The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills by Jesse Singal

The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills Reviews

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  Growing up, my mom drank a lot of coffee. If we were on the road, we were stopping for lunch at Starbucks. If she hadn’t had her morning espresso and we passed a coffee shop, I was going to be late for school. She always defended her casual addiction with blurry statistics from studies she could kinda-sorta remember. “Coffee makes you live longer,” she would claim. Or: “Coffee is good for your heart.” “Coffee makes you a better listener.”
  
  Wow, young me thought, why doesn’t everyone drink coffee? It sounds like a super medicine. Someone should spread the good word about coffee. She was, of course, justifying her love for coffee, and every time she saw a new headline, it further reinforced that belief.
  
  We all do this, to a certain extent, and it shows the problems with headline-grabbing studies that can’t be replicated and rely on flimsy data. It’s good for news corporations because they can get clicks every few months with “updated” studies. I just did a Google search and found this headline: “A new study found a link between listening to rap music and having strong coffee with better driving skills.”
  
  Right, sure. And listening to indie pop makes me a better lover. Punk rock helped me fix my motorcycle. When my dogs listen to “Who Let the Dogs Out” they get more confident and rowdy.
  The Quick Fix sets out to dissect some of the more egregious cases, especially those that have had profound impacts on our social life, education, and even military.
  
  Singal is a careful yet engaging writer. The language is academic only when it needs to be, accessible without flattening the complex reasoning of why each trend gripped the public. In each chapter, he traces the roots of a particular social science movement, how it spread, and the need it filled for a certain group of people (these findings are usually positioned as curing a social ill). He extends every scientist the benefit of the doubt—one which most probably don’t deserve—before methodically breaking down the data manipulation, lies of omission, or counter-studies that reveal the flaws at work.
  
  Social scientists, while scientists, are still human beings. They are not immune to the trappings of chasing headlines, presenting “groundbreaking” research before their peers can, or getting swept up in a riptide of positive press. Call it the Ted Talk affect. Everyone wants to be up there with a headset. No one wants to admit they were wrong the whole time, or that they spent five years collecting data that can’t be replicated.
  
  This book blows up the #LifeHacks culture, of the daily diet trend, and the easy “self-actualization” trends that mistake surface character traits for core personality markers. Not every study is completely invalidated, a point Singal stresses, but we should be cautious around new proclamations, especially those that spit in the face of common sense or logic.
  
  Real change requires hard work. A simple sentiment, perhaps, but one that invalidates 99% of the social insight studies that Buzzfeed will grab for its next headline. Now an adult, I drink a ton of coffee like my mom, I just don’t care what the health benefits are.
  
• 
  David Wineberg

  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
  
• 
  Ryan Boissonneault

  The self-improvement industry—with a projected 2022 market value of $13.2 billion—clearly has massive appeal and a wide readership. Self-help is consistently represented in the top five nonfiction genres sold on Amazon each year, and the latest self-help bestseller often maintains its position at the top of the charts for months at a time.
  
  The genre’s popularity is not difficult to understand; when people feel that most aspects of their lives are beyond their control, they respond positively and predictably to any simple, intuitive message that tells them they have more control over their lives than they had originally thought. These messages are often highly exaggerated, simplified, and context-independent claims that, while containing some truth, are mostly misleading and sometimes even dangerous, as Jesse Singal describes in his latest book, The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills.
  
  As Singal point outs, while not all books labeled as “self-help” are pseudoscientific, the genre, overall, does not have a great track record. The prototypical example of this is the 2006 book written by Rhonda Byrne titled The Secret, which has sold over 30 million copies worldwide and has been translated into 50 languages. Essentially, the book tells us, based on the dubious “law of attraction,” that our positive and negative thoughts have the power to actualize positive and negative events in our lives. This pseudoscientific idea—which tells us that thoughts control actual physical events—sold millions of copies because it presents a story that gives people a comforting sense of control in an otherwise chaotic world.
  
  Of course, there is some truth in the claim that a positive disposition can bring positive results, as the phenomenon of the self-fulfilling prophecy does have some empirical support. Those who are confident, optimistic, and self-assured tend to create positive opportunities for themselves and are generally more highly regarded and better treated by others, while those that are angry, depressed, or pessimistic often bring about their own negative experiences.
  
  But this is precisely the danger with fad psychology: it presents ideas that are at least partially correct, but then exaggerates those claims to reach the largest audience possible—an audience that is less interested in scientific rigor and critical analysis and more interested in gaining a greater sense of self-control or in implementing a quick fix to a complex social problem. That’s how a reasonable idea like “positive thoughts can lead to better outcomes for certain people in certain situations” can turn into the more exaggerated claim that “positive thoughts will magically cure 100 percent of everyone’s problems.”
  
  This is how “thought leaders'' and academics can take flimsy evidence, package it into simple, intuitive ideas that promise a quick fix for complicated problems, and then can get politicians, CEOs, and government bureaucrats to adopt expensive and essentially worthless programs that ultimately produce little evidence for their effectiveness.
  
  Singal presents several examples of this, demonstrating how the “self-esteem craze” of the 1980s failed to reduce crime and cure various other social ills; how improving one’s posture through “power posing” does not automatically lead to career advancement; how “grit” is not a better predictor of academic success than more traditional measures; how the implicit association test for racial bias does not measure what its proponents think it does; how social priming studies often fail to replicate; and how the interventions of positive psychology do not necessarily make people happier, and certainly do not prevent PTSD in military personnel, as was claimed by its advocates based on almost no empirical evidence.
  
  Nevertheless, millions of dollars and countless resources were dedicated to social programs based on these half-baked ideas, all with negligible results. In most cases, leaders implemented these programs based on nothing more than “gut feelings”—what Singal refers to as “unskilled intuition”—without the necessary due diligence or input from experts.
  
  In presenting the various case studies, Singal digs deep into the science and statistics, equipping readers with the critical thinking skills necessary to identify shoddy scientific claims. Singal teaches the reader the difference between correlation and causation and how to spot inadequate sample sizes, statistical manipulation, the use of vague terminology, the overextension of research beyond its original area, replication problems, and the context-dependent nature of all psychological research (i.e., what applies to a group of college students in a controlled laboratory setting may not translate outside of the classroom in the far messier real world).
  
  Singal persuasively shows that, at best, these half-baked ideas of fad psychology are simply a waste of money, resources, and time, and at worst, they prevent the implementation of more effective structural reforms that could actually work to improve our social problems (which is the main message of the book). As Singal writes:
  
  “Sure, you can try to train a female business student to be more confident seeming [through power-posing], or try to train a hiring manager to be less implicitly biased, but there’s good reason to believe you’ll have more success changing the former’s business school so that overconfidence isn’t unduly rewarded in the first place, and the latter’s workplace so that implicit bias doesn’t even have a chance to hijack decision-making when there’s hiring to be done. These approaches deserve more attention than they get. The problem, again, is that they aren’t quite as eye-catching as interventions that promise to reform individuals”
  
  Fad psychology, by diverting attention away from structural solutions, is far more socially dangerous than is commonly recognized. For example, if we become obsessed with teaching female business students to act more stereotypically male to get ahead—thus maintaining the status quo and simply trying to work around it with individual behavioral reform—then we ignore the underlying problem altogether, which is the prioritization of overconfidence and aggression in academia and the workplace while undervaluing more considered and rational approaches to problem solving.
  
  It’s important at this point to note that Singal is not suggesting that all psychological and behavioral science is harmful or useless. Singal presents several areas of psychological research that have impressive empirical support, including cognitive behavioral therapy, the idea of fixed versus growth mindsets, and several established interventions of behavioral economics. But the overall point of the book applies to these areas as well: even within the more credible research areas, individual behavioral reform still has its limits, and often only provides temporary and inadequate fixes to larger social problems requiring more extensive policy reform. And if this applies even to the credible areas of psychology, it applies doubly so to the questionable claims of the latest self-help bestseller.
  
  In fairness to the self-help industry—which probably gets more criticism than it should—one could argue that the problem is with the institutional overextension of self-help ideas and not necessarily with the ideas themselves. Since the nature of self-help is to provide individual recommendations, and further, since psychological interventions are always context-specific, one would not expect to find any single intervention to be empirically effective across the board. So if someone claims that any particular self-help book has positively influenced their lives, what sense would it make to dismiss this claim as meaningless simply because it hasn’t been shown, statistically, to work for everyone? Sure, this puts self-help more in the category of practical philosophy than psychology, but this in itself doesn’t make self-help any less effective or meaningful at the personal (if not social) level.
  
  This is a fair point, but Singal would probably respond by saying that the psychologists and scientists spreading self-help ideas are not exactly going out of their way to prevent this institutional overextension. The proponents of these ideas often make exaggerated claims that inevitably lead to costly and ineffective social interventions. And there is a very specific reason for why this is the case, as summarized nicely by the social psychologist Carol Tavris. During an interview with Singal, Tavris said:
  
  “Once you have committed yourself to a theory—and this is true of any of us—it becomes hard to accept criticisms of that theory, let alone evidence that you might be wrong about it. Scientists are not immune to this inclination, even though the whole nature of the scientific enterprise is to put your beliefs to the test—Is this what’s going on here?—and see if the evidence supports it or not. But if you have also taken your theory into the public forum, you are now getting thousands upon thousands of dollars to educate people in companies and the government about your test, your measure, or your hugely popular idea, you now have a vested interest, financially, emotionally, and psychologically, in its being right. ‘Maybe I went too far? Maybe I ignored the parts that didn’t fit? Maybe this idea sounded appealing but has a few problems I didn’t anticipate?’ That, in terms of research and science, is the greatest danger of this TED-ification phenomenon: the impulse to oversimplify and cut around the edges.”
  
  And so the incentives are all aligned for psychologists to oversell their ideas. Singal is hopeful, however, that things will change, and that not only will consumers of psychological research become more sophisticated (which this book will help with), but also that researchers and journalists will become more conscientious in their reporting of research as the field of psychology reforms itself in the face of the replication crisis. But while we’d all like to think Singal is right in this regard, if history is any indication, the market for simple, quick fixes will always exist.
• 
  Rick Wilson

  I really love reading. And oftentimes that’s because I will occasionally stumble across a book like this. A book that is that is a full baked version of a half baked idea that I have. This book was wonderful.
  
  If you go through my reviews you’ll see I’m not a fan of a lot of pop psychology despite returning to it regularly like a moth attracted to a porch light. (Note: i’ll probably go back and hyperlink some of these, be patient with me) I love learning about the human condition whether that’s through classical literature, history, or psychology books. Best guess is that it’s a trauma response from macro events that deeply affected my childhood. I think all these books have something to say, even if that something is obfuscated by bullshit or self interested nonsense. A couple days ago I lampooned “noise“ by Daniel Kahneman and Cass Sunstein because it was such a poorly done book despite talking about a fairly important subject.
  
  Anyways, I’ve been working around this idea that a lot of modern psychology is pretty bad and slowly categorizing the varying levels of badness and deliberate versus unintentional bullshit represented within. It’s not anything I’ve directly written down, despite keeping a kind of mental abacus on it. As a general rule, self-help books don’t contribute much of anything to anything, If you read “How to Win Friends…” You’ve read them all. Maybe Atomic Habits gets a good bump for speaking intelligently despite not really containing any sort of replicable research or evidence, the author speaks to that problem and I think it’s a strong book despite that.
  
  You have the actual “based on good research” stuff. This is some of the trauma reading. And even that it’s dubious depending on who writes it. Peter Levine seems like he’s just kind of disassociated from reality permanently. Bessel is coasting on his one seminal book that’s slowly getting outdated. And there’s some newer interesting research coming out by like Gabor matè. But as a whole it’s not real good, and I think that stems from the fact that we really don’t know fundamentally what makes people tick.
  
  Even rolling further into a wide audience things that are sociological and nature often times seem to conveniently allow the author to justify their worldview. All the more so if they have a financial interest vested in confirming that worldview. I’m looking at you Rebecca. But that’s been a problem in a lot of fields, workplace productivity, social justice, homelessness, you name it. Often times these books are some of the more difficult to separate the bullshit from the valuable parts because truth and self interest are entwined like snakes on that medical staff thing. (Google says it’s a caduceus.)
  
  Well then you start getting into some of the books I’ve been recommended from coworkers. Things like The Secret, The Happiness *whatever, Grit, Who Moved My Cheese, etc. and these are all books people individually like but when I read them they typically produce the sort of eye roll that requires a good THUNK on the back of the head to undo, least my eyeballs get stuck. these books are basically junk food for those that want to temporarily feel better and then have a gut ache afterwards. They’re more of a hustle than they are helpful.
  
  So there’s all these bits and pieces. And over the past couple years I’ve slowly been trying to fit them together and determine why it is some of them I sort of like and some of them I don’t like at all. And some of it I can put my finger on, people who succeed at sports will always tell you “keep trying” because they have such a high level of survivorship bias that is just unrecognized. Honestly you can say the same thing about a lot of successful memoirs, people like Steve Jobs survive and succeed despite being assholes not because of it. Luck is a huge part of a sort of a triad that seems to involve hard work, predisposition, skill, And luck.
  
  This book intelligently speaks to the fallacies and problems with all of the above. Like a Spring cleaning for your brain to get rid of lots of questionable research that doesn’t replicate. And it takes a step back to discuss some of the global problems and how that colors the nature of emergent research and fad cycles. I’m grateful the author wrote it, I’m delighted I read it, and hopefully I can find more like this that will help reduce the noise out there.
• 
  Sebastian Gebski

  The book aimed to deal with all the silver-bullets of behavioral and social psychology? Count. Me. In!
  Singal covers topics like: unconscious bias, grit, power pose, fighting PTSD, or the nudge. If that is not enough to make you interested, I don't know what would do so :)
  
  Just to be clear: Singal doesn't smash all of them into pieces by proving them wrong and fad. In some cases he simply says: I don't know, in some cases it may be right, in some it may be wrong, BUT there's no objective data that would prove it being right end-to-end. He does quite a good job when it comes to tracing the rationale and documented research on those topics - I find him credible and genuinely interested in finding the truth, instead of creating a lot of reverb in the community.
  
  Is there a lot of value in his research? Well, I wouldn't call it breath-taking or disruptive, e.g. I still strongly believe (personally, based on empirical/anecdotal evidence) in the importance of grit. But it doesn't change the fact that the book was definitely worth the money spent on it.
  
  TBH the book is far less entertaining than it could have been - keeping in mind how much attention is typically sparked by the topics covered. I'm not even sure whether it's a pro or a con.
  
  Anyway, keeping in mind that I DO recommend this book, I'm not sure it deserves full 5 stars. 4.2 stars would be more fair, but I do round it up to 5, just because of the author's courage to touch topics that are (in some cases) so sensitive or so strongly acclaimed.
• 
  Ludwig Franke Föyen

  Perhaps it is a sign of my erudition (probably not) or that I've studied psychology for 5 years that this book didn't contain much new of anything. If you're at all familiar to the replication crisis, pseudoscientific psychological claims and bad science this book will be mostly familiar to you. Singal sometimes argues for sociological answers to the questions behavioral researchers have tried to answer and that does make sense - but he never acknowledges the fact that saying something conclusive using these methods is damn hard. I'd say there is no need to kick a horse that has been dead for years without offering something new. Probably a more informative read would have been
  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...
• 
  Allyson

  Listened to Audible. I thought the premise of this book sounded interesting and had previously heard the author speak on a podcast. I think unfortunately there was not enough interesting content to fill an entire book. His premise would be better stated in a 45-60 minute podcast or long-form article. The takeaway was rather evident at the very beginning, to not trust all hyped social psychology trends. By diving into the flawed research methodology behind 'power posing' and 'grit', I didn't become a more enlightened person and my individual activities won't change. Would not recommend this book...maybe try to catch the author on a podcast.
• 
  Aaron Cohen

  Duh.
• 
  Stephen Theaker

  Rating books you haven't read makes you a liar. Shocking to see a published author doing it here with this book.
• 
  Stetson

  Jesse Singal's The Quick Fix is booked as a sober dismantling of the "PrimeWorld" of behavioral science. "PrimeWorld" is "a worldview fixated on the idea that people's behavior is largely driven - and can be affected - by subtle forces," such as "unconscious influences" and other individual-based, low-cost interventions. Toward this end, Singal's project succeeds but does so in a wandering and sometimes ambivalent fashion. Thus, The Quick Fix makes for an interesting but periodically frustrating or befuddling read.
  
  There is a clear need for popular criticisms of flashy yet low quality, non-replicable science that is laundered through various media and journalistic venues often for sociopolitical purposes. There are disturbing institutional investments in flimsy interventions like Martin Seligman's Penn Resilience Program or bunk instruments like the implicit association test (IAT). However, Singal's criticisms often fail to pack a punch and sometimes chase undeserving targets (e.g. Cass Sunstein, Richard Thaler, and Daniel Kahneman). The poor choice in targets, especially late in the book, is where Singal's writing grows a bit discursive because he has to dedicate significant portions of time to praising the concepts and researchers that he'll later critique in a marginal way.
  
  Instead of squandering scarce scrutiny on well supported behavioral science concepts like nudging, it would have behooved Singal to focus more on what plausible and effective alternative solutions exist to the purported "quick fixes." Singal regularly gestures at institutional policy as solutions but provides few examples of what this looks like and fails to spend time identifying which sociopolitical problems need institutional solutions. What the reader is left to surmise is that Singal thinks negative behavioral outcomes associated with low socioeconomic status result from complex, multi-causal, system-level processes that correspondingly require institutional interventions. These problems are supposedly remedied by wealth redistribution and means-tested social programs (some of the tangible interventions Singal gestures to). Unfortunately, we already know such system-level interventions are often as ineffective yet more costly than "PrimeWorld" solutions. Moreover, this framing elides the sources of the inequality Singal appears to abhor. Ironically, some of the stronger empirical explanations for said inequality emanate from the behavioral sciences, specifically behavioral genetics - a topic Singal studiously avoids in The Quick Fix though makes some subtle nods at (Singal is definitely aware of this field and its major takeaways).
  
  I still recommend The Quick Fix. It is just that because I know and respect Singal's work, I expected and wished for more out of this book.
• 
  Tristan

  Good book. Excited for the TED talk.
• 
  Henry Manampiring

  Very good to inoculate you against "TED celebrities" and popular psychology fads.
• 
  James

  Three and a half stars.
  
  Not a bad book in most cases, but it feels lightweight. Singal takes on many of the overhyped social phenomena of the past forty or so years, but he does so in an almost apologetic manner, perhaps out of class fealty.
  
  My only real disagreement with the book was Singal’s apparent ignorance of or dismissal of the link between higher crime and reduced law enforcement. It has been my observation that if you don’t think you’re going to get in trouble for doing something, you’re more likely to do it, especially if you’re a bad guy to begin with.
  
  One caveat: don’t listen to the audiobook as read by the author. To paraphrase an old joke, he has a voice made for writing.
• 
  CJ

  A damning indictment of both the behavioral psychology field and the unrigorous way that scientific ideas are too often covered by the popular press. Singal goes case-by-case through a number of pop psychology fads, including power posing, "grit" and the implicit association test and details why and how they caught on despite a lack of thorough evidence backing them up. Ultimately, what all these concepts have in common is they offer tantalizing solutions for fixing serious social problems -- racism, misogyny, mental illness, etc. -- without requiring dramatic structural reform. The book is critical of this mindset without being nihilistic, and points the way towards a better and more responsible future for the psychology field.
• 
  Chris Boutté

  This is by far my new favorite book in the niche of books that explain how flawed studies can get a lot of attention. I've never read or listened to any of Singal's work, but I've been anticipating this book for months now based on some of the things I've seen from him on Twitter. Once I started this book, I couldn't put it down. No review I do of this book would do it justice, but I do think I've pinned down why I believe this book stands out above the rest. 
  
  Most books in this niche debunk popular psychology studies like the power pose, the IAT, nudging, and others. But when they do so, they just point out the flaws and that's about it. Jesse Singal approaches each chapter in a very nuanced way and explains how each study could be improved upon, and he tries to give researchers the benefit of the doubt. My favorite thing about the book is that you can tell that Jesse fully acknowledges that many systems in our world negatively affect minority communities and those who are struggling financially. You can feel that Jesse wants to educate people about these flawed studies so we can focus our attention to the root causes of these issues and find better solutions.
• 
  Emil O. W. Kirkegaard

  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.
• 
  Nina (Momo)

  This book was alright! I hate having to rate things with stars (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 stars, though, I feel unfair, because that lowers the book's aggregate rating and feels unfair.
  
  As it is, I did actually enjoy this book well enough, so I'm giving it three stars, 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 self-assessment. Maybe self-assessment forms are actually highly unbiased and reliable much of the time, but as the chapter on self-esteem mentions, self-assessment can be misleading. Having self-assessed high self esteem and self-assessed good looks doesn't mean you have good looks, as the book shows. What I'm curious about, though, is where else self-assessment might go wrong.
  
  Like, take me and my conundrum over stars. My personal feelings mean I'm unlikely to give a book lower than three stars 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 individual-focused psychology-based 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 society-level 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 institutional-level 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."
• 
  Ryan

  In The Quick Fix, Jesse Singal summarizes psychology’s replication crisis through several high profile fads. He covers self-esteem, 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 theory’s 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 psychologist’s 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.
  
  It’s 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 self-esteem 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 mind’s causal role in our life’s outcomes, it would be supremely satisfying to conclude that we can think our way out of our problems.
  
  I don’t want to suggest that we can’t 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. We’d 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 life’s 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.
• 
  Nathan

  In depth dive into some of the more "self help" psychology that has been popularized by TED talks and other similar platforms. This book really talks about the replication crisis and how a combination of over-claiming research press releases, cuts to important science reporting jobs, and politicians looking for an easy out will push "novel" psychology ideas. Often these concepts have little actual evidence behind them but are pushed as revolutionary ways to solve large social problems. The ideas stemming from these "quick fix" ideas put all the pressure on an individual to become their own solution to societal problems outside of their control instead of re-evaluating certain governmental and economic structures that lead to poor outcomes for a large swath of society. Would recommend.
• 
  Maryam Nada

  YES! Finally someone taking a deeper look into the many many many common, baseless, positive psychology/ pop social good-for-nothing 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.
• 
  Daniel

  Fad psychology is interesting but misleads.
  
  1. Self esteem: correlate with only self reported but not objective performance
  
  2. Supervillain from young: no such person exists
  
  3. Power posture: rather useless
  
  4. Positive mindset: just asking soldiers to feel the hug would not prepare them for the actual horrors of war. Cognitive behavioural therapy helps depressed people with the wrong mental framework. Cognitive processing therapy helpful in PTSD. But asking people to have a positive mindset has minimal effects.
  
  5. Grit: not enough. You need a mentor/guardian and some money
  
  6. Implicit bias: over diagnosing bias; deal with systemic explicit bias instead.
  
  7. Nudge: not all nudges work. Sometimes the exact opposite outcome ( like Sunstein’s money account framework during Obama’s cash; turns out Bush and Trump’s cash cheque actually causes people to spend more, a directly opposite result as what Sunstein had predicted)
  
  Ultimately, pop psychology harms because it focuses on easy magical fixes. Rather than really helping needy students (which take years and many resources), it is so much cheaper and easier to ask them just to have more grit… then when they don’t succeed, victim blaming is easy (maybe you should have more grit). We need to tackle complicated problems with many many difficult and expensive fixes.
  
  Ok I will still certainly buy the next pop psychology bestseller. But I promise I will not trust them much.
• 
  Ben Madsen

  I have been wanting to write a “everything cool you heard in psych 101 was wrong” set of articles for a while. So many social psychology lessons I remember from my Psych 101 class 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 Singal’s 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!
  
• 
  Kristine

  The Quick Fix by Jesse Singal is a free NetGalley ebook that I read in mid-March.
  
  Singal addresses, challenges, and criticizes new age, fad, patch and fix it psychology, like self-love, trauma, biases, and tenacity to name a few.
• 
  David Mihalyi

  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, best-selling 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” (self-confidence boosting) interventions offered cure to PTSD, power-posing 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.
• 
  Eric

  Jesse Singal has long been one of my favorite writers and this book doesn't disappoint. Scientific skepticism and social sciences: this is totally my jam. One reason I loved this book is it showed me just how much TED talks have been lying to me, and how much social science I've been taking for granted that it turns out is not well supported by the evidence. Maybe some people dislike learning those sorts of truths, but for me it's refreshing and illuminating and I love the increase in knowledge that comes from having to modify some of my worldview. I especially appreciated how he made the case that much of the social psychology "quick fixes" were about individual behavior modification which ignores the larger societal forces that should change.