They preclude genuine solutions---only evaluate replicable scientific claims

WHAT I SOON REALIZED is that our society’s fascination with psychology has a dark side: many half-baked ideas—ideas that may not be 100 percent bunk but which are severely overhyped—are being enthusiastically spread, despite a lack of hard evidence in their favor. The IAT is one example, but there are numerous others. The popularity of these ideas, as well as the breathless manner in which they are marketed by TED Talks and university press offices and journalists and podcasts, is not harmless. It misallocates resources to overclaiming researchers when others are experiencing a funding crunch, and it degrades the institution of psychology by blurring the line between behavioral science and behavioral pseudoscience.

Perhaps most important, these ideas are frequently being adopted by schools, corporations, and nonprofits eager to embrace the Next Big Thing to come out of the labs and lecture halls of Harvard or the University of Pennsylvania. As the decision-makers who work in these institutions have grown more fluent in science and cognizant of the need to look to behavioral scientists for guidance (a good thing), they’ve also become more susceptible to half-baked behavioral science (a bad thing). And this explosion of interest in psychological science has occurred at a time when, if anything, people should be more cautious about embracing new and exciting psychological claims. As we’ll see, many findings in psychology—including those featured in introductory textbooks—are failing to replicate, meaning that when researchers attempt to re-create them with new experiments, they are coming up short. This so-called replication crisis has cast a giant shadow over the entire field of psychology, and the best available evidence suggests that a sizable chunk of published psychological findings may be false (though the size of that chunk is a source of heated debate). Many psychologists themselves may be unwittingly helping to promote half-baked science that seems to be built upon a solid foundation of published research. In all likelihood, we’ll look back wincingly at some of the popular theories being taught and developed today and, all too often, transformed into sleek interventions that promise to alleviate our ills.*

THIS BOOK IS AN ATTEMPT to explain the allure of fad psychology, why that allure is so strong, and how both individuals and institutions can do a better job of resisting it. It is important to improve our understanding of how behavioral scientific information circulates in the public realm, because only sound knowledge will earn us the improvements we wish for. Just as we can’t enact successful environmental and energy policies while denying global warming, and we can’t improve global public health without taking a stand against anti-vaccination myths, we will never solve the pressing social issues of the day—racism and inequality and the education gaps and so many others—while relying on claims about human behavior and how to change it that are half-true at best.

The spread of half-baked behavioral science can’t be explained apart from the present state of American political and intellectual life. The country has suffered from decades of rising inequality paired with interminable political dysfunction, and as institution after institution has seen its legitimacy crumble, there’s been an ever-intensifying focus on the individual. We’re living in what the Princeton historian Daniel Rodgers calls an age of fracture, the title of his invaluable 2011 book. “Conceptions of human nature that in the post–World War II era had been thick with context, social circumstance, institutions, and history gave way to conceptions of human nature that stressed choice, agency, performance, and desire,” he explains. “Strong metaphors of society were supplanted by weaker ones. Imagined collectivities shrank; notions of structure and power thinned out.”3 In this dispensation, we are taken to be discrete individuals floating around in markets, increasingly responsible for our own well-being and increasingly cut off from the big groups and institutions and shared ideas that gave American life so much of its feeling and texture and meaning in the past. (Of course, many Americans, by dint of their race or gender or religion or sexual orientation, would not want to return to that past.)

Americans are also living with the consequences of what the political scientist Jacob Hacker has termed “the great risk shift”: as the nation’s social safety net has frayed and ever more risk has been off-loaded from companies and the government onto overburdened Americans, economic insecurity has crept higher and higher up the income and wealth ladders. This only exacerbates the sense that everyone must fiercely defend their gains and stand vigilant against the possibility of sliding down into a less advantaged position. The combination of the age of fracture with the great risk shift likely affects what sort of behavioral science wins out in the marketplace of ideas: it likely shifts the focus toward improving and optimizing and repairing individuals rather than understanding how they are influenced by big, roiling forces largely beyond their control.

Within psychology, particularly social psychology, these tendencies have given rise to what I call Primeworld,4 a worldview fixated on the idea that people’s behavior is largely driven—and can be altered—by subtle forces. Central to Primeworld is, well, “primes,” the unconscious influences that, according to some psychologists, affect our behavior in surprisingly powerful ways: holding a warm drink makes people act more warmly toward others, claims one finding, and being exposed to stimuli connected to the elderly makes people walk slower, claims another. The proponents of Primeworld suggest we can work toward “fixing” individuals by helping them to understand the influence of primes and biases. Their accounts have three main characteristics: big, imposing social structures and systems are invisible, unimportant, or improved fairly easily; primes and biases have an outsize influence on societal outcomes; and these primes and biases can be fixed, to tremendously salubrious effect, thanks to the interventions offered by wise behavioral scientists.

This worldview treats complicated problems as though they can be significantly ameliorated or solved with quick fixes: with cute, cost-effective interventions by psychologists. Over and over, throughout this book, we will see situations in which otherwise brilliant researchers examining some of the most complicated problems known to humankind have adopted the tenets of Primeworld. Whereas a social scientist taking a broader view might look at a problem like “the education gap” between white and black students and explain that it has many complicated causes, ranging from segregated schools to early-life experiences to the impact of tutoring, Primeworld adherents will take a different tack. They will stress that a great deal of progress can be made by optimizing the individual participants in the system, whether students (perhaps via increasing their “grit,” meaning their ability to stick with difficult problems tenaciously) or teachers (perhaps via IAT-based trainings).

The point is not that Primeworlders deny that there’s a bigger world out there, beyond primes and biases; if you asked them, they would quickly acknowledge that yes, there is. The problem is that their work speaks for itself, advancing a set of very specific, very zoomed-in priorities. As a result of their evident excitement over exploring biases and primes and the potential to optimize individuals, almost everything else fades into the background, indistinct and all too easily ignored. But it is increasingly clear that Primeworld simply hasn’t delivered. Over and over, it has been shown that the interventions its members favor simply don’t warrant the hype they generate, and there’s strong reason to believe that they fail because they neglect to attend to deeper, more structural factors that are not easily remedied via psychological interventions.

As this book will show, this does not mean we should give up on applied behavioral science entirely. Psychology has produced some ideas—particularly certain so-called nudges and interventions targeting institutions rather than individuals—that have held up well under scrutiny, and is likely to produce more as methodological reforms take hold (which, as we will see, has already begun happening).

Still, there are good reasons to be wary of the styles of psychological research that have seized public attention in recent years. And yet we fall for quick-fix, half-baked behavioral science over and over again.