The Quick Fix

Life hacks. Self-improvement. Quintessential American traits. Makes for good clickbait: Transform your life through this one simple trick!

 

Also, good fodder for TED talks. In the early days, some of these might have featured substance over showmanship. I no longer watch them. Hyped-up chaff has become dominant; thin on substance and thick on sales.

 

Jesse Singal takes on several of these hyped topics in his new book The Quick Fix, appropriately subtitled “Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills”. His book is complementary to Stuart Ritchie’s Science Fictions (here’s my post on it) which focuses more on the statistics. While Singal also points out the statistical problems, he focuses instead on why we’re easily drawn into such fads and the history behind their meteoric rise. Topics include the self-esteem movement, super-predators, and power posing, among others. The one that’s most related to education, and we’re still in its grip, is Grit – the topic of today’s blog post.

 

I was excited about grit when it burst onto the stage, championed by Angela Duckworth, who has an interesting backstory. I viewed her TED talk, and even before I read her book, I had started to read the primary literature and felt positively disposed towards the idea. But over the years as I’ve followed the primary literature, I’m much less sanguine the effectiveness about so-called grit interventions, and even its usefulness as a construct. For example, Conscientiousness (from the OCEAN big-five personality traits) seems to correlate better to some measures of student “success”, but there’s still much to quibble about even from the larger meta-studies.

 

Singal opens his chapter on grit with the following: “Grit is everywhere. By the time you read this, it will have been a golden child of the world of education for well over a decade. It’s a sexy, appealing idea: grit predicts success, grit can be measured, and grit can be improved.” Given my own prior reading of the primary literature, I didn’t learn much that was new from Singal’s take, although I did appreciate his historical narrative and the personalities involved – something one doesn’t quite get from reading the primary literature.

 

Grit is appealing to me as an instructor. I teach chemistry. It’s hard. Students both complain and acknowledge this. Don’t expect to breeze through the class. You have to persevere and put in the hard work. Even if you do, you might not be successful. But if you don’t, you’re unlikely to do well unless you’re some sort of super-genius. Now I’ve had students breeze through first-semester G-Chem if they’ve had a strong AP Chem or Honors Chem class in high school. But that’s because much of the material is a repeat for them. Second-semester G-Chem is a little harder, but if the students have seen the material before, they still do well – but they actually have to put in some work. Not a single student has told me that P-Chem was easy in my twenty years of teaching it. I suspect every single one of those who got A’s (and there aren’t many) will say they spent many hours studying and working on the problem sets. So would those who got B’s and C’s, for that matter.

 

The problem with Duckworth’s book (Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance), according to Singal, is that the vignettes are happy stories of the winners: “… we don’t really hear anything about hardworking, gritty, resilient people who don’t get as far as they would like to, or who fail spectacularly; the losers are nowhere to be seen.” It’s what I see in P-Chem. Perseverance may be necessary. But it isn’t sufficient. Whether or not one is ultimately seen as “successful” depends on a whole range of other factors, some of which are structural, some of which are not under one’s control (be it student or instructor). Grit can get you out of the hole in some circumstances, but not others.

 

A common thread on the psychology fads that Singal writes about, is that there is an element of truth in all of them. That’s why they resonate. That’s why one can make up a plausible explanation of why they work, at least in some cases (usually in simplified “laboratory” conditions removed from the real world). The most clickbait-y ones are low-hanging fruit. Simple life hacks. But they over-promise. A small life hack will likely not lead to a large transformation, at least in most cases. Yes, there will be some outliers, and the positive outliers make great stories. For the average person, a simple optimization could lead to a small improvement. And after you’ve done the small optimizations, you hit a dead end. Unless you’re willing to “disrupt” and make large changes. And there’s always someone willing to sell you something to make that transition easier – technology in education is one I’ve been thinking about lately.

 

The truth is that many things are outside our control. Larger structures and systems are not easy to change. When you run up against them, you feel stuck. Like you’re banging your head against the wall. All your passion and perseverance may lead to nought, not to mention your ingenuity, creativity, and whatever other positive trait is celebrated as being the savior. The quick fix doesn’t get you very far. Worse, if you are one of the haves in society who likes the idea of grit, you might see the have-nots as lazy and not persevering enough. That’s the dark side of meritocracy.

 

Singal closes his book discussing priming and nudging – also popular fads in education today. If you’re interested in these, and more, I recommend his very readable book, with an extensive index for those who want to delve into the primary literature. His take on finishing the book in the midst of a pandemic are interesting, and I’ll quote him in closing.

 

When the virus arrived in the United States, Americans’ choices were, as always, defined by big, complicated structures of power and wealth. Some Americans in the pandemic’s epicenters were forced to choose between financial ruin and continuing to work low-wage jobs in which they faced infection, while others were able to make a fairly seamless shift to working remotely. It would be impossible to overstate the significance of these divergences: no, having money didn’t render anyone immune from the virus, but overall one’s chance of riding this pandemic out safely and in relative comfort had everything to do with the resources at one’s disposal, which, as usual, meant that shocking racial disparities soon emerged. Structural forces went a long way toward dictating who lived, who died, who struggled, and who was relatively unaffected. They always do.