The Dangers of Junk Science: Non-Climate Version

Our man Rich has been johnny-on-the-spot regarding the junk science of climate change — or man-made global warming or whatever. This science has not been the only place for shenanigans of course. The largest area of junk science since alchemy has come from the broad amorphous field called the social sciences (so-called) including psychology, sociology and their related disciplines and it’s cousin biology. Now I’m no hater because there is much good and useful research from those disciplines, but there are just as many junk theories coming from those disciplines — many of these with potentially dire consequences.

Malcolm Gladwell has made a mint on pushing pop psychology this decade and while I’m no psychiatrist or psychologist I do know something about people and his theories have never quite impressed me, but I’ve never taken or had the time to dig deeper. Gladwell has written many NYT bestsellers this decade including Tipping Point, Blink and the article The Art of Failure (which any pop-psych inclined sportswriter quotes mindlessly as “Choking is the opposite of panic” whenever someone strikes out in the bottom of the 9th or misses that field goal.

Far be it from me to buck accepted wisdom (har-har), so I’ll let this guy — Jeff Wise, author of Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger do it. From Psychology Today:

I stumbled upon this realization when, last year, I began writing my book, Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger. In the course of my research I delved into all the major manifestations of the emotion, including the phenomenon of athletes choking on the playing field. Gladwell, I already knew, had famously dealt with the subject in a 2000 New Yorker article entitled “The Art of Failure.” He summed up the topic with breathtaking concision. Choking, he declared, is the opposite of panic. “Choking is about thinking too much,” he wrote. “Panic is about thinking too little.”

It was the epitome of a Gladwellian idea: counterintuitive, startling, yet immediately graspable. In other words, sticky — the supreme attribute for a successful meme. And thus it spread. Read anything about choking in the popular press these days and you’ll likely get the Gladwell line. Here’s Jonah Lehrer, writing in his book How We Decide: “Choking is actually triggered by a specific mental mistake: thinking too much.” And here’s John Paul Newport, writing this February in the Wall Street Journal: “Choking… is essentially the opposite of panic.”

The only problem is that, from a neuroscientific perspective, Gladwell’s “choking is the opposite of panic” doesn’t make any sense. It’s like saying “dogs are the opposite of cats” – a stimulating proposition, perhaps, but logically unparsable.

Meanwhile, as it happens, a great deal of fascinating research has gone into figuring out how choking actually works. The phenomenon is an expression of a specifically social kind of fear, a variety of performance anxiety related to stage fright, panic attacks, and the “shy bladder” syndrome familiar to men at airport urinals. It has nothing to do with a negation or undersupply of panic.

What’s the problem, as Wise writes, if a large segment of the country spews out junk pop psychology to get laid or impress the boss or whatever? Right? As I tell my students — the reason this stuff is important is because every day in Washington D.C. or in some state capitol some PhD or pseudo-scientist is spouting his pet theory to get a grant of tax dollars or to get the legislature or executive agency to implement his theory as policy. The consequences in law enforcement, the War on Terror (witness the lunacy spouted out about pre-traumatic stress during the Ft. Hood aftermath), education, etc. could be devastating to individuals and to our society as a whole.

Wise continues:

One of the chapters in Gladwell’s second book, Blink, concerns the work of the University of California psychologist Paul Ekman, a man who, according to Gladwell, has mastered the secret of lie detection. Thanks to a combination of innate skill and scientific savvy, Ekman has supposedly trained himself to detect fleeting “micro-expressions” on a liar’s face and so can determine their true emotional state with stunning accuracy.

It was the best chapter of the book, maybe the best chapter Gladwell has ever written. When Universal Studios paid $1 million for the movie rights to Blink, this was the part they really wanted; when the deal was inked, the studio announced that Steven Gaghan was attached to the project to write and direct, and Leonardo DiCaprio would star as an Ekman-like character. That film is still gestating, but meanwhile the Gladwell/Ekman juggernaut has already steamrollered across the public consciousness through the Fox TV show “Lie to Me,” currently in its second season. In the show, Tim Roth stars as Dr. Cal Lightman, the protagonist with Ekman-type powers. The real Ekman serves as a script adviser to the show and writes about each episode on his blog.

The chapter’s most profound impact played out not on the screen but in the real world, when the Department of Homeland Security enlisted Ekman, soon after Blink’s publication, to help implement a project to detect would-be terrorists in airports around the country. Called “Screening Passengers by Observation Technique,” or SPOT, the program debuted in December, 2005. By 2008, TSA officers were pulling aside nearly 100,000 passengers a year for screening. (Of those, fewer than one percent were eventually arrested, and the TSA won’t say how many were convicted.)

You might think, given Ekman’s cultural ubiquity, that his discoveries on the subject of lying have laid the groundwork for a whole sub-field of research psychology. On the contrary. In fact, it has been well established by peer-reviewed studies that, Ekman’s claims notwithstanding, no person can reliably tell whether or not another human being is lying simply by looking at them. “It’s hokum,” says Yale psychologist Charles A. Morgan III.

So SPOT, it turns out, was a $3-million-a-year waste of taxpayer money. So “Lie to Me” is scarcely more scientifically grounded than “Ghost Whisperer.” Well, okay. Dumb TV shows and wasteful government programs are nothing new. What’s really disturbing, though, is that once Gladwell had granted Ekman his intellectual seal of approval, no one in the popular media was willing or able to point out that the good professor’s claims were spurious.

For four years.

One chapter… millions of dollars and no telling how many innocents hassled and arrested because they blinked or twitched. The media pushes these ideas because they’re pithy and easy to digest. Getting behind them and testing them takes years and dollars — time and money the media — and apparently the government — won’t put into them before they implement theories into policy or tout them as the truth.

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