The Impact of Fad Psychology on Journalism

This is your book about psychological things, right? Explain your book. Yeah. It's the Quick Fix Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Social Ills. That's a good sign that I had to look at the book to remember what it's called. I was a science editor at New York Magazine. I wrote about psychology, basically. And every day we get press releases from Harvard, from Yale, from University of Pennsylvania that psychologists are figuring out amazing stuff about how to fix the world. How to fix racism, how to fix the educational system. And a lot of these, when I looked into them more, there's like nothing there. There's no actual result there. And people spend hundreds of millions of dollars on these ideas that don't really do anything. Have you ever taken the implicit association test with this? No. All right. Do you know implicit bias? Yes. Okay. So this is a test. You sit at a computer. It tells you how unconsciously racist you are. So anyone listening to this who's done a diversity training recently at work has probably heard of the implicit association test. Since 1998, leading psychologists are like, this test will measure your unconscious racism, racism you're not even aware of. And this leaks into the real world. It makes you do racist stuff. And we end up spending millions of dollars on it. Every school embraces it. Every company embraces it. Except whoops, there's nothing there. It doesn't actually measure anything. So I'm really interested in those instances where like the most, and maybe this is why I should drink with Alex Jones. We're the most important experts in the world tell us shit and it's just, it's not true. How much has to do with the spreading of this kind of information, how much of it has to do with clickbait? One of the things that's disturbed me over the last decade or so is that journalism, even journalism at its highest levels without naming any names, but like fabled institutions are resorting to clickbait. My friend Kurt Metzger said something about the New York Times once. He said, it's like a fat girls' Tumblr blog now. And I'm like, that is such a fucked up thing to say. But what he was saying was that there's stories that are written in there that are, they're not what you associate with the New York Times of old. I still read the New York Times. I still love it. Me too. I think it's great. People are always looking for flaws in any institution, right? Especially a fabled one in times of chaos like we are today. Part of us wants to see them collapse. Exactly. Yeah, people do. But I still think they're the best. And I think it's, there's something about having a reputation to uphold that does force people to the highest standards. But those standards are different. It's very difficult to find unbiased, objective news with a clean headline today. Because people aren't buying the newspaper like they were. It's mostly clicking things online. And there's a lot of these that have, they rely on subscription services. They rely on someone coming along and saying, you know what? I value your journalism so much, I'm going to give you some money. And then you have to justify the articles. There's ads on these articles in a lot of times. And you got to get people to click on them. So you have maybe a title to that article that's not totally accurate or bends the truth a little bit. Or it's a format story. Well, everyone gets more desperate because they just need to keep feeding the beast. I think the key difference is I would imagine, I never got to be a science writer or editor in 1990. But back then, journalism was healthy. And I bet you could be a writer. No, it's still hard work. But you publish three articles a week, four articles a week. When I was editing Science of Us, that was the behavioral science site at New York Magazine. I forget what it was. I think we had to publish 15 to 20 things a week. So when Harvard... It's a lot. Yeah, dude. When Harvard sends you a press release, we have this amazing new study. We're like, great, write it up. We don't call the researcher. We don't read it closely. Oftentimes we read the press release, but not the study itself. And it's sort of like the press releases often, they don't quite lie, but they leave out a lot of details. And so 2010 was sort of the peak when the stuff in my book in psychology, like the worst psychology was being published. 2010 was also when things got really, really clickbaity, I think. What happened in 2010 that the worst psychology got published? This is where it gets complicated, but like certain areas of research. So one of them is called social priming. And that's the idea that if I flash an American flag before your eyes for 300 milliseconds, you'll get way more patriotic. And it sounds like voodoo magic, but for a while people really believe these results. And the reason they believe them is because there's all these ways you can fuck up statistically and you publish stuff that appears to be true, but isn't false. So let's say I asked you off the bat, take the top psychology journals around. What percentage of the findings in them? Would you say could be replicated later on if you run it back? Oh, I have no idea. It's about a 50%. There's a coin flip chance that anything you read in the top psychology journals, some people think it's higher, some think it's lower. Have you ever read the stuff that Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay and Peter Bogosian put out? I've read some of their stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Where they published these sort of satirical scientific papers that actually got accepted. The dog rape. Dog rape. Yeah. Well, it had the most craves. See if you can find the title of their dog. Because it had to do with homosexuality. But meanwhile, they were getting lauded for these things. They were getting applauded for fat bodybuilding. They were joking around about how bad academia has gotten. And they made these farcical papers and some of them won awards. A lot of the problems they are concerned with, it's not just sort of like the wacky whatever, Marxist geography. It's like some of the top psychology papers in the country. It's tricky because I want people to trust experts. I want people to trust science. But a lot of scientists themselves don't know what they're doing. Yeah. That makes it complicated. A lot of scientists don't know what they're doing. How so? It's hard to explain this without getting into some statistics. I'm not good at statistics, but basically people realize that the statistical test people do to decide if something is significant. Meaning we're pretty sure Joe Rogan comes out with a pill to cure the common cold. We give 50 people that pill. We give 50 people a placebo. The people who take the pill do better. The cold goes away. At a certain threshold, you're like, this is a real result. This isn't just random statistical noise. And it turns out there's lots of ways to fool yourself into thinking the pill works when it doesn't. And that's basically what psychologists realized. That led them to understand that arguably most of what they publish is garbage basically. Do you know what a no-cebo is? Yeah. That's one of my favorite stories was a guy who was involved in a test where they were doing a study or they gave him ... They gave one group an SSRI and the other group they gave a placebo. This guy for whatever reason took a shitload of pills and ran to the hospital with an elevated pulse, high blood pressure, holding this pill bottle, freaking out, thinking he's dying, telling them that he fucked up and he took the whole bottle of pills and he's going to die. They contact the physician. The physician comes down and informs him that he was a part of the control group and he had taken a placebo. Within minutes, his heart rate drops down to normal. His blood pressure drops down to normal and he's fine. So this guy who was convinced he was going to die had just completely done into himself. He had decided that he had taken some sort of fucking poison or something, some horrible medication and far exceeding the dose you're supposed to take. Catch new episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience for free only on Spotify. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips easily, seamlessly switch between video and audio experience. 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