One of the books I'm reading now is Jesse Singal's The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Fix Our Social Ills. It's a survey of ideas from the social sciences that have gone viral on the common assumption that they're more accurate and useful than they actually wind up being. Having been a psych major in college before switching to English, and having read a good deal of the literature both good and bad, I can see the temptation to find magic bullets in psychology.
Singal has chapters on the self-esteem movement--which was kicked into high gear by a very weird California legislator--and the late 20th century panic over delinquent underclass youth being "superpredators."
There's also the Implicit Association Test, a test intended to help the user pinpoint their level of (usually racial) bias. The idea that unadmitted racial prejudice has a negative effect isn't crazy and is in fact fairly logical. The test itself, though, has huge problems.
Implicit bias has enjoyed blockbuster success because there is a simple test that anyone can take to measure one's own level of this affliction: the implicit association test, or IAT. If you've been in a diversity training anytime in the last few years, it's likely you've come across this tool, which is promoted by Harvard University and a veritable army of well-credentialed social psychologists who study bias and discrimination. You can go to Harvard's Project Implicit website at implicit.harvard.edu to take an IAT yourself, and if you do you'll see that the setup is fairly simple. First, you're instructed to hit i when you see a "good" term like "pleasant", or to hit e when you see a "bad" one like "tragedy." Then hit i when you see a black face, and hit e when you see a white one. Easy enough, but soon things get more complex. Hit i when you see a good word or an image of a black person, and e when you see a bad word of an image of a white person. Then the categories flip to black/bad and white/good. As you peck away at the keyboard, the computer measures your reaction times, which it plugs into an algorithm. That algorithm, in turn, generates your score.
When I first read this description I mistakenly thought that it primed the test-taker to associate black faces with negative words. It apparently doesn't, or at least not exclusively. But there are enough moving parts to the test to make it hard to read. In practice it's not obvious that it measures anything at all.
Which is often the case.
2 comments:
I'm sure you've noticed as we have done that over the years any number of pop psychology crazes have come and gone without anything like the fanfare they originally engendered. Back in the 60s and 70s the Human Potential Movement became popular enough that large numbers of people attended training seminars that were intended to train them to expand their consciousness. I remember the est training in particular because my friend Inger, having spent a weekend at one in Montreal in 1971, described it as torturous mind control. She never went back.
As well as reading your review of Singal's book I looked up its summary on Goodreads where I learned he discusses a number of remedies that have been proposed recently and in the past. One reader commented that 'ultimately there are very few easy paths in life and when new theories and trends profess something that sounds too good to be true, they usually are.' That seemed like a pretty fair assesment.
Jer told me he'd heard about the Implicit Association Test a year or so ago and had taken the test at the time - well, part of it. Since the instructions state one should press either the e or i key as quickly as possible and if you take too long the result won't be registered he thought that anyone not familar with a keyboard or someone who was nervous about being under pressure would make mistakes. He didn't finish it once it got to be like whack-a-mole. He described it to me as being like the Instructions to the Class John Cleese did in The Meaning of Life.
The book does sound like a necessary antidote to this decade's madness. Businesses and governments fostering programs for individual people to change themselves rather than undertaking serious efforts to change the system will always end in failure.
It's interesting to hear you talk about Inger attending the EST training. It was probably smart of her to tap out after one. One reason I say it's interesting is that today I just read this story on the experiences Aldous Huxley and William S. Burroughs had with Scientology, which Hubbard was selling as a personal development tool before he turned it into a religion. Burroughs got on after the transition was underway and was quite taken with it for a while.
Our media is strangely bipolar. Every day you read new systems and new technologies being hyped as something that's going to everyone's life for the better. About as often are these mundane threats that are blown up into an apocalypse. You can probably think of some recent examples.
Yeah, the IAT does sound like a not-so-fun video game. Probably a lot of people give up on it before finishing the teste, although I couldn't give you a number. That scene from Meaning of Life is quite hilarious, which makes me a little embarrassed I had forgotten it.
Definitely beware of large-scale attempts to rewrite human nature. Human nature happens to be one of the few luxuries everyone can afford, so not surprisingly some want to take it away.
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