 So I want to start by offering you a free no-tech life hack, and all it requires of you is this, that you change your posture for two minutes. Do you remember the power pose craze from about a decade ago? In the second most popular TED Talk ever, psychologist Amy Cuddy told over 60 million viewers that they can change their life outcomes by simply changing their body language. Tiny tweaks can lead to big changes. This is two minutes, two minutes, two minutes, two minutes. Cuddy sparked a movement supposedly rooted in science around the idea that changing your posture can change everything around you. By striking power poses in tough situations, women could even gain equality in corporate boardrooms. The problem is, none of it was true, says science writer Jesse Single, even according to Cuddy's own research. One of Cuddy's two co-authors, a woman named Dana Carney, who's at UC Berkeley, she posted a thing to her faculty website saying, I think we made some methodological errors in this study. I think the effect is totally false. So even one of the people who discovered power posing has come out and said, there's nothing there. Single is the author of The Quick Fix, Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills, which looks at how academics and policymakers routinely oversell their pet projects as the one easy way to address some major social problem. The goal of this book is to explain to people why we keep falling for the ideas that psychologists sell us about the ways they're going to help fix society. And these ideas have had a really good time in the 21st century. They've gone viral, TED Talk culture is doing quite well. Over and over and over, I've noticed that these ideas will burst onto the scene. They'll offer some incredible new way to fight racism or to improve education or to improve gender equity in the workplace. There's a rush of attention, often a rush of research dollars. Everyone gets really into them. There's the NPR New York Times coverage. And then a few years later, more research comes out. We realized the idea was barely true, if that and it ends up having wasted a lot of time. Single points to other fad ideas that have had long lasting impacts. The self-esteem movement, which sought to boost academic achievement by making students feel good about themselves regardless of performance, dominated public school curricula starting in the 1980s. This idea was championed by a powerful California legislator who believed that praising kids and even criminals would help them to overcome obstacles. And the problem is the claim that improving self-esteem can fix all these negative societal outcomes, which there is never really any evidence for. There's not a harm to like making people feel like they're loved or have worth. The harm is like partly opportunity cost. I think with a lot of these ideas, people really like get a little bit fixated on them at the expense of other more important things. So if you really think criminals are committing crimes as a result of low self-esteem, that might distract you from the actual things that contribute to high crime rates. Single says one of the most influential and pernicious quick fixes has to do with implicit bias, especially with regard to racism. He points to the Implicit Association Tester IAT, a free online quiz that supposedly shows how takers are unconsciously biased with regard to overweight people, gays, women, and especially blacks and other minorities. The test received glowing media attention from the likes of Malcolm Gladwell and Nicholas Kristof. It's routinely used in all sorts of diversity training programs and educational settings from K-12 through college. Yet there's at least two major problems with the IAT, says Single. You get very different tests on the IAT in a short period if you retake it. That's one problem. The other problem is validity, which is basically proof that the test is measuring something out in the real world. So the claim for a long time was that you get a high score on the black-white IAT that predicts you're going to discriminate against people. It doesn't seem to really, except in the tiniest way. I mean, it's statistically significant, but it's almost certainly not relevant to the real world. The best estimate we have is that your IAT scores explain about one percent of the variance in people's discriminatory behavior in lab settings, which is just a fancy way of saying that it predicts very little. One of the goals of the quick fix is to make people more aware of our willingness to believe that all our problems can be cured easily by focusing on one thing. Yeah, I think humans, just by dint of our brains, we're always going to be susceptible to less than rigorous monocosal accounts. So like power posing was like, well, we just got to make women feel more powerful. They never bothered to prove that that's really what's driving these discrepancies. I think these ideas like take these big, complicated, tangled problems and just zoom in on a little bit of it. And it would be nice if addressing that bit could address the whole thing, but there's often not a lot of evidence that's the case.