Attain The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills Edited By Jesse Singal Audio Books

have been wanting to write a “everything cool you heard in psychwas wrong” set of articles for a while, So many social psychology lessons I remember from my Psychclass were misrepresented, including the Implicit Associations Test, the Milgram Study, the Stanford Jail study, Stereotype Threat, Diffuse Responsibility The Bystander Effect and many more.
These psychology ideas are used as touchstones to explain some larger issue in society, Even if the larger issue is real, the idea that “we know this from psychology” research is misleading, Jesse Singals book is an absolute palate cleanser for a solid slate of the issues that have gained public validation as “backed by psychological science, ” I think you will enjoy it, let me know if you read it!
A great book discussing how a series behavioral life hacks rose to great prominence in the past decades.
They were proposed by psychology researchers at top universities and offered to solve big societal problems such as racism, sexism and PTSD, At their peak they were turned into popular TED talks, bestselling books and an array of trainings and interventions offered to roll them out, But lately it has become increasingly clear that the benefits of these interventions fall well short of what they promised,
Singal's book walks through a number of prominent examples and in my reading breaks down the underlying cause for their failure into two parts,

First, It discusses why and how a particular group of highly influential studies which found large effects from behavioral interventions were later debunked, Some simply failed to replicate even when closely following instructions, others were not generalizable or reported tiny effect sizes or did not have any credible underlying theory.
The stories described here are a recount of the work by other psychologists who scrutinized these initial results, This culminated into psychology's "replication crisis" and led to major reckoning for researchers in this field, Having only been partially aware of the how that crisis had unfolded, I learned a lot from these often stats heavy insights,

Second, it discusses how these particular study results before becoming debunked were oversold in the marketplace of ideas, How "grit” selfconfidence boosting interventions offered cure to PTSD, powerposing to overcome sexism, implicit bias test to defeat racism, Here it describes the process through which the published results of some causal link between an intervention and behavioral change in a lab setting are then blown up into much bolder claims on solutions to societal problems.
He documents how the authors, university press offices and journalists play a role in pushing such messages, He also discusses the role of major institutions generating demand for such quick societal fixes, Although the complexities in trying to address problems such as racism, PTSD, sexism are obvious to specialists and careful observers, but Singal recounts how leaders in the army, HR departments of major firms, politicians fell in love with these quick fixes.
In essence, they needed to deliver something that shows they care and are committed to act, but without needing to confront the complex underlying structural problems,

As an economist, I felt like many of the problems in behavioral psychology research the books described are actually quite applicable to my own field as well.
There are plenty of papers in our field that don't hold up to scrutiny as well as incentives to oversell results, There is also the tension between small scale interventions which may show promising results and the complexities in implementing policy reforms on a societal scale, In The Quick Fix, Jesse Singal summarizes psychologys replication crisis through several high profile fads, He covers selfesteem, super predators, power posing, positive psychology, grit, implicit bias, social priming, and nudging, The way these theories consistently find undeserved scholarly, popular, and political support is alarming,

The Quick Fix is not an all out takedown and dismissal of these theories, Nudging can work in some contexts, for example, but it's not a panacea, Instead, the pattern tends to look more like this: moderate evidence of an effect followed by a popular/ political embrace of what looks like a solution to a complex problem.
Each chapter sums up the theorys promise as well as its overpromise,

Sometimes, the psychologists act shamefully, I do not understand what Seligman was thinking, for example, suggesting that positive psychology could be used to treat let alone prevent PTSD in combat veterans, especially since his questionable moderate effects were tested on teenagers.
At other times, however, the fad seems to snowball ahead of the psychologists influence, which seems to partially explain what happened with grit and Angela Duckworth, It occurs to me that academics should be wary of catchy titles, TED talks, and going viral,

Its frustratingly easy to see why the culture embraces these ideas, It would be great for Americans if racial inequality could be explained and solved by implicit bias tests and diversity seminars, It would be nice if achievement gaps could be solved with motivating posters and selfesteem messages, It would be comforting if veterans with PTSD could lead healthy lives rather than living with the terrible effects of participating in war, Further, given that we tend to value the minds causal role in our lifes outcomes, it would be supremely satisfying to conclude that we can think our way out of our problems.


I dont want to suggest that we cant think our way out of problems at all, I have found a lot of value in CBT in managing anxiety, for example, But I still have to deal with that fact of my life, Similarly, in researching addiction, I note that addicts often perennially return to the fact of their addiction as part of their identity, Wed be further ahead looking for the limit of thinking through our problems and then confronting what is beyond that limit, It is hard to escape that material influences ranging from genetic predisposition to, say, depression to economic circumstances affect our lifes path more than we prefer, And I worry also that many difficulties are a tragic part of life, and we should find ways to accept that statement without finding such acceptance callous or uncaring.


To conclude that the social commentaries offered by psychologists are less insightful / helpful than those offered by Hollywood blockbusters would be an overstatement, But, for me at least, it might be a useful heuristic to adopt, YES! Finally someone taking a deeper look into the many many many common, baseless, positive psychology/ pop social goodfornothing trends that many fall for,
There is no easy fix, no matter how many wishes u send out for the universe to hear and do, This book was alright! I hate having to rate things with I say, despite nobody forcing me and the fact that I frequently forget to do so entirely, because I'm always stuck between rating based on my enjoyment of a book and my overall impression of the quality of the book.
Sometimes, the former will be so overwhelming that I'll rate the book highly even if I can see problems with it usually with fiction, but surprising often, I'll find books that are perfectly alright and honestly well written, good books, but which just weren't particularly gripping for me.
If I rate those books with only two, though, I feel unfair, because that lowers the The Quick Fix's aggregate rating and feels unfair,

As it is, I did actually enjoy this book well enough, so I'm giving it three, but for all its assessment of issues with psychology, it doesn't do much to address how so much psych research as far as I understand is based on selfassessment.
Maybe selfassessment forms are actually highly unbiased and reliable much of the time, but as the chapter on selfesteem mentions, selfassessment can be misleading, Having selfassessed high self esteem and selfassessed good looks doesn't mean you have good looks, as the book shows, What I'm curious about, though, is where else selfassessment might go wrong,

Like, take me and my conundrum over, My personal feelings mean I'm unlikely to give a book lower than three unless I tremendously

disliked it, or felt there were enough problems with it to justify criticism or, sometimes, if it's famous enough that my assessment is just numerical noise.
Not everyone on this site uses the star scale that way, Imagine now a study where you asked people to rate, idk, how applicable a statement like "I tend to be introverted" is, With the scads of internet articles about introversion out there, people may have very different and strong ideas about introversion that do or don't match the assessor's ideas.
I know assessments have other questions to verify from different angles, but I still wonder about the reliability of these things,

I really enjoyed when this book discussed how research is conducted how relevance is determined, how data can be presented in this or that way, etc.
, and I guess I wish there was even more of that,

I also had one thing that gave me pause about the book overall, The author points out that individualfocused psychologybased solutions don't address institutional problems that are often the real cause of individual problems, I heartily agree! The author also, though, seems to think the problem here is that psychologists need to focus more on societylevel problems, This seems to me like saying chemists need to focus more on how to contribute to advances in biology if I'm getting my comparison right, Sociologists study and address society, and maybe we should turn to them and their insights for institutionallevel solutions,

Psychologists, for the most part, as far as I can tell, study the psyche at the individual level, Expecting a field that focuses on individuals and individual problems to solve social problems seems to be the issue at root here, Sociology is a much maligned field, and I think it would've benefited this book to touch on, if nothing else, it's existence, and why it may be relevant to the problems psychology fails to solve alone.


initial review:
I'll write a proper review later, but I thought it was amusing that the author noted "zooming out" as a phrase he overuses in the acknowledgements I would've pointed out "all else being equal.
" This is alright, but there are better books on these topics out there, Stuart Richie's book is among the best, Most of popular psychology is false or vastly overstated, Quick fixes don't work. This is all obvious stuff to people who have been paying attention, So the typical SSC reader won't learn anything, but sure, the average reader will, The Quick Fix by Jesse Singal is a free NetGalley ebook that I read in midMarch,

Singal addresses, challenges, and criticizes new age, fad, patch and fix it psychology, like selflove, trauma, biases, and tenacity to name a few, .