The Quick Fix

Introduction

There is probably no other scientific discipline in which fads come and go so quickly, and with so much hype, as psychology.

In Quick Fix, Jesse Singal discusses different psychological ideas that have been promoted as quick fixes for different social problems. He refers to these as “half-baked” ideas—ideas that may not be 100 percent bunk but which are severely overhyped” because the research has been often been sloppy, superficial, biased, and even deceptive.

My top 30 points

Self esteem

1. Singal begins with self-esteem, a trend America has taken to unimaginable extremes. It is now institutional practice to assure every child s/he is not merely unique but the best possible person that could be. Everyone gets a medal or ribbon. Everyone is a winner. Everyone is above average.
2. Self-esteem improvement programs do seem to make people score higher on subjective measures such as happiness, which is important. But they have little effect on more objective measures of behavior.

Super predators

3. The concept of the “superpredator” (Chapter 2), the (usually Black) teenager who ran wild killing, raping, and pillaging, became a popular stereotype in the 1990s.
4. The claim was that these teens were destined to become career criminals. Since birth rates were increasing, the fear was that there would be a dramatic increase in the coming years of such wilding teens, thus posing a severe threat to society. In 2001 Dilulio “acknowledged… that he had simply been wrong”.

Power posing

5. It was in 2010 that advice was reshaped into a sure-fire method of empowerment, especially for women, in the form of “power posing.” The idea was that if you sat up straight, leaned forward, sort of took possession of the space around you…all kinds of good things would happen. Amy Cuddy was the crusader. This led to the expected outbreak of self-help books, TED talks, and general hype.
6. The trouble was that none of it was true. In 2016 the lead author of the study, Dana Carney, posted on her UC-Berkeley webpage that “I do not believe that ‘power pose’ effects are real”.
7. The most revealing quote (p.86) is by a key researcher who admitted that the main results were not based on comparing power posers to neutral posers but from comparing neutral posers to negative (slouching) posers. This pretty much ends the debate for me.

Positive psychology

8. This emphasizes finding ways to make already psychologically healthy people happier and more satisfied with their lives rather than dwell on psychopathology. This is a laudable goal, but positive psychology has had major problems empirically verifying its interventions.
9. One of the founders of positive psychology is Martin Seligman. Seligman is famous for trying to apply the principles of positive psychology on a mass basis through various interventions. However, these interventions have proven to be of questionable effect.
10. Despite the questionable effectiveness of Seligman’s programs, in 2008 the US Army asked him to devise an intervention to deal with PTSD among soldiers. The research intervention was done in groups and, not surprisingly, didn’t have much effect on students. Promoting it as an effective treatment for adults who had suffered severe trauma was, to put it mildly, a stretch. Nonetheless, the Army gave Seligman’s group a $31 million contract. As expected, the program had little effect.
11. The Army program was approved and mandated by a single person, the then Army Chief of Staff, General George Casey. Casey had no experience evaluating psychological intervention programs. Singal cites this as an example of what he terms “unskilled intuition,” which is when a decision maker thinks they have the skills and knowledge to make a decision but do not.
12. This is a case of the Dunning Kruger Effect, a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain vastly overestimate their knowledge or competence relative to objective criteria or performance of their peers or people in general.

Grit

13. The concept of “grit,” (Chapter 5) pretty much the same as stick-to-it-iveness, is another spawn of positive psychology.
14. Grit was marketed to American schools by Angela Duckworth in her 2016 book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. The text mainly consisted of success stories of people with, you guessed it, real grit. But as Singal correctly notes, this was cherry picking. Reports of students who clearly had grit but didn’t succeed were largely left out.
15. Grit is said to be able to predict success in various situations better than older, well-established measures such as conscientiousness. For example, grit was said to make valuable predictions about whether West Point cadets would make it through a challenging seven-week training course. And so it did… But not really. Ninety-eight percent of cadets scoring high on this scale completed the course. But 95 percent of all cadets complete the course, so the grit scale didn’t really add much.
16. Similarly, since grit doesn’t correlate very highly with measures of student success, and there is little evidence that interventions can change grit.
17. As was the case with the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program to combat PTSD, there are much better and proven ways of improving student success, such as teaching best study habits and nurturing skills that require class attendance and time management.
18. Grit was just the fancy new kid on the block who got all the attention. A marketing ploy for grit was to claim that increasing grit would be helpful in decreasing the inequality between wealthy and poor children in school achievement. Grit was another attempt to avoid making the major changes in the American educational system that would be needed to really address social inequalities. It was just another failed, quick fix.

Implicit bias

19. In Chapter 6, Singal discusses the Implicit Attitude Test (IAT), commonly known as the “bias test,” arguably the most controversial topic in social psychology.
20. The test is said to measure unconscious bias by using a reaction time measure. Bias is found when “someone is quicker to connect positive concepts with white people and negative concepts with black people” (p. 186).
21. The test has become a mainstay of diversity training programs. The basic idea is to identify people who hold implicit biases and then train these biases out of them.
22. There are serious problems with this approach. The IAT is a test and, like any other test, must be Reliable. Reliability means that a test must give close to the same results on repeated testing. The IAT is not reliable. The correlations obtained “have ranged from r = .32 to r = .65” (p. 182). By the normal standards of psychology,” these figures put “the IAT well below the threshold of usefulness in real-world settings” (p. 181).
23. If a test is not reliable, it cannot be valid. That is, if the scores are bouncing around, they can’t be telling us anything about the stable trait the text is advertised as measuring.
24. A related problem exists: “it has never been clearly stated what it [the IAT] measures” (p. 186) but simply tautologically assumed that having a particular score on the IAT meant that the person had implicit bias “without that score implying a connection to real-world behavior” (p. 187).
25. The lack of validity of the IAT makes it highly problematic as a tool for changing behavior, although it has become an established tool in antiracism and diversity training.
26. Singal says that it would be better to recognize that the most serious problem facing minority groups is not implicit bias that may never express themselves in overt behavior but in the structure of a society that oppresses minorities.
27. None of this is to say that implicit bias doesn’t exist, an important point made by Singal. It does. The question is whether the IAT: (1) measures it; and (2) whether training programs based on the IAT have any real beneficial effects in mitigating it. The answer to both these questions appears to be “no.”

The replication crisis

28. This refers to the finding that many of the much-ballyhooed study results in social psychology do not replicate when other researchers repeat the experiments.
29. This happens due to mistakes made in the initial study. These include:
    • using multiple statistical tests and then reporting only those that seemed to confirm the initial hypothesis.
    • changing the study’s hypothesis after the fact to conform with the obtained results, among other issues.
    • calculating such that the p values were too low (and the level of significance was too high) meaning that rejecting the null hypothesis (and not rejecting the alternative hypothesis) was highly likely.

Why quick fixes are popular

30. Quick fixes are easy to understand and thus gain popularity, especially when their creators promote them through TED talks and public media. Unskilled intuition also plays a role. Quick fixes get other rewards—academic promotions, consulting gigs, book royalties, etc.