How Half-Baked Ideas Infiltrated Psychology
19th April 2021
If you’re the sort of person who buys and reads books about human behavior, then it is likely you have recently encountered an exciting, counterintuitive new psychological idea that seems as if it could help solve a pressing societal problem like educational inequality, race relations, or misogyny. Maybe you came across it in a TED Talk. Or, if not there, in an op-ed or blog post or book.
It is, after all, a golden age for popular behavioral science. As the University of Virginia law professor Gregory Mitchell, a keen critic and observer of the field, wrote in 2017, ‘With press releases from journals and universities feeding a content-hungry media, publishing houses looking for the next Gladwellian bestseller, governments embracing behavioral science, and courts increasingly open to evidence from social scientists, psychologists have more opportunities than ever to educate the public on what they have learned about why people behave as they do.’