Social Psychology Won't Save Us
Episode Stats
Summary
Jesse Singel explains how social psychology has come to such prominence in our culture, the role things like TED Talks have played in its rise, and yet how the replication crisis calls into question the legitimacy of the field s growing influence.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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When it comes to propose solutions to life's problems, whether on an individual or societal
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scale, the four most commonly used words these days are according to a study. This phrase used
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by journalists and media outlets, we certainly use it a lot in our AOM articles, and it's used
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in the rationales that are forwarded for implementing some new program in a school or other institution.
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My guest, however, questions whether we really should be lending the research of social
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psychologists and behavioral scientists so much weight. His name is Jesse Singel. He's
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the author of The Quick Fix, Why Fat Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills. Today on the show,
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Jesse explains how social psychology has come to such prominence in our culture, the role
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things like TED Talks have played in its rise, and yet how the replication crisis calls into
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question the legitimacy of the field's growing influence. We discuss why the solutions sometimes
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offered by behavioral science are both seductive and flawed, and how this dynamic played out
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in the self-esteem movement of the 1990s. We then discuss if another fad of social science,
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power posing, actually works, before turning to how the problems of positive psychology are
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exemplified in a program the military adopted to help soldiers with PTSD. And we end our conversation
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with whether the idea of grit is all it's cracked up to be, and how ultimately, there are no quick
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fixes to life's big problems. After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash quick fix.
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So you got a new book out called The Quick Fix, Why Fat Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills. And you basically
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put under the microscope a lot of these psychological studies that have come out that blogs have written
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about, publications have written about, and put them in the microscope to see if the claims are really
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what they say they are. How did you end up doing a deep dive into the claims of some of our most
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popular social psychological research? Yeah, back in 2014, I very much lucked into a job helping to
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launch and edit Science of Us, which was New York Magazine's behavioral science website. And it's
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funny, because I think when they launched it, they wanted it to be like, to expose readers to all these
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cool new ideas psychologists were generating. But I quickly realized like a lot of these ideas were
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pretty shoddy and overhyped. And I slipped into a little bit of a debunker role, which the magazine,
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to its credit, supported me in that. So yeah, from there, my agent suggested turning it into a book.
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And we've been really fortunate that it's worked out. So what do you think happened there? Because
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I noticed that too, I'd say around like 2005, 2006, you just saw all this stuff coming out from the
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world of behavioral science and just getting really hyped up. What was going on then that caused
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behavioral psychology, behavioral science, social psychology, psychology become such a thing?
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Yeah, man. I mean, that's sort of the million dollar question. So part of it is that social
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psychology in particular, which I think is the epicenter of a lot of this. They got really good
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at just selling their stuff, at realizing like there's a market for us to send journalists our
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studies. TED Talks became big. That was a really big vector for that stuff. And journalists sort of
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played along. Like if you're a journalist and you write about science every day, Harvard, Penn,
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Stanford, a million other schools, they're sending you their studies and saying like, you will not believe
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what I found. This could revolutionize education. This could help end racism. And it's easy to just
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swim along with the tide because you need to publish like five articles a day these days. And most
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journalists aren't really trained to identify weaknesses and scientific findings. So I think
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it was like, it was this big confluence of factors, but a lot of it was like TED Talks, social media,
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the explosion of all sorts of media in general.
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And you call this a worldview that a lot of popular social psychologists hold and the boosters of
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book publishers, the websites, they have this worldview and you call it prime world. What do
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you mean by that? Yeah. So a prime is like this idea that the world around us is like influencing us
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in these subtle or unconscious ways. And the classic example of this was a study from the 90s,
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where if you see words pertaining to old people like wrinkly or slow, it will physically make you
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walk slower. That was the claim at the time. That turned out to be false. It didn't replicate.
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But prime world is the idea that stuff like that and stuff like our unconscious biases
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are the reason for things like racist outcomes or gender inequity in the workplace. And what's
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convenient about this worldview is if those are the problems and those problems can be solved by
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social psychologists, that's a pretty big market for social psychologists to help institutions solve
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the problems or help the government solve its problems. My view is like when you look at a problem
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racism or gender inequity in the workplace, that's caused by way more complicated factors than people
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being a little bit biased or people being primed in the wrong way. I don't think those factors are
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non-existent, but things are usually way more complicated than that. And I'd argue we now know
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that social psychologists are not very good at solving most of these problems because over and over,
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an idea will burst onto the TED Talk stage. And then five years later, more research comes out.
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And it's like, why were we excited about that in the first place?
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Well, you talk about that. One of the things that social psychology has been experiencing
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these past 10 years, they call it the replication crisis. What is that for those who aren't familiar
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with it? Yeah. So if I come up with a wonder pill, the Jesse Single wonder pill, and I publish a study
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showing that it makes you grow two inches taller. One interpretation is that the pill makes you grow two
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inches taller. It's an incredible wonder pill. Everyone's going to buy it. The way science works is that
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someone can then come along and say, I'm going to try to replicate this study. I think this guy might
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be full of it. I think if I run that same study back, maybe with a bigger sample size, maybe a
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little bit more carefully, we'll find his pill doesn't make you grow at all. What's happened in
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psychology, and particularly social psychology, is that you can take a study published in a top journal,
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Nature or whatever, and only about half the time does it replicate. That means a huge number of
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published psychological studies are just sort of noise. They seem to be a signal, but they're
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really noise. And what that means is that these entire subfields of psychology are sort of built
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on sand, and psychologists have realized they have a major problem on their hands if their field is
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going to be credible. So, and as you said, the thing that's appealing about this stuff is that
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oftentimes the solutions that these studies come out with are easy, right? So school districts,
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corporations, they're like, well, we got this problem on an institutional level. Instead of
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having to really think hard about this stuff and make some hard changes, well, we can just
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implement these little nudges, and it will fix it. And you're saying, well, no, it could help,
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but it's not going to, it's not a panacea. And so let's talk about some of these popular
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psychological findings that you put under the microscope that we've tried to institutionalize.
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And you start off with, if you're a kid who grew up in the 80s or 90s, you're probably
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familiar with this. It's the self-esteem movement. And I think I want to start off here
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because I think it sort of sets the pattern of these quick fixes that we've seen in the
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past 20 years. So what was the psychological premise behind the self-esteem movement in
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Yeah, this very colorful California state legislator named John Baskin-Sellos, who was like,
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just a real hippie. He sort of floated from idea to idea. Interesting guy. People should
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Google him. He found this small body of theorizing and research suggesting that if people have low
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self-esteem, all sorts of negative stuff ensues. It can make them criminals. It could make them do
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worse in school. He actually lobbied the governor of California to set up a California self-esteem
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commission. I forget the budget. I want to say they had like $300,000 a year. They hired people.
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They convinced themselves and most of the country and some of the rest of the world that one of the
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most important things you can give someone is self-esteem because there are these studies
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showing that people who had higher self-esteem had better life outcomes. And I was exposed to
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this too. I have a vivid memory from like kindergarten or first grade of doing a self-esteem
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exercise, but it just became a craze. Everyone became convinced that self-esteem was the key
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to fixing society in many ways. I mean, to the point of people saying, well, if someone commits murder,
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it's because they don't have high self-esteem and people believe this stuff.
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And then when did the research start coming out saying, nah, there really isn't. That's bogus.
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So around the turn of the century, there was this sort of ambitious effort to really review the
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research in a careful way. So technically that's when this big paper was published led by a guy named
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Baumeister, social psychologist. If you look closely at the research that was published along the way,
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there was never good proof of this stuff. And this is what often happens is like a body of research
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will build up that people don't look into closely enough. But then when you sort of aggregate it and
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look at it carefully, you realize a lot of the studies were flawed. And in this case, there was
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never really a reason to think that boosting people's self-esteem, if we can even do that easily,
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which we don't think we can, or there's no way to, would lead to good outcomes. It's more
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complicated than that. Like for example, it might be that kids who do better in school,
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their self-esteem goes up as a result. So it's not their self-esteem causing good grades. It's
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good grades causing self-esteem. That was the sort of like complexity in the literature that people
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sort of ignored a lot of the time. Yeah. There was one thing too, like people who murder or commit
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crimes often have high self-esteem. They think they can get away with this. So they just, they just
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don't, the rules don't apply to them. I would never try to murder something because I know I would
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be caught right away. I don't have high self-esteem. Right. Oh, I thought it was interesting too.
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You delve into how, like there was like an official report done and there was actually,
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they had this one like legitimate guy, I think it was from Stanford. And he was saying, yeah,
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there's something there, but it's not as strong as we think it is. But when they talked about it
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publicly, this California representative, like they just buried that stuff and they just focused on
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the positive results and buried the negative results. Yeah. This guy named Will Storr, a British
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journalist, did some amazing journalism on this and I sort of stole it from him. But yeah,
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this guy named Neil Smelsner, who Smelsner maybe was a sociologist at one of the UC systems. And
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there was a meeting in a motel room South of San Francisco, where he was going to tell all the fans
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of self-esteem who'd been pushing this idea, whether or not it was justified. And what he told them in
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that room was, no, it's not, you guys are overhyping this, but they selectively cropped his quotes
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to quote this, this preeminent scientist as saying, yep, this is very exciting. And that really
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added legs to the whole self-esteem movement. And it was a really good example of how, like,
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I think lay people like us view science as this sort of pure heavenly process where it's just about
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the data. It's just about the evidence, but science isn't done by robots. It's done by humans and
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humans have their own agendas and incentives that can nudge them away from the truth.
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And I love to, you do this sort of like philosophical genealogy of the self-esteem movement
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to show people like why it was so appealing to Americans. Can you talk, walk us through some of
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that? Like, why was the self-esteem things like, why did we like, yes, that's the thing that's going
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to solve all of our problems here? Yeah. There's something uniquely American about the idea that if
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you can just sort of change your outlook on life, it'll fix everything. You know, this, this goes back
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centuries probably, but I trace it from a late 19th century movement called new thought,
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which was sort of this like transcendental, you know, they would have been hippies in the 1960s.
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They thought that you could use your mind to sort of control matter. And it just evolved and wound
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through the 20th century. It ended up with the secret. That's an Australian woman who Oprah
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promoted. She basically thinks like, if you visualize yourself having a new car, you can get a new car.
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So self-esteem is like a little bit more scientific than that, but it's the same idea that all you have
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to do is change your mindset and amazing things will happen. Oh, and the other big,
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book there is the power of positive thinking, which I think is still selling hugely today.
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That's a mid-century book that says the same thing. Just change your outlook,
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think in a more positive way and riches will fall into your lap.
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No, the self-esteem stuff still going on. It was funny. I was actually, I was driving my kids to
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school today and on the way I was like, Hey, what are you guys doing today? My son, he's in fourth
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grade. He's like, Oh, we got this like assembly thing. It's all this positive talk. They had this
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chant these things. You are you and you are great. And he's like, it's so dumb.
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Spoken like the true son of a podcast. It's so dumb. But yeah, it's still going on. So I mean,
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that's what's crazy about this is this one guy, this crazy California state rep, like he ended up
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shaping like curriculum for an entire generation of Americans. Like you and I both got the self-esteem
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treatment because of this one guy. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, and I got to say like,
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we don't need to go down this road, but if you look at some of the sort of interventions and ideas
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that are currently percolating in schools that are newer, it's sort of the same thing where if
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you're like, where did this come from? You can trace it back to like one random pamphlet someone
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wrote in 2000 and no one, I don't know why schools are such a site of like social engineering and
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experimentation, but it does worry me when people are like using these interventions on kids that are
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just sort of unproven. Not that it'll do any harm. Like it's not going to hurt your kid to chant.
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I am great or whatever, but you know, you'd think we'd be a bit more science-y about it.
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Yeah. I mean, I get it. Cause I mean, I think the thing you, the point you make in the book is that
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organizations, institutions, there's these big problems and they want to solve them. And this
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is like an easy, like it's, Oh, well, if I can just, we do, we chant, you are great. Then that
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might help, but that's not going to help. Yeah. I mean, like, so I co-host a podcast too. And let's
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say we wanted to, me and Katie, my co-host wanted to get more advertisers. We would look on the
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internet and we'd find whoever seems to be best at drumming up ad dollars, but we wouldn't really
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have the expertise to know who to pick. So it's the same thing. If you're a school and you have
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problems and you want to increase kids attendance or self-esteem or whatever else, you probably don't
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have the training to make an educated decision about which consulting firm to bring in or which
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speaker to bring in. You just sort of, uh, you go by your gut, but people's guts are often wrong.
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All right. So this, yeah, the self-esteem movement sort of lays the groundwork for quick fixes that we see
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later on. So it's like the positive findings are amplified. The, the negative findings are
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swept under the rug. There's an outcome that someone wants and they'll just make sure the
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evidence fits that outcome. But then later on, once you put it under the microscope, it's like,
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well, that's completely, we, we, we messed up. So let's talk about one research that got a lot of
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hype. I'm going to say about eight years ago, it was this idea of power posing for those who aren't
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familiar with this idea. What is power posing and like, what's the legit psychological premise behind
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the idea? Yeah. Power posing is the idea that if you adopt an expansive pose, so, I mean, if you're
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listening to this now and you're not driving, you could literally stand up, put your hands on your
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hip and on your hips in that sort of wonder woman stance. And, uh, the theory, and this was based on
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one study of, uh, I think Harvard or Columbia students was that this, this increases your sense
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of power and this will make you a better negotiator. It'll make you do better in workplace and maybe
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school situations. Harvard psychologist named Amy Cuddy, who was one of the coauthors on the first
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paper, took this idea and ran with it and created what I think is still one of the most watched Ted
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talks of all time. So what's the state of power posing today? I'm so like, it, it was a big thing.
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I remember, I think we've even like, we've referenced that stuff on our website, you know,
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take a big space, like lift your hands up in the air. Testosterone is supposed to like flow through
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your body and like cortisol is supposed to go down. What's the state of power posing today?
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From where I sit, it's, it's basically been debunked. I think there's a little bit of evidence that it
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might, it might actually make you feel a little bit more powerful, but there's other evidence
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suggesting that if you do power posing, knowing what power posing is, that takes away the effect.
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It's this weird placebo thing. So there, there is no harm in power posing. If you think it's helpful,
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my gripe is not that these ideas are worthless because you know, maybe power posing will help
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someone here or there. My gripe is Amy Cuddy being on the Ted talk stage saying power posing for a
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minute rewires your brain to make you more assertive, which to me was like a very overhyped
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claim from, uh, from the research she'd done at that point. All right. So power pose, if you want
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to, it's not going to hurt, but like, don't, I think the idea is like, don't make this like an
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institutional thing. Like don't tell school kids or people at a corporation, like you have to power
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pose before you do a sales deal. Don't, don't like a power pose in lieu of preparing for an
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interview. You should probably prepare also. Right. Well, so something you mentioned this,
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the reason why power posing so big was the phenomenon that was big, huge on Ted, the most
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downloaded video. And from your point of view and your research into this, like what role has Ted
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and I would call it the self-improvement business organizational complex, industrial complex.
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I mean, what role does that stuff play in the psychological studies? Like are, has there been
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studies on whether or not like psychological researchers are incentivized to reach bold counterintuitive
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claims just so they can get on Ted or publish a, an airport book?
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You know, this is very unscientific of me. There is not specific research on that, but it seems so
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obviously true. If you watch how science works and you watch the way universities send out press releases,
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I think it's undeniably the case that there's a difference between being a social psychologist in
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2021 versus 1961 in terms of like what the potential fruits of your research are in terms of like public
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acclaim and money and book deals. And just by dint of human nature, if over-claiming is rewarded,
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people will over-claim. And there's been some really good stuff written by like a guy named Daniel
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Dresner, another guy named Anand Giridharadas. They've done good stuff on what they call the ideas
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industry and, and the nature of Ted talks. But like the point of things like a Ted talk is to give
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wealthy people and people who aspire to be wealthy, this, this window into the world of experts who can
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really help them hack and improve their own lives and become more prosperous as a result.
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We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
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And now back to the show, right? And so, yeah, I can see there might be some psychologists out there.
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Well, I can get that idea. I can get on Ted and then I can get on the, the, the public speaking
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Yeah. And I feel, look, it, academia is a rough place to be right now. Like psychologists,
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I don't think are particularly well-funded. A lot of them have to be adjunct professors forever.
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I would not want to be a 25 year old young academic. So that's why some of this stuff
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brings some temptation with it, but I, you know, it does harm science in the long run.
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Have, has like, have psychologists thought about this? Like, are they trying to implement
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things to correct that? I mean, are they aware of it and are they doing anything as a, as a profession?
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Yeah. One of the really interesting innovations has just been blogging basically. I mean,
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it's funny, like I'd say around 2012. So the old norm in psychology and a lot of research science is
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like, I think this paper is nonsense. So I'm going to write a letter to the editor of the journal and
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I hope they publish it. And maybe the author of the paper is powerful and ask the editor not to run
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the letter because they think it's unfair with blogging and social media. You can just,
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you can publish your own thing. You can say, I think the study is bad. Here's why. And that's
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actually happened a few times. So that that's just like an informal advance in the way science
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has done that I think has been really helpful. There's a lot of stuff that isn't peer reviewed,
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but which is still good and fair critique. Psychologists have also just sort of changed the
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way they run studies and implemented some reforms that I think are making the science a little bit
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better. And I think particularly 10 years from now, it'll be a much more credible science with
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a higher replication rate, but the best psychologists definitely know what the problems are. And I think
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I've started to turn the ship around a little bit. All right. So another psychological, call it a fad
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that's happened in the past 20 years that you discussed in your book is positive psychology.
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I say in the past 20 years, 30 years, it's become bigger and bigger and bigger. We've had people,
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positive psychologists on the podcast before we've written about positive psychology on the website,
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but for those who aren't familiar, like what is the goal of positive psychology and how does it
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differ from the goals of traditional psychology? Yeah, this is one of the really interesting stories
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out of research psychology. And I recommend Barbara Ehrenreich's book, Bright Sided is sort of a
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history of, or a critique of positive thinking in general that also talks about positive psychology.
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Okay. There's a legendary psychologist named Martin Seligman. He goes by Marty,
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University of Pennsylvania. Early in his career, he did these like really dark
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experiments about learned helplessness. So if you shock a dog in its cage long enough,
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it will basically give up trying to resist the shocks or trying to escape the shocks.
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There's just this weird response where if you like sort of harm or traumatize a creature enough,
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it stops, it's self-preservation instinct gives out. And that's an important concept,
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learned helplessness. Later in his career, he advocated for psychology to turn away from this
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negative stuff, from studying why people are broken and turn toward helping people who are
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basically healthy, like someone who's 80th percentile of mental wellbeing, do a little bit
00:21:14.200
better. Maybe you can bump them up to the 85th percentile of the 90th. And this also opened up a
00:21:19.460
big market for psychologists to treat people who are well, because I'm making this number up out of
00:21:25.400
thin air. Let's say 30% of Americans have a mental illness that would benefit from treatment.
00:21:29.360
That means psychologists only have a market of 30% of Americans. If you change the goal of
00:21:35.080
psychology to let's also help healthy people do even better, anyone's a potential client. And at
00:21:41.540
base, that's a reasonable idea. Why shouldn't psychologists help healthy people do better,
00:21:46.360
Right. No, yeah, it makes sense. We want to be super awesome, super rad. But this has been going on for
00:21:51.740
20 years. What does the research say about positives? Can we make people who don't have problems,
00:21:57.600
who are relatively healthy psychologically? Can you make them better with positive psychology?
00:22:04.820
Yeah. So what I argue in my chapter on positive psychology is that the field has centered on
00:22:10.880
these two main claims. One is that if you make someone more optimistic, it has all sorts of
00:22:16.500
benefits, including on their physical health, including boosting their immune system. That's one
00:22:21.640
of the claims. The other claim is simply that people have a really big capacity to get significantly
00:22:26.760
happier. I'm not talking 3% percentile points, but 20 or 30. What I argue is that positive
00:22:34.100
psychology has tended to overclaim and to say stuff is true that might be true, but that really hasn't
00:22:39.960
been proven. And this is something that positive psychologists themselves have been pointing out.
00:22:44.240
I quote people within the field in 2011 saying we're rushing this stuff to market, even though it
00:22:50.020
hasn't been proven. And the real centerpiece of my chapter involves basically the military adopting
00:22:57.360
some of these positive psychology ideas in a really big way.
00:23:02.160
Well, yeah, let's talk about that. So I guess after the Iraq and Afghanistan wars,
00:23:06.780
the military, the PTSD was just exploding amongst veterans. And they were like, we got to do something
00:23:12.220
about this. So they thought, well, maybe positive psychology. They wanted to help people who had
00:23:19.240
PTSD, but also they wanted to prevent PTSD if they could, like nip it in the bud. So they thought
00:23:25.320
positive psychology could help with that. So walk us through that.
00:23:28.920
Yeah. Basically, I explain exactly how they got to Marty Seligman. It's through this one particular
00:23:34.560
woman who I really think was just trying to do the right thing. But Marty Seligman convinced the army
00:23:39.520
that he could take this program that the positive psychology center at the university of Pennsylvania
00:23:43.940
had developed called the Penn resilience program. This is where it gets slightly complicated, but I
00:23:48.460
can't really explain this without explaining that program. That program was built at, you take a
00:23:53.360
classroom of 10 to 14 year old kids, like middle schoolers, you give them this intervention. And the
00:23:59.000
theory is that this will reduce their anxiety and depression in the long run. Seligman tells the army,
00:24:04.720
we can take this program, adapt it to a military setting, and we can use that to reduce suicidality
00:24:11.180
and PTSD. Two major problems with this. One is, and I think this is intuitive to all of us, like
00:24:17.340
there's a pretty big difference between helping a 12 year old girl with like boy and homework problems
00:24:22.820
feel better and helping a 20 year old fighting in Fallujah feel better. Right. I feel like that's like
00:24:28.100
an obvious stretch. Right. And what's the other difference? The other problem?
00:24:31.380
The other problem was the Penn resilience program itself, there was never much evidence it worked.
00:24:38.260
Like the take home message from this meta analysis published by one of its creators is
00:24:42.480
there's some effect here. We think kids' depression and anxiety symptoms go down a little. It's what
00:24:49.020
researchers call statistically significant, which basically means real. There's something here.
00:24:53.380
We're not even sure it's clinically significant. We're not sure it's enough to matter to improve
00:24:56.940
their day-to-day life. So even as this, this important meta analysis is being published,
00:25:01.860
showing the Penn resilience program doesn't work for its original stated purpose. The army is rolling
00:25:07.680
out an adapted version of it for every soldier and for people facing like the worst urban combat ever.
00:25:14.120
And that's just not good science. That's not responsible. There was never any evidence to
00:25:18.780
think that this program could prevent PTSD or suicide because it wasn't designed to.
00:25:23.720
How much money, do we know how much money the government spent on that?
00:25:27.860
Journalists better than I have gotten estimates from the army of about $46 million a year. So if
00:25:33.180
you stretch that over the length of the program, it's probably cost more than $500 million.
00:25:38.600
There's also a version the Air Force adopted, comprehensive airman fitness. So
00:25:42.820
what frustrates me and angers me a little bit is like, imagine someone gave you $500 million
00:25:49.680
to spend on soldiers with PTSD at risk of suicide and of suffering for the rest of their lives.
00:25:59.720
Well, why do you think they spend it on that? Is it because it's easy? It's like, well,
00:26:02.860
it's easier than actually having to deal with the problem.
00:26:05.820
This, this is where I'm a little bit sympathetic to the army. They thought they could prevent PTSD
00:26:10.320
before it even arose by like this rolling out this mass program for every soldier.
00:26:14.920
If you could pile 30 soldiers in a room and give them this training for a few hours,
00:26:20.500
and that could actually prevent PTSD, that would be revolutionary. Then you wouldn't have to treat
00:26:24.960
the PTSD after they develop it. So I understand the thinking, but it, but it was a totally novel
00:26:29.640
theory because no one has a way of reducing PTSD before the fact or reducing the probability people
00:26:35.180
get it. So this was really rushed into the army at a time of crisis when, when someone needed to
00:26:40.900
put the brakes on and say like, let's really test this first. And what's the state of the,
00:26:45.320
this fitness resilience fitness program. Are they still doing it?
00:26:48.900
It has gone through a few different name changes. I think the military likes acronyms and name
00:26:54.020
changes. The key, I confirmed this with the army last summer, as I was finishing up the book,
00:26:58.800
the key components I critique that are based on the Penn resilience program are still in place.
00:27:03.020
So this is still going on. So yeah, the takeaway I got from there was one, okay, from an,
00:27:06.920
on an individual level with positive, there's different levels you can look at this stuff at
00:27:10.880
on an individual level. If you're looking to positive psychology to improve your life,
00:27:15.800
maybe like you have to kind of temper your expectations. I feel like, I think the point
00:27:20.380
you made is that psychological interventions typically help people more who have a mental
00:27:25.160
health issue, like anxiety, depression. If you're okay, these interventions, they could help a little
00:27:30.740
bit, but it's not going to take you to a hundred basically. And then on an institutional level,
00:27:36.220
it's just like, you gotta, yeah, you have to be careful like of rushing into stuff before it's
00:27:41.620
actually been vetted. And yeah. So if you're, if you work for a company organization or you work
00:27:45.760
in a school district, like kind of be like, well, maybe we don't do that. Or maybe we hold off on
00:27:50.320
this before we implement this new curriculum. Yeah. And, and look, I don't want to lose sight of
00:27:54.560
the fact that we have some pretty good treatments for anxiety and depression and PTSD for that matter.
00:27:59.340
And I think the element of truth and positive psychology is like, and, and in self-esteem too,
00:28:04.540
actually, is if you walk around and anytime something bad happens to you, your brain spirals
00:28:09.420
and you say, I'm worthless. I'm never going to be successful. I'm never going to be healthy
00:28:12.860
or happy. That's bad. And that is usually treatable. So in that sense, you know, you,
00:28:20.380
optimism isn't a panacea, but if you have a severe lack of optimism that can hurt you,
00:28:25.080
if you're an ultra pessimist, you might want to seek out treatment for that. So that's true.
00:28:29.900
But yeah, like you're saying, you can't go from that, from the fact that individuals can suffer
00:28:34.520
from a lack of optimism to the fact, to the claim that we can make the whole army
00:28:39.060
more optimistic and resilient. That just isn't how human psychology works. It's often much more
00:28:44.860
complicated than that. So for service members who have PTSD, do we know what works for treating
00:28:51.540
PTSD? And I imagine it's, it's a pretty hard process. Yeah. There are a couple sort of,
00:28:57.300
they're considered like gold star treatments by the military that they, they're effective.
00:29:01.280
They're empirically proven. I mean, nothing in science is proven forever. There can always be
00:29:05.300
more research, but I go through briefly a couple of these approaches that we think work. And I talked
00:29:10.980
to Patricia Rezik, I believe she's at Duke about what it's like. You basically have to sit with a
00:29:16.060
soldier and go through his thought process that contributes to his trauma. So the most classic one
00:29:21.720
is there's a firefight and your buddy gets killed and you're convinced it was your fault.
00:29:26.440
You did something wrong. You didn't protect him. And soldiers with PTSD can be tortured by these
00:29:31.620
thoughts of guilt, which is horrible. So her job is to sort of like sit with them and unpack this
00:29:36.360
and help them come to realize that combat is so horrible and raw and random that it's often not
00:29:43.100
quite true that like you could have saved your buddy. It's not, you didn't control the bullet.
00:29:46.860
You didn't know where the sniper was. It's often not your fault. So that's the kind of really
00:29:50.780
painful work she does. And it's, it's, I don't know, man, it's visceral. It's a lot less sunny
00:29:56.600
and optimistic than we're going to pile these 20 year old kids into a classroom and teach them
00:30:01.180
resilience so they don't get PTSD. And my theory that I lay out, which I can't prove is that part
00:30:06.220
of the reason comprehensive soldier fitness caught on in the army is because it's a much happier story
00:30:11.280
than what it looks like to actually treat PTSD after the fact.
00:30:14.360
And it's easier. I mean, like with this treatment, you have to, it has to be one, one-on-one or you
00:30:18.960
can't, you can't mass, you can't, like, it's not like a factory that you can put, like you said,
00:30:23.040
it has to be one-on-one. It's going to take months, probably years to do.
00:30:26.880
Yeah. Yeah. I think the treatment I just mentioned, I think is like four, maybe 14, 40 minute
00:30:32.260
sessions. So it's not always years, but at the very least, it's like a several months process.
00:30:37.700
I think the other treatment that they do is exposure therapy. And again, it has to be one-on-one
00:30:41.820
in a controlled environment. So, you know, guys with, soldiers with PTSD, whenever they hear
00:30:45.840
like a muffler, a car backfire, right? They had to like, they, they freak out so that their
00:30:51.640
therapist works with them exposing. So they'd understand, okay, just because you hear that
00:30:55.760
noise doesn't mean you're, there's about to be an IED or gunfire.
00:31:00.040
Yeah. Yeah. So what happens is, is soldiers will develop a symptom where like, they won't go out
00:31:04.400
because they will be scared that something will trigger their symptoms, avoidance. And avoidance
00:31:08.660
only makes things worse. Cause if you cut yourself up from your friends, from bars, from restaurants,
00:31:12.660
you're just sitting there stewing in your own trauma. So exposure therapy is a really good way
00:31:17.160
to get people sort of back out in the world and more functional again. But again, it takes a little
00:31:21.180
bit of time. It's not, it's not fun. You can't just, you know, film kids in a class learning to be
00:31:25.860
more resilient. So another thing you look at in the book is this idea of grit. And I'm going to be,
00:31:30.820
I love the idea of grit. We, it's getting a lot of press lately and we've talked about on the
00:31:35.440
podcast. We've had Angela Duckworth on the podcast, but for those who aren't familiar,
00:31:38.980
like what's the basic idea of grit and what does the research say about it?
00:31:43.420
So Angela Duckworth is an interesting case. She, I highlight her as a researcher who I think is
00:31:49.300
overall more honest and has more humility than some of the other researchers in my book. And I
00:31:54.980
understand why people like her. Her claim in another highly mega viral Ted talk was she had
00:32:00.820
developed a new scale to measure grit and grit is basically people's ability to stick with
00:32:06.180
challenging problems and, and to solve problems in the longterm rather than getting distracted and
00:32:11.620
wandering off to something else. Uh, I scored in the 10th percentile of Americans with regard to grit.
00:32:17.100
So I'm not very gritty. Her whole claim was that we underestimate things like effort and grit
00:32:24.680
and we overestimate the importance of things like intelligence that we don't have a huge amount of
00:32:29.520
control over. Cause like, you can't, you can maybe juke someone's SAT score a little bit with
00:32:34.560
tutoring, but overall things like SAT scores and IQ are pretty stable. So, you know, this is a great
00:32:39.980
idea and you can understand why it caught on. Like, what if we can just help kids learn to work harder
00:32:44.600
and stick through problems? I don't disagree with that. I think all else being equal, you can probably
00:32:50.000
teach kids to have better study habits, to, to go to bed on time and all that. My problem was the way
00:32:56.380
grit sort of, it isn't new. Like there's a thing called conscientiousness, part of the big five
00:33:03.100
personality model that we've known about for years. We've known conscientiousness is a factor
00:33:08.240
in, in how well people do in school at work. I'm not convinced it's, it's anywhere near as important
00:33:14.100
as intelligence. I think intelligence is always way more important and telling people otherwise
00:33:18.100
doesn't necessarily help them. I also, there isn't a scalable way to like improve kids grit.
00:33:24.800
We're only starting to learn how to improve grit and conscientiousness. So this is one of those
00:33:29.600
areas where I do think she overclaimed. I also think she, she's been honest about the fact that
00:33:35.360
some other people have also overclaimed and that we don't yet have reliable ways to improve grit.
00:33:39.800
But, you know, I think readers who get to the end of the chapter will understand why I'm pretty
00:33:43.820
skeptical of it, that I don't think it's this revolutionary idea. It was, it was made out to be.
00:33:48.660
Right. I think what a lot of researchers have found is that it's great. It's pretty much the same
00:33:52.520
as conscientiousness and conscientiousness. It's, it's the personality trait where you're, you want
00:33:57.360
to be on time, you obey the rules, yada, yada. But because of the personality trait, that's going
00:34:02.240
to be, it's hard to change. Like personality traits tend to remain stable over the life of a person.
00:34:08.680
So there probably aren't too many interventions that you can do to improve someone's conscientiousness
00:34:15.520
Yeah. And Duckworth is honest about this. And I do mention one sort of, this was an intervention
00:34:20.580
done with like individuals would get a coach, a personality coach, and they would choose
00:34:25.040
which of the week five they wanted to improve. There's some sign it works, but in terms of a
00:34:30.320
school setting, are you going to be able to assign kids an individual coach to work with for weeks
00:34:35.400
and weeks? We're also not sure it would work on someone who wasn't motivated to improve their
00:34:39.720
conscientiousness or grit. So again, she's been honest that we don't know how to improve grit,
00:34:44.520
but I just, at the end of the day, when you look closely into her claims, I'm not sure there's
00:34:47.640
anything that exciting left, except you could argue that grit is a much catchier term than
00:34:53.160
conscientiousness. So, you know, what's wrong with marketing it differently? That in itself
00:34:58.300
Yeah. And you mentioned that. Another thing to her credit too, to Duckworth's credit, is that,
00:35:02.900
you know, she's been open to the feedback and the criticism to her initial research. But then she
00:35:07.240
also says, part of the problem is that the popular press got a hold of her research and then kind of ran
00:35:12.880
her way with the narrative. And so you had all these, you know, blog posts coming out saying
00:35:17.740
grit can change everything. And I imagine she's played a role in that type, you know, she went on
00:35:22.760
TED. But I think there's something to that idea when like the popular press often gets a hold of this
00:35:27.280
research. We were kind of talking about this a little bit earlier and then extrapolates dubious
00:35:31.540
claims to get clicks. I mean, I think this happened, you can see this happening with the 10,000 hour
00:35:36.220
rule, right? Erickson. Malcolm Gladwell got a hold of that. And like, everyone's like, oh, yeah, 10,000
00:35:42.580
hours. If I just play golf for 10,000 hours, I'll be the best golfer in the world. And Andrews Erickson
00:35:48.640
was like, no, no, no, no, like 10,000 hours, like the average. Sometimes it was less, sometimes it was
00:35:53.240
more. But I can see how it can be frustrating for a researcher. You do like a solid research paper and
00:35:59.420
then some, you know, journalist or whatever takes a hold of it and just runs away with the narrative.
00:36:03.920
Yeah. Angela Duckworth, I think she had a piece in the Times basically saying people are going too
00:36:10.180
far with this. A lot of these claims about grit aren't proven. And she deserves a lot of credit
00:36:13.800
for that because other researchers in the same position, I won't necessarily name names here,
00:36:20.400
would have written a New York Times column saying, no, grit is great. I stand by the research
00:36:24.680
completely. So I think I have qualms with the way she presented the research and some of them are
00:36:30.420
pretty nerdy, but I think important during the chapter. But overall, yeah, I think she's been a
00:36:36.480
better actor than some of the other researchers I highlight.
00:36:39.700
So, I mean, what we've talked about some of the stuff you hit on the book, there's other stuff,
00:36:43.840
but like when someone finishes your book, like what do you hope they walk away with thinking after
00:36:50.020
I want people to feel empowered to say to their school board or their company or their commanding
00:36:56.740
officer, if they're in the military, what's the evidence for this? Why are we spending money on
00:37:01.620
this? Why do I have to do a two-hour training doing this? And to just know, I'm not a stats
00:37:06.940
expert. I have to reach out to statistics experts for help. But I think if you read my book, you will
00:37:12.820
know the first five questions to ask about an intervention, like what the nature of the research
00:37:17.880
is behind it, how old the research is, whether it has a big sample size. There's some basic questions
00:37:23.640
anyone who's decently educated can ask. And I just, I'd like there to be more pushback when a school
00:37:28.560
or a company institutes one of these trainings that there's not much evidence for.
00:37:32.620
Right. And I think also too, you imply this on an individual level. If you come across an article
00:37:36.480
making a big claim based in social psychology, be like, well, maybe, but it's probably not as big
00:37:42.500
as, I don't need to go out and change my life just to introduce this hack into my life.
00:37:47.860
Yeah. Yeah. And then the maybe bigger and more important and slightly more political argument I make
00:37:53.240
is just like, I'm recording this. I'm visiting my parents from sort of like a wealthy Boston
00:37:57.880
suburb, affluent at least. And kids six, seven miles down the road from me have had to go to
00:38:03.260
really crappy schools. They did not have access to the resources I did. There's nothing fair about
00:38:07.980
that. I think everyone should have opportunity at the very least. And I do think these ideas tend to
00:38:15.000
downplay the role of structural factors. I don't want to tell a kid who doesn't have air conditioning
00:38:20.160
in an 80 degree classroom. Well, you got to develop some grit. I think those are probably
00:38:24.660
some of the grittiest kids in the world. And I actually, I quote at length from a book called
00:38:28.620
When Grit Isn't Enough by a Boston-based educator who talks about this. So I'd like to get people to
00:38:34.380
think a little bit more seriously about what it'll take to actually improve these complicated problems.
00:38:40.300
Right. And that's going to be high level stuff. And everyone's got solutions or ideas for how to
00:38:44.680
fix those high. But whatever they are, they're going to be hard. I think we have to accept that.
00:38:49.160
Oftentimes, I think this stuff is going to be really easy to solve. But no, we have to tweak
00:38:54.480
a bunch of different factors. It's going to maybe take years. So I don't know. I think we have to
00:38:59.500
just resign ourselves. There are no quick fixes to this stuff, whether it's education gaps, poverty,
00:39:04.700
whatever. They're going to be hard. Just accept it and roll up your sleeve and let's get to work.
00:39:08.540
Well, Jesse, where can people go to learn more about the book?
00:39:11.320
Just Google it, The Quick Fix on Amazon or IndieBound. You can check out my newsletter,
00:39:15.540
jessiesingle.substack.com. I think by the time this is up, my podcast, Blocked and Reported,
00:39:22.360
we both have an episode on it. And I believe we'll be running an excerpt from the introduction
00:39:26.440
of the audio book. So there's plenty of quick fix content abounding at this point.
00:39:31.520
Well, Jesse Single, thanks so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:39:35.960
My guest today was Jesse Single. He's the author of the book, The Quick Fix,
00:39:38.900
Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores
00:39:42.700
everywhere. Check out our show notes at aom.is slash quick fix. We can find links to resources
00:39:55.640
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at
00:39:59.280
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00:40:02.940
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