Review of The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills by Jesse Singal

BY TERENCE HINES

There is probably no other scientific discipline in which fads come and go so quickly, and with so much hype, as psychology. In his Quick Fix, Jesse Singal discusses eight different psychological ideas that have been promoted as quick fixes for different social problems. He refers to these as “halfbaked ideas—ideas that may not be 100 percent bunk but which are severely overhyped” (p. 6).

The first chapter concerns the self-esteem movement, which began in 1990 with a report from the State of California titled Toward a State of Esteem. The report argued that increasing a person’s self-esteem, especially for children and adolescents, would improve nearly everything from social behavior to academic performance. The questionable origins of this report have, to my knowledge, not been previously described. Due to pressure from a “very eccentric California politician” (p. 13) named John Vasconcellos, major findings that called into question the utility of increasing self-esteem were suppressed from the report. This, in turn, led to all sorts of dingbat programs for improving self-esteem. The chapter provides many illuminating examples, such as banning games with winners in elementary schools. 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.1 The cottage industry of self-esteem therapists is doing little to improve objective measures.

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. It generated a rush of legislation that meted out much harsher punishment for teenage criminals. The claim was that these teens were destined to become career criminals because of genetic faults, poor upbringing, or both. 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. The idea was advanced by some criminologists and picked up by politicians of both conservative and liberal persuasions. Prominent among the criminologists who advanced the superpredator idea was John Dilulio, “a careful academic in other respects” (p. 72). Singal notes that Dilulio did not put forth this idea in peer-reviewed publications, and thus the idea was not subject to the criticisms that it would have generated due to lack of evidence and sloppy conceptualization. In 2001 Dilulio “acknowledged… that he had simply been wrong” (p. 72) but rejected the idea that he was the cause of so many kids going to jail.

Remember how your mother would tell you to “sit up straight and have a good posture?” Well, 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. The original paper reported that assuming such a pose increased feelings of power and people’s willingness to take a financial risk. It even increased testosterone levels compared to what was defined as more submissive or passive poses. This led to the expected outbreak of self-help books, TED talks, and general hype. 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” (p. 82), although she has never formally had the paper retracted. The problem was a statistical manipulation (called p-hacking) that led to finding differences between the power and passive pose conditions where none existed.