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Table of Contents
A Note About the Author
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To my parents, Sydney Altman and Bruce Singal,
who gave me all the love and support I needed
and then some, who taught me there are no quick
fixes, and who let me skip school once in a while
just for the hell of it
INTRODUCTION
If you’re the sort of person who buys and reads
books about human behavior, then it is likely you have
recently encountered an exciting, counterintuitive new
psychological idea that seems as if it could help solve a
pressing societal problem like educational inequality, race
relations, or misogyny. Maybe you came across it in a TED
Talk. Or, if not there, in an op-ed or blog post or book.
It is, after all, a golden age for popular behavioral
science. As the University of Virginia law professor Gregory
Mitchell, a keen critic and observer of the field, wrote in
2017, “With press releases from journals and universities
feeding a content-hungry media, publishing houses looking
for the next Gladwellian bestseller, governments embracing
behavioral science, and courts increasingly open to
evidence from social scientists, psychologists have more
opportunities than ever to educate the public on what they
have learned about why people behave as they do.”1
I should know. Starting in March 2014, I was the editor of
Science of Us, New York magazine’s newly launched online
social science section. It was my job, and the job of the very
talented people I worked with, to find new, interesting
behavioral science research to write about every day of the
week and to do so in a rigorous, sometimes skeptical
manner.
Thanks to a fairly stats-heavy master’s program I had
completed, I knew some of the differences between good
and bad research, and some of the ways quantitative claims
can mislead. What I didn’t anticipate was the fire hose of
overhyped findings that would fill my email in-box daily, the
countless press releases from research institutions touting
all-caps AMAZING results that would surely blow my mind,
and the minds of our readers, bringing us impressive web
traffic in the process. I treaded water as best I could, trying
to resist the lure of bad science by writing and editing
stories we could be proud of. But I don’t think I quite
grasped the full scale of the problem.
That changed in September 2015, six months or so into
my job. That was when I met with Jeffrey Mosenkis, who
does communications for the research organization
Innovations for Poverty Action and who also happens to
have a PhD in comparative human development (a blend of
anthropology, social psychology, and other fields). Perhaps
because he had noticed that I appreciated the debunking of
overhyped research findings, he had decided to pass along
a tip: I should look at the flaws in the implicit association
test.
Maybe you’ve heard of this test. Commonly referred to as
the IAT, it is seen by important people with impressive
credentials as the most promising technological tool for
attenuating the impact of racism. The idea is that by
gauging your reaction time to various combinations of words
and images—say, a black face next to the word “happy,” or
a white one next to the word “danger”—the test can reveal
your unconscious, or implicit, bias against various groups.
The test, introduced in 1998, has been a blockbuster
success. Anyone can take it on Harvard University’s website,
and over the years its architects and evangelists, some of
the biggest names in social psychology, have adapted it for
all sorts of diversity-training uses. It would be hard to
overstate its impact on schools, police departments,
corporations, and many other institutions.
In his email, Jeff said there was a story waiting to be told
by a journalist; the test was weak and unreliable,
statistically speaking. A group of researchers had published
work showing rather convincingly that the test barely
measures anything of real-world import. Which, if true,
would naturally raise some questions about the possibility
that Harvard was apparently “diagnosing” millions (literally
millions) of people as unconsciously biased on the basis of a
flimsy methodology, and about all the money being spent
on IAT-based trainings.
I was intrigued by Jeff’s email and soon got in touch with
one of the skeptical researchers, Hart Blanton, who was
then at the University of Connecticut. As I started looking
into his claims, I realized that I had simply assumed the test
did what its most enthusiastic proponents said it did,
despite the rather audacious nature of their claim: that a
ten-minute computer task with no connection to the real
world could predict subtle forms of real-world discrimination.
I had credulously accepted these claims because I had
figured that if almost the entire discipline of social
psychology had embraced this innovation as a cutting-edge
tool in the fight against racism, and a multitude of
organizations outside academia had followed suit, all these
people must have known what they were doing. This
brought a pang of shame. “I believe this thing because a lot
of people say it is true” is not a great stance for a science
writer and editor.
After a lot of reading and interviewing, I concluded
Blanton was correct. As I wrote in a subsequent article, the
statistical evidence for the sorts of claims the IAT’s creators
were making was sorely lacking.2 There was a gap between
what many people believed to be true about the test and
what the evidence revealed. Part of what was going on was
that the IAT told a good story that lined up with certain
liberal anxieties about race relations, tinged with an
optimistic note—Sure, everyone’s racist deep down, but this
test can help us discover and undo those biases, one person
at a time!—and people wanted to believe that story. If
millions of people believed in the IAT largely on the basis of
good storytelling and the impressive credentials of its
creators, what did that say about the manner in which we
talked about these issues? Could it be that urgent tasks like
police reform were being approached in the wrong way? And
what about the broader current state of behavioral science?
What else was I missing?
WHAT I SOON REALIZED is that 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 IAT is one example, but
there are numerous others. The popularity of these ideas, as
well as the breathless manner in which they are marketed
by TED Talks and university press offices and journalists and
podcasts, is not harmless. It misallocates resources to
overclaiming researchers when others are experiencing a
funding crunch, and it degrades the institution of
psychology by blurring the line between behavioral science
and behavioral pseudoscience.
Perhaps most important, these ideas are frequently being
adopted by schools, corporations, and nonprofits eager to
embrace the Next Big Thing to come out of the labs and
lecture halls of Harvard or the University of Pennsylvania. As
the decision-makers who work in these institutions have
grown more fluent in science and cognizant of the need to
look to behavioral scientists for guidance (a good thing),
they’ve also become more susceptible to half-baked
behavioral science (a bad thing). And this explosion of
interest in psychological science has occurred at a time
when, if anything, people should be more cautious about
embracing new and exciting psychological claims. As we’ll
see, many findings in psychology—including those featured
in introductory textbooks—are failing to replicate, meaning
that when researchers attempt to re-create them with new
experiments, they are coming up short. This so-called
replication crisis has cast a giant shadow over the entire
field of psychology, and the best available evidence
suggests that a sizable chunk of published psychological
findings may be false (though the size of that chunk is a
source of heated debate). Many psychologists themselves
may be unwittingly helping to promote half-baked science
that seems to be built upon a solid foundation of published
research. In all likelihood, we’ll look back wincingly at some
of the popular theories being taught and developed today
and, all too often, transformed into sleek interventions that
promise to alleviate our ills.*
THIS BOOK IS AN ATTEMPT to explain the allure of fad
psychology, why that allure is so strong, and how both
individuals and institutions can do a better job of resisting it.
It is important to improve our understanding of how
behavioral scientific information circulates in the public
realm, because only sound knowledge will earn us the
improvements we wish for. Just as we can’t enact successful
environmental and energy policies while denying global
warming, and we can’t improve global public health without
taking a stand against anti-vaccination myths, we will never
solve the pressing social issues of the day—racism and
inequality and the education gaps and so many others—
while relying on claims about human behavior and how to
change it that are half-true at best.
