The Quick Fix, Jesse Singal

Over the last 20 or 30 years, a number of interesting ideas have reared their heads and suggested that they may offer simple keys to dealing with a number of social ills. Though they may seem counterintuitive on first glance, they back up their bold claims with solid psychological research that proves the claims are true. The originators of the ideas become gurus, building impressive consulting empires that help get the ideas into workplaces, schools, public policy discussions and government or military branches. Their opinions are sought out via public speeches and presentations, sometimes even in areas outside the expertise that raised their profiles in the first place.

And then nothing changes.

Which, according to investigative journalist Jesse Singal, is more or less what we should have expected to happen if the data backing up the claims had been investigated properly. In The Quick Fix, he tells the story of some of these ideas, their initial acceptance without nearly enough questioning or critical evaluation and how others who come along later wind up doing that work in order to explain why what sounded too good to be true was. Among his targets are the rise of self-esteem educational emphasis in the 1990s, the "superpredator" scare from the same era threatening gangs of teens completely without moral codes beginning to roam the streets hunting for prey, "positive" psychology practices, implicit bias testing and some others.

In some cases, rational or common-sense ideas are simply stretched far beyond their legitimate boundaries by wishful thinking or institutional bias. The originators of "positive psychology" thought their discipline could benefit mentally healthy people by exploring ways they could stay healthy, just as physicians offer advice to their patients on maintaining their health and avoiding illness. From there they grew a discipline that promised mental health benefits, but those promises were backed by shaky and misinterpreted research. Since the ideas behind some of the program matched the institutional self-portrait of some organizations, including the United States military, those groups adopted the programs in order to help deal with the issues they faced, such as post-tramautic stress disorder. Their limitations finally became apparent when they didn't get anything like promised results.

In other cases, the human tendency to find what we want to find combined with some of the flaws of our current research culture -- the tendency to over-emphasize "new" results or to discard more nuanced findings in favor of unequivocal but less-supported ones -- and led researchers astray.

Although some of the psychological fads that Singal unmasks are ones that cut in directions he prefers, he simply follows the research data that he finds even when it works against them. Quick Fix gores oxen both left and right because the human tendency to look for simple, easy fixes to complicated problems that ask very little of us as individuals knows no political divide. His own leanings will show up when he suggests the kinds of policy fixes that he says would work, but a right-of-center person uncovering the same methodological flaws would suggest similarly complex solutions from his or her own point of view.

Singal's style in Quick Fix is straightforward but not dry and takes advantage of the occasional opportunity the subjects afford for some humor. In his closing passages on possible solutions to our love affair with fad psychology he notes the help made possible by "Bayesian analysis," which essentially says that if your data suggest a result is common but you know it isn't common in the real world where people live, it's time to re-analyze the data. He does go for the dry in sections such as that, but it's dry of the humor variety instead of style.

Non-fiction books are evaluated as much on their success at raising or answering the questions posed by their different theses as they are on style and Singal succeeds in pointing out just how easily fad psychology pervades society and muddies the waters for people seeking solutions for modern problems. A couple of the chapters seem to cover very similar ground and the book would improve by exchanging one of them for a different case study. Even so, The Quick Fix clearly succeeds in showing why our modern society's problems require solutions that can either be quick or they can fix things, but they almost certainly can't be both.