About the Book
With their viral TED talks, bestselling books, and counter-intuitive remedies for complicated problems, psychologists and other social scientists have become the reigning thinkers of our time. Grit and "power posing" promised to help overcome entrenched inequalities in schools and the workplace; the Army spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a positive psychology intervention geared at preventing PTSD in its combat soldiers; and the implicit association test swept the nation on the strength of the claim that it can reveal unconscious biases and reduce racism in police departments and human resources departments. But what if much of the science underlying these blockbuster ideas is dubious or fallacious? What if Americans' longstanding preference for simplistic self-help platitudes is exerting a pernicious influence on the way behavioral science is communicated and even funded, leading respected academics and the media astray? In The Quick Fix, Jesse Singal examines the most influential ideas of recent decades and the shaky science that supports them.
About the Author
Jesse Singal is a Brooklyn-based writer who is a contributing writer at New York Magazine, where he was formerly a senior editor and writer-at-large. He is the cohost of the podcast Blocked and Reported, and has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, and other outlets on subjects ranging from psychology's replication crisis to the strangest corners of internet culture to PTSD and youth gender dsyphoria. His first book, The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills, is out April 6, 2021.
