The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills

There are plenty of pop culture self-help books out there purporting to have the new great thing from psychological research. Often a counterintuitive small change can have great impacts. Why weren't we doing this before? The usual answer is that it doesn't work for everyone. Often these "quick fixes" come from some small study that showed the positive result. In the worst cases these were just statistical flukes. The researcher may have been p-hacking and just cherry picking their best results. Or they may have picked a hypothesis to explain the data. In other cases, the results were legitimate. However, the research did not support the applications that have been advocated. Other times it is fairly legitimate work under a new name.

Quick fix explores some popular psychological fads. Most of them have some legitimacy, but not nearly as much as their supporters advocate. "Grit" is for the most part just conscientiousness reinvented. Racial bias studies often tell us that people are racially biased in racial bias studies. A lot of the anti-racism work out there basically supports an anti-racism industry. It does more to help make people feel good than to help with race relations. Self esteem coaching helps psychologists feel good about their pocketbooks. It may help people a little bit, but not as much as we would expect. Some work to counteract PTSD in the military is based on research done on children. Social priming is also overrated.

The message here is not that fad psychology is useless. There is generally small value. We must pay attention to the details and not spend too much effort on the "new big thing".