The Art of Manliness - Social Psychology Won't Save Us

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:10.540 When it comes to propose solutions to life's problems, whether on an individual or societal

00:00:14.720 scale, the four most commonly used words these days are according to a study. This phrase used

00:00:20.240 by journalists and media outlets, we certainly use it a lot in our AOM articles, and it's used

00:00:24.480 in the rationales that are forwarded for implementing some new program in a school or other institution.

00:00:29.080 My guest, however, questions whether we really should be lending the research of social

00:00:32.780 psychologists and behavioral scientists so much weight. His name is Jesse Singel. He's

00:00:36.960 the author of The Quick Fix, Why Fat Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills. Today on the show,

00:00:41.400 Jesse explains how social psychology has come to such prominence in our culture, the role

00:00:45.260 things like TED Talks have played in its rise, and yet how the replication crisis calls into

00:00:49.740 question the legitimacy of the field's growing influence. We discuss why the solutions sometimes

00:00:53.620 offered by behavioral science are both seductive and flawed, and how this dynamic played out

00:00:57.580 in the self-esteem movement of the 1990s. We then discuss if another fad of social science,

00:01:01.920 power posing, actually works, before turning to how the problems of positive psychology are

00:01:06.500 exemplified in a program the military adopted to help soldiers with PTSD. And we end our conversation

00:01:11.480 with whether the idea of grit is all it's cracked up to be, and how ultimately, there are no quick

00:01:16.160 fixes to life's big problems. After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash quick fix.

00:01:21.600 Here we go, Jesse Singel, welcome to the show.

00:01:34.220 Hey, thanks for having me on.

00:01:35.480 So you got a new book out called The Quick Fix, Why Fat Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills. And you basically

00:01:40.640 put under the microscope a lot of these psychological studies that have come out that blogs have written

00:01:45.340 about, publications have written about, and put them in the microscope to see if the claims are really

00:01:50.240 what they say they are. How did you end up doing a deep dive into the claims of some of our most

00:01:54.900 popular social psychological research? Yeah, back in 2014, I very much lucked into a job helping to

00:02:01.280 launch and edit Science of Us, which was New York Magazine's behavioral science website. And it's

00:02:06.440 funny, because I think when they launched it, they wanted it to be like, to expose readers to all these

00:02:11.340 cool new ideas psychologists were generating. But I quickly realized like a lot of these ideas were

00:02:15.800 pretty shoddy and overhyped. And I slipped into a little bit of a debunker role, which the magazine,

00:02:21.680 to its credit, supported me in that. So yeah, from there, my agent suggested turning it into a book.

00:02:26.720 And we've been really fortunate that it's worked out. So what do you think happened there? Because

00:02:29.920 I noticed that too, I'd say around like 2005, 2006, you just saw all this stuff coming out from the

00:02:35.800 world of behavioral science and just getting really hyped up. What was going on then that caused

00:02:40.560 behavioral psychology, behavioral science, social psychology, psychology become such a thing?

00:02:44.740 Yeah, man. I mean, that's sort of the million dollar question. So part of it is that social

00:02:49.920 psychology in particular, which I think is the epicenter of a lot of this. They got really good

00:02:54.460 at just selling their stuff, at realizing like there's a market for us to send journalists our

00:02:59.820 studies. TED Talks became big. That was a really big vector for that stuff. And journalists sort of

00:03:05.600 played along. Like if you're a journalist and you write about science every day, Harvard, Penn,

00:03:10.240 Stanford, a million other schools, they're sending you their studies and saying like, you will not believe

00:03:14.120 what I found. This could revolutionize education. This could help end racism. And it's easy to just

00:03:19.640 swim along with the tide because you need to publish like five articles a day these days. And most

00:03:24.720 journalists aren't really trained to identify weaknesses and scientific findings. So I think

00:03:29.820 it was like, it was this big confluence of factors, but a lot of it was like TED Talks, social media,

00:03:35.100 the explosion of all sorts of media in general.

00:03:37.880 And you call this a worldview that a lot of popular social psychologists hold and the boosters of

00:03:43.520 book publishers, the websites, they have this worldview and you call it prime world. What do

00:03:48.180 you mean by that? Yeah. So a prime is like this idea that the world around us is like influencing us

00:03:54.300 in these subtle or unconscious ways. And the classic example of this was a study from the 90s,

00:03:59.860 where if you see words pertaining to old people like wrinkly or slow, it will physically make you

00:04:05.620 walk slower. That was the claim at the time. That turned out to be false. It didn't replicate.

00:04:10.000 But prime world is the idea that stuff like that and stuff like our unconscious biases

00:04:15.260 are the reason for things like racist outcomes or gender inequity in the workplace. And what's

00:04:22.620 convenient about this worldview is if those are the problems and those problems can be solved by

00:04:26.900 social psychologists, that's a pretty big market for social psychologists to help institutions solve

00:04:31.860 the problems or help the government solve its problems. My view is like when you look at a problem

00:04:37.120 racism or gender inequity in the workplace, that's caused by way more complicated factors than people

00:04:43.800 being a little bit biased or people being primed in the wrong way. I don't think those factors are

00:04:49.040 non-existent, but things are usually way more complicated than that. And I'd argue we now know

00:04:54.620 that social psychologists are not very good at solving most of these problems because over and over,

00:04:59.880 an idea will burst onto the TED Talk stage. And then five years later, more research comes out.

00:05:04.340 And it's like, why were we excited about that in the first place?

00:05:07.660 Well, you talk about that. One of the things that social psychology has been experiencing

00:05:10.980 these past 10 years, they call it the replication crisis. What is that for those who aren't familiar

00:05:17.000 with it? Yeah. So if I come up with a wonder pill, the Jesse Single wonder pill, and I publish a study

00:05:23.560 showing that it makes you grow two inches taller. One interpretation is that the pill makes you grow two

00:05:29.580 inches taller. It's an incredible wonder pill. Everyone's going to buy it. The way science works is that

00:05:34.220 someone can then come along and say, I'm going to try to replicate this study. I think this guy might

00:05:38.780 be full of it. I think if I run that same study back, maybe with a bigger sample size, maybe a

00:05:43.960 little bit more carefully, we'll find his pill doesn't make you grow at all. What's happened in

00:05:48.620 psychology, and particularly social psychology, is that you can take a study published in a top journal,

00:05:54.760 Nature or whatever, and only about half the time does it replicate. That means a huge number of

00:06:00.440 published psychological studies are just sort of noise. They seem to be a signal, but they're

00:06:06.540 really noise. And what that means is that these entire subfields of psychology are sort of built

00:06:12.900 on sand, and psychologists have realized they have a major problem on their hands if their field is

00:06:17.780 going to be credible. So, and as you said, the thing that's appealing about this stuff is that

00:06:22.220 oftentimes the solutions that these studies come out with are easy, right? So school districts,

00:06:27.640 corporations, they're like, well, we got this problem on an institutional level. Instead of

00:06:31.960 having to really think hard about this stuff and make some hard changes, well, we can just

00:06:35.920 implement these little nudges, and it will fix it. And you're saying, well, no, it could help,

00:06:41.640 but it's not going to, it's not a panacea. And so let's talk about some of these popular

00:06:46.620 psychological findings that you put under the microscope that we've tried to institutionalize.

00:06:51.240 And you start off with, if you're a kid who grew up in the 80s or 90s, you're probably

00:06:55.520 familiar with this. It's the self-esteem movement. And I think I want to start off here

00:06:59.860 because I think it sort of sets the pattern of these quick fixes that we've seen in the

00:07:04.880 past 20 years. So what was the psychological premise behind the self-esteem movement in

00:07:11.580 the 80s and 90s?

00:07:13.520 Yeah, this very colorful California state legislator named John Baskin-Sellos, who was like,

00:07:19.880 just a real hippie. He sort of floated from idea to idea. Interesting guy. People should

00:07:24.240 Google him. He found this small body of theorizing and research suggesting that if people have low

00:07:30.540 self-esteem, all sorts of negative stuff ensues. It can make them criminals. It could make them do

00:07:35.900 worse in school. He actually lobbied the governor of California to set up a California self-esteem

00:07:41.420 commission. I forget the budget. I want to say they had like $300,000 a year. They hired people.

00:07:47.520 They convinced themselves and most of the country and some of the rest of the world that one of the

00:07:52.840 most important things you can give someone is self-esteem because there are these studies

00:07:56.520 showing that people who had higher self-esteem had better life outcomes. And I was exposed to

00:08:02.560 this too. I have a vivid memory from like kindergarten or first grade of doing a self-esteem

00:08:06.600 exercise, but it just became a craze. Everyone became convinced that self-esteem was the key

00:08:12.420 to fixing society in many ways. I mean, to the point of people saying, well, if someone commits murder,

00:08:18.420 it's because they don't have high self-esteem and people believe this stuff.

00:08:23.440 And then when did the research start coming out saying, nah, there really isn't. That's bogus.

00:08:28.600 So around the turn of the century, there was this sort of ambitious effort to really review the

00:08:33.220 research in a careful way. So technically that's when this big paper was published led by a guy named

00:08:39.800 Baumeister, social psychologist. If you look closely at the research that was published along the way,

00:08:45.180 there was never good proof of this stuff. And this is what often happens is like a body of research

00:08:49.300 will build up that people don't look into closely enough. But then when you sort of aggregate it and

00:08:53.840 look at it carefully, you realize a lot of the studies were flawed. And in this case, there was

00:08:58.700 never really a reason to think that boosting people's self-esteem, if we can even do that easily,

00:09:03.420 which we don't think we can, or there's no way to, would lead to good outcomes. It's more

00:09:07.080 complicated than that. Like for example, it might be that kids who do better in school,

00:09:11.240 their self-esteem goes up as a result. So it's not their self-esteem causing good grades. It's

00:09:16.680 good grades causing self-esteem. That was the sort of like complexity in the literature that people

00:09:21.680 sort of ignored a lot of the time. Yeah. There was one thing too, like people who murder or commit

00:09:26.680 crimes often have high self-esteem. They think they can get away with this. So they just, they just

00:09:30.800 don't, the rules don't apply to them. I would never try to murder something because I know I would

00:09:34.460 be caught right away. I don't have high self-esteem. Right. Oh, I thought it was interesting too.

00:09:37.640 You delve into how, like there was like an official report done and there was actually,

00:09:41.880 they had this one like legitimate guy, I think it was from Stanford. And he was saying, yeah,

00:09:46.260 there's something there, but it's not as strong as we think it is. But when they talked about it

00:09:51.240 publicly, this California representative, like they just buried that stuff and they just focused on

00:09:55.980 the positive results and buried the negative results. Yeah. This guy named Will Storr, a British

00:10:01.520 journalist, did some amazing journalism on this and I sort of stole it from him. But yeah,

00:10:05.620 this guy named Neil Smelsner, who Smelsner maybe was a sociologist at one of the UC systems. And

00:10:12.020 there was a meeting in a motel room South of San Francisco, where he was going to tell all the fans

00:10:17.900 of self-esteem who'd been pushing this idea, whether or not it was justified. And what he told them in

00:10:22.800 that room was, no, it's not, you guys are overhyping this, but they selectively cropped his quotes

00:10:27.660 to quote this, this preeminent scientist as saying, yep, this is very exciting. And that really

00:10:33.980 added legs to the whole self-esteem movement. And it was a really good example of how, like,

00:10:38.120 I think lay people like us view science as this sort of pure heavenly process where it's just about

00:10:44.960 the data. It's just about the evidence, but science isn't done by robots. It's done by humans and

00:10:49.680 humans have their own agendas and incentives that can nudge them away from the truth.

00:10:54.320 And I love to, you do this sort of like philosophical genealogy of the self-esteem movement

00:10:58.300 to show people like why it was so appealing to Americans. Can you talk, walk us through some of

00:11:04.380 that? Like, why was the self-esteem things like, why did we like, yes, that's the thing that's going

00:11:08.440 to solve all of our problems here? Yeah. There's something uniquely American about the idea that if

00:11:13.580 you can just sort of change your outlook on life, it'll fix everything. You know, this, this goes back

00:11:19.200 centuries probably, but I trace it from a late 19th century movement called new thought,

00:11:24.260 which was sort of this like transcendental, you know, they would have been hippies in the 1960s.

00:11:29.480 They thought that you could use your mind to sort of control matter. And it just evolved and wound

00:11:35.320 through the 20th century. It ended up with the secret. That's an Australian woman who Oprah

00:11:39.400 promoted. She basically thinks like, if you visualize yourself having a new car, you can get a new car. 0.97

00:11:45.780 So self-esteem is like a little bit more scientific than that, but it's the same idea that all you have

00:11:49.700 to do is change your mindset and amazing things will happen. Oh, and the other big,

00:11:54.260 book there is the power of positive thinking, which I think is still selling hugely today.

00:11:59.000 That's a mid-century book that says the same thing. Just change your outlook,

00:12:02.580 think in a more positive way and riches will fall into your lap.

00:12:06.280 No, the self-esteem stuff still going on. It was funny. I was actually, I was driving my kids to

00:12:10.120 school today and on the way I was like, Hey, what are you guys doing today? My son, he's in fourth

00:12:14.200 grade. He's like, Oh, we got this like assembly thing. It's all this positive talk. They had this

00:12:19.500 chant these things. You are you and you are great. And he's like, it's so dumb.

00:12:22.500 Spoken like the true son of a podcast. It's so dumb. But yeah, it's still going on. So I mean, 1.00

00:12:28.840 that's what's crazy about this is this one guy, this crazy California state rep, like he ended up

00:12:34.540 shaping like curriculum for an entire generation of Americans. Like you and I both got the self-esteem

00:12:40.240 treatment because of this one guy. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, and I got to say like,

00:12:45.700 we don't need to go down this road, but if you look at some of the sort of interventions and ideas

00:12:49.300 that are currently percolating in schools that are newer, it's sort of the same thing where if

00:12:53.380 you're like, where did this come from? You can trace it back to like one random pamphlet someone

00:12:58.140 wrote in 2000 and no one, I don't know why schools are such a site of like social engineering and

00:13:05.480 experimentation, but it does worry me when people are like using these interventions on kids that are

00:13:10.060 just sort of unproven. Not that it'll do any harm. Like it's not going to hurt your kid to chant.

00:13:14.460 I am great or whatever, but you know, you'd think we'd be a bit more science-y about it.

00:13:18.560 Yeah. I mean, I get it. Cause I mean, I think the thing you, the point you make in the book is that

00:13:22.120 organizations, institutions, there's these big problems and they want to solve them. And this

00:13:27.540 is like an easy, like it's, Oh, well, if I can just, we do, we chant, you are great. Then that

00:13:31.400 might help, but that's not going to help. Yeah. I mean, like, so I co-host a podcast too. And let's

00:13:37.160 say we wanted to, me and Katie, my co-host wanted to get more advertisers. We would look on the

00:13:42.300 internet and we'd find whoever seems to be best at drumming up ad dollars, but we wouldn't really

00:13:47.820 have the expertise to know who to pick. So it's the same thing. If you're a school and you have

00:13:52.420 problems and you want to increase kids attendance or self-esteem or whatever else, you probably don't

00:13:57.180 have the training to make an educated decision about which consulting firm to bring in or which

00:14:01.660 speaker to bring in. You just sort of, uh, you go by your gut, but people's guts are often wrong.

00:14:06.220 All right. So this, yeah, the self-esteem movement sort of lays the groundwork for quick fixes that we see

00:14:10.580 later on. So it's like the positive findings are amplified. The, the negative findings are

00:14:15.500 swept under the rug. There's an outcome that someone wants and they'll just make sure the

00:14:19.680 evidence fits that outcome. But then later on, once you put it under the microscope, it's like,

00:14:23.400 well, that's completely, we, we, we messed up. So let's talk about one research that got a lot of

00:14:28.640 hype. I'm going to say about eight years ago, it was this idea of power posing for those who aren't

00:14:33.560 familiar with this idea. What is power posing and like, what's the legit psychological premise behind

00:14:38.520 the idea? Yeah. Power posing is the idea that if you adopt an expansive pose, so, I mean, if you're

00:14:44.520 listening to this now and you're not driving, you could literally stand up, put your hands on your

00:14:47.620 hip and on your hips in that sort of wonder woman stance. And, uh, the theory, and this was based on

00:14:53.400 one study of, uh, I think Harvard or Columbia students was that this, this increases your sense

00:14:57.780 of power and this will make you a better negotiator. It'll make you do better in workplace and maybe

00:15:02.720 school situations. Harvard psychologist named Amy Cuddy, who was one of the coauthors on the first

00:15:07.960 paper, took this idea and ran with it and created what I think is still one of the most watched Ted

00:15:13.000 talks of all time. So what's the state of power posing today? I'm so like, it, it was a big thing.

00:15:18.300 I remember, I think we've even like, we've referenced that stuff on our website, you know,

00:15:22.100 take a big space, like lift your hands up in the air. Testosterone is supposed to like flow through 0.75

00:15:26.260 your body and like cortisol is supposed to go down. What's the state of power posing today?

00:15:31.060 From where I sit, it's, it's basically been debunked. I think there's a little bit of evidence that it

00:15:36.060 might, it might actually make you feel a little bit more powerful, but there's other evidence

00:15:40.420 suggesting that if you do power posing, knowing what power posing is, that takes away the effect.

00:15:47.180 It's this weird placebo thing. So there, there is no harm in power posing. If you think it's helpful,

00:15:53.180 my gripe is not that these ideas are worthless because you know, maybe power posing will help

00:15:58.660 someone here or there. My gripe is Amy Cuddy being on the Ted talk stage saying power posing for a 0.95

00:16:03.200 minute rewires your brain to make you more assertive, which to me was like a very overhyped

00:16:08.300 claim from, uh, from the research she'd done at that point. All right. So power pose, if you want

00:16:12.760 to, it's not going to hurt, but like, don't, I think the idea is like, don't make this like an

00:16:16.520 institutional thing. Like don't tell school kids or people at a corporation, like you have to power

00:16:21.200 pose before you do a sales deal. Don't, don't like a power pose in lieu of preparing for an

00:16:27.580 interview. You should probably prepare also. Right. Well, so something you mentioned this,

00:16:30.920 the reason why power posing so big was the phenomenon that was big, huge on Ted, the most

00:16:35.260 downloaded video. And from your point of view and your research into this, like what role has Ted

00:16:41.340 and I would call it the self-improvement business organizational complex, industrial complex.

00:16:48.740 I mean, what role does that stuff play in the psychological studies? Like are, has there been

00:16:53.320 studies on whether or not like psychological researchers are incentivized to reach bold counterintuitive

00:17:00.780 claims just so they can get on Ted or publish a, an airport book?

00:17:05.220 You know, this is very unscientific of me. There is not specific research on that, but it seems so

00:17:12.160 obviously true. If you watch how science works and you watch the way universities send out press releases,

00:17:17.520 I think it's undeniably the case that there's a difference between being a social psychologist in

00:17:23.660 2021 versus 1961 in terms of like what the potential fruits of your research are in terms of like public

00:17:31.120 acclaim and money and book deals. And just by dint of human nature, if over-claiming is rewarded,

00:17:38.540 people will over-claim. And there's been some really good stuff written by like a guy named Daniel

00:17:44.220 Dresner, another guy named Anand Giridharadas. They've done good stuff on what they call the ideas

00:17:48.820 industry and, and the nature of Ted talks. But like the point of things like a Ted talk is to give

00:17:55.300 wealthy people and people who aspire to be wealthy, this, this window into the world of experts who can

00:18:01.460 really help them hack and improve their own lives and become more prosperous as a result.

00:18:06.560 We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:18:11.460 And now back to the show, right? And so, yeah, I can see there might be some psychologists out there.

00:18:16.420 Well, I can get that idea. I can get on Ted and then I can get on the, the, the public speaking

00:18:21.340 junket and I'm done.

00:18:23.340 Yeah. And I feel, look, it, academia is a rough place to be right now. Like psychologists,

00:18:27.920 I don't think are particularly well-funded. A lot of them have to be adjunct professors forever.

00:18:32.280 I would not want to be a 25 year old young academic. So that's why some of this stuff

00:18:36.220 brings some temptation with it, but I, you know, it does harm science in the long run.

00:18:40.780 Have, has like, have psychologists thought about this? Like, are they trying to implement

00:18:44.240 things to correct that? I mean, are they aware of it and are they doing anything as a, as a profession?

00:18:50.600 Yeah. One of the really interesting innovations has just been blogging basically. I mean,

00:18:55.500 it's funny, like I'd say around 2012. So the old norm in psychology and a lot of research science is

00:19:01.100 like, I think this paper is nonsense. So I'm going to write a letter to the editor of the journal and

00:19:06.460 I hope they publish it. And maybe the author of the paper is powerful and ask the editor not to run

00:19:11.400 the letter because they think it's unfair with blogging and social media. You can just,

00:19:15.920 you can publish your own thing. You can say, I think the study is bad. Here's why. And that's

00:19:19.540 actually happened a few times. So that that's just like an informal advance in the way science

00:19:24.760 has done that I think has been really helpful. There's a lot of stuff that isn't peer reviewed,

00:19:27.940 but which is still good and fair critique. Psychologists have also just sort of changed the

00:19:33.340 way they run studies and implemented some reforms that I think are making the science a little bit

00:19:38.580 better. And I think particularly 10 years from now, it'll be a much more credible science with

00:19:42.880 a higher replication rate, but the best psychologists definitely know what the problems are. And I think

00:19:48.240 I've started to turn the ship around a little bit. All right. So another psychological, call it a fad

00:19:53.480 that's happened in the past 20 years that you discussed in your book is positive psychology.

00:19:58.600 I say in the past 20 years, 30 years, it's become bigger and bigger and bigger. We've had people,

00:20:03.100 positive psychologists on the podcast before we've written about positive psychology on the website,

00:20:06.860 but for those who aren't familiar, like what is the goal of positive psychology and how does it

00:20:10.960 differ from the goals of traditional psychology? Yeah, this is one of the really interesting stories

00:20:17.580 out of research psychology. And I recommend Barbara Ehrenreich's book, Bright Sided is sort of a

00:20:23.000 history of, or a critique of positive thinking in general that also talks about positive psychology.

00:20:28.500 Okay. There's a legendary psychologist named Martin Seligman. He goes by Marty,

00:20:32.860 University of Pennsylvania. Early in his career, he did these like really dark

00:20:36.460 experiments about learned helplessness. So if you shock a dog in its cage long enough,

00:20:42.020 it will basically give up trying to resist the shocks or trying to escape the shocks.

00:20:46.520 There's just this weird response where if you like sort of harm or traumatize a creature enough,

00:20:51.560 it stops, it's self-preservation instinct gives out. And that's an important concept,

00:20:56.900 learned helplessness. Later in his career, he advocated for psychology to turn away from this

00:21:03.720 negative stuff, from studying why people are broken and turn toward helping people who are

00:21:08.560 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,

00:21:45.480 right?

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.

00:25:57.200 Spending it on this is a baffling decision.

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 0.67

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

00:34:14.140 slash grit.

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

00:34:56.920 might be a useful thing.

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

00:36:48.560 they're done with your book?

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.

00:39:33.820 Thank you so much for having me.

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

00:39:46.940 and we delve deeper in this topic.

00:39:55.640 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at

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The Art of Manliness - April 05, 2021

Social Psychology Won't Save Us

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