub-Saharan Africa who were pushing the thought that democracies weren’t working in Africa because the population had too many young men. (This was also a subset of Clinton-era thinking about the conflict in Somalia, with lots of images of armed young men high on qat.) It can be both amusing and tragic to see where these kinds of simplistic monocausal ideas lead people who have to come up with implementations—I sat through a presentation at Emory University where a major figure in the world of development institutions argued that the solution to violence and political disorder in Africa was to raise the voting age to 25 so that unstable young men had to wait for their chance to be citizens. I am still not sure how I got out of that room without my head exploding.
When Singal opens up the full ancestry of a fad idea, he really should give any social scientist in any discipline pause in that the bad faddish implementations often do come back at some point to flawed but more careful research where the scholars doing that work at some point edged into speculation or allowed themselves to be participants in some process of rubbing off all the complexity and nuance. It should give us all pause because there’s some sort of responsibility for what happens to an idea, even if it’s not what you meant or what you found. There’s a British historian of Zimbabwe who wrote in a memoir that he was rather astonished that some readers have seen him as aiding the sectarian (and ultimately murderous) version of nationalism adopted by the ruling party after independence, but I’ve always had a pretty clear picture of what aspects of his scholarship provided some friendly encouragement to the sort of nationalist ideology that sees a minority ethnicity as dangerous to the national project. You can’t guard comprehensively against misuse of what you study and write, but you can at least anticipate some of that—and in the social sciences that readily lend themselves to advocacy of interventions, that’s more important.
I just plain kind of missed the “power posing” fad, so Singal’s description of that was pretty fascinating. It’s a good description of p-hacking and how the critique of p-hacking generally has fed into the “replication crisis” in psychology and other fields. I was a little surprised that he didn’t do a deeper dive to see the power posing argument as a resurgence or recurrence of an older pseudo-scientific idea—the “posture studies” that led to (among other things) several incoming classes at Ivy League and selective colleges being required to pose nude for a quack researcher.
I was kind of stunned to discover that my own child’s public high school was the pilot site of an experimental intervention by Martin Seligman’s center at Penn—I did not know this and I frankly wish I had known it, even though the original research and intervention program was well before she started school. One of my colleagues here at Swarthmore was also involved in it and concedes that there’s never been a full-blown peer-reviewed evaluation of the program at Strath Haven—though my colleague herself has published a meta-analysis that acknowledges that her own interventionist project has produced only small positive effects in statistical terms. The more important takeaway in this chapter is about the US military’s attempt to use Seligman’s work to handle PTSD in the military, and that ends up being the same story as in other chapters—research with some complexity in its original form being stripped out to simplistic understandings because facing the full complexity of a problem requires daunting attention to the flaws of the originating institution and basic problems with what it does in the world.
I kind of knew going into the book that “grit” was inevitably going to be the focus of at least one chapter, and so it is. One thing Singal adds in going back into grit’s deeper genealogy that I hadn’t heard of were the McGuffey Readers, commonly used textbooks in early American public education that aimed to build moral character and patriotism. Singal also does a great job of summing up two separate aspects of grit as it has been applied: first, that it proposes to give to poor Americans what rich Americans get through their existing social networks and wealth without having to say that and that grit also becomes a peculiarly back-handed way for successful, wealthy and powerful Americans to compliment themselves. As with most efforts to reassign structural inequities to moral character.
Anybody wanting to talk about the use of the IAT to document implicit bias in relationship to DEI trainings and the like ought to read Singal’s Chapter Six beforehand. I also loved that Singal did not just counterpose certain uses of “implicit bias” to strong arguments about structural racism (which offer no quick fix and often resist reductionism) but also to the degree to which a vast array of assertions about racism simply avoid talking about evidence of explicit bias, in part because people who have explicit biases have become canny enough not to say so or leave obvious evidence lying around that they act on that basis. It’s a whole other issue with the way that a lot of social science operates now, including my own discipline and other qualitative disciplines like cultural anthropology, which is that we frequently cannot observe, study, experiment on or participate in many of the sites where power is concentrated and where power may be determining outcomes, so we tend to make arguments about what we can see and study. When we are given access to power, to the “room where it happens”, our access is typically conditional—either we have to agree not to report on or study what our subjects would find embarrassing or our subjects get enough warning that they can perform idealized and sanitized versions of their normal practice and self-presentation. We don’t get to sit inside police cars for weeks on end, we don’t get to listen to landlords deciding who they’ll rent to, we don’t get to hear supervisors talking about their employees, we don’t get to see a military leadership as it decides to stage a coup d’etat, we don’t get to know what bureaucrats really say to one another, and so on. Most of the sites where explicit bias might be both expressed and determinative are protected from our inquiries, so we don’t build studies around it and we’re left having to think about what might be available for us to probe—something hidden from view but present universally in everyday life. And as is often the case, we come to think that the only thing we’re allowed to study is the only thing that matters.