We began this book with an example of a widely used commonsense intervention designed to help people recover from traumatic events—Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD). As we saw, CISD doesn’t do what it is supposed to do and may even prolong people’s distress. Along the way we encountered many other interventions that merit my blistering or bloodletting awards, including advice offered in many self-help books (e.g., The Secret), national programs to prevent child abuse (e.g., Healthy Families America), Dollar-A-Day programs to prevent repeat teen pregnancies, scared-straight programs to reduce teen delinquency, and the D.A.R.E. program to prevent drug and alcohol abuse.
But at least these programs have been rigorously tested using the experimental techniques described in chapter 2, allowing us to know that they don’t work or do harm. That’s more than we can say about countless other ongoing programs that have never been adequately tested, probably because their founders are certain that they work. Some of these programs undoubtedly are effective, but, as we’ve seen, we can’t take that for granted.
I can’t resist giving one more example. Recently I had the pleasure of attending a concert by Peter Yarrow of the folk group Peter, Paul & Mary. The concert was part of a remembrance of the 1960s, commemorating the fact that the 1960s have, well, turned fifty. It was heartwarming to hear Yarrow sing protest songs from that tumultuous decade and to listen to his stories, such as what it was like to perform at the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.
But the evening wasn’t just about looking backward. Yarrow has never lost his commitment to social change, and he used the concert as an opportunity to energize the audience, reminding us that there are plenty of current problems that need to be addressed and imploring us to keep up the fight. Yarrow has devoted his energies to creating safe educational environments for children. In 1999, he founded a nonprofit organization called Operation Respect, which distributes videos, music, and instructional guides to schools and summer camps with the goal of preventing bullying and violence. The program is based on the song “Don’t Laugh at Me,” written by Steve Seskin and Allen Shamblin and recorded by Peter, Paul & Mary. According to the Operation Respect website, more than 150,000 copies of the Don’t Laugh at Me curriculum have been distributed and more than 40,000 educators have attended Don’t Laugh at Me workshops. In 2003, the United States Congress passed a resolution honoring Peter Yarrow and Operation Respect, and a version of the program was launched in Israel in 2009.
I hope that by now you have the same sinking feeling in your stomach as I did when I heard Yarrow talk about Operation Respect. As catchy as “Don’t Laugh at Me” is, and as heartwarming as it was to hear Yarrow perform it, the cold-blooded social scientist in me couldn’t help but ask, “But does it work?” Sure, it makes a certain amount of sense that it would. But the answer is that we don’t know, because, like many of the interventions we have encountered in this book, it was implemented widely before being adequately tested.
The Don’t Laugh at Me curriculum is based on something called the Resolving Conflict Creatively Program, which to my knowledge has never been evaluated with an experimental design in which children, classrooms, or schools were randomly assigned to participate in the program or to a control group that did not. Resolving Conflict Creatively was not considered to be an effective program, or even a promising one, by the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, which has vetted more than six hundred violence-prevention programs. Adding the Don’t Laugh at Me component to the program makes me especially nervous, because social psychological research shows that the human mind does not process negations as well as it does affirmations. When a president says, “I am not a crook,” people are more likely to think of him as a crook, because he becomes associated in their minds with that word, despite his denial. Hearing a kid sing the words “don’t laugh at me” could backfire, because people might associate laughing with that kid. In short, the song might lead to a subtle reinterpretation of how kids are viewed, in precisely the opposite direction from what is intended. I sincerely hope that I am wrong about this. But the point is we don’t know.1
“Don’t be such a wet blanket,” you might be thinking. “School violence and bullying are huge problems, and if we wait until you social scientists dicker around and test every program we’ll never make progress. Kids are getting beat up and bullied every day.” Fair enough—there are many pressing problems that need immediate attention. But recall the medical analogy from chapter 1. Even though there are numerous terrible diseases that kill children every day, we don’t disseminate new cures until we are sure they work. Imagine that Peter Yarrow announced that he had concocted a new drug in his basement that he believed cured early-onset diabetes and that he was distributing the drug to children around the world. Most of us would be horrified, because Yarrow is not a physician, and even if he were, he would need to test his drug extensively and seek permission from the Food and Drug Administration before giving it to children.
But neither is Yarrow a social psychologist, and if I have accomplished nothing else in this book, I hope I have made people wary of untested interventions designed to address social and personal issues.
This book isn’t just about what doesn’t work. It is about solutions—the realization that interventions can be tested to see what works, and if they don’t work, refined until they do. Even better, we have powerful techniques at our disposal based on the story-editing approach. As you know by now, this is a family of techniques that share three assumptions: first, in order to change people’s behavior we have to see the world through their eyes. It’s not just about incentives, as it is to an economist; it’s about the way in which we interpret ourselves and the social world. Second, these interpretations are not always set in stone, and in fact can be redirected with just the right approach. Third, small changes in interpretations can have self-sustaining effects, leading to long-lasting changes in behavior. We have seen myriad story-editing interventions that used these principles to address a wide range of personal and social issues.
It may have occurred to you to wonder how researchers came up with these interventions, especially the ones that seem so implausible. The researchers did not invent the interventions out of thin air, but instead based them on theory-driven psychological research, much of it conducted in the laboratory. Of course, social psychologists do not know for sure whether these interventions will work in applied settings, after they scale up a laboratory procedure to a real-world application. It’s a long way from having college students write about their values to devising an intervention to close the achievement gap in middle schools. But social psychologists have a place to start and a means to find out whether their interventions work. These are huge advantages over relying on common sense alone, which, as we have seen, has led to some tragically flawed interventions that did more harm than good. With careful, theory-based research, social psychologists have discovered some remarkable solutions to long-standing problems, such as ways to reduce the achievement gap in education, lower teen violence, and reduce racial prejudice.
The story-editing approach isn’t just about solving societal problems; it can be used by you and me in our daily lives to redirect our own narratives and those of our children. True, we can’t very well design experiments to test our hunches about the best way to raise our children. But we can learn from the efforts of others, and throughout this book I’ve pointed out ways in which the story-editing approach can be used in everyday life. I’ll end by recapping some of the major points:
• Be skeptical of advice from self-help books about easy roads to riches, fame, and everlasting happiness. Instead of believing fantastic claims about the laws of the universe, try the simple writing exercises described in chapter 3, which are based on solid psychological research. They might make you happier.
• As a parent, be mindful not only of what your children do, but of the narratives they are developing about themselves, their relationships, and the world at large. You can help them develop healthy core attachment narratives by, starting at birth, being attentive and responsive to their needs and providing consistent, dependable, and prompt care.
• As your children grow older, follow the minimal sufficiency principle, whereby you use the smallest level of rewards and threats necessary to shape their behavior. The danger of going overboard with rewards and threats is that your kids will not internalize the values you are trying to impart, but will instead come to believe that they are obeying you simply to earn your love or avoid your wrath.
• When your kids reach adolescence, keep in mind that their narratives will be shaped by their peers and the media. You can’t choose your kids’ friends, but you can have some influence on whom they hang out with and what they see on television and at the movies. Encourage them to engage in volunteer work in areas they enjoy.
• Appreciate the power of the do good, be good principle. One of the best ways of revising our narratives is to change our behavior first. As Kurt Vonnegut said in Mother Night, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” This is why getting teens to engage in volunteer work can be so powerful—it fosters the narrative that they are caring people who are engaged in their communities. We can all use this principle by acting more like who we want to be.2
• Initiate interactions with people who are outside of your comfort zone, such as coworkers of a different race or ethnicity or social class. You might worry that such interactions will be awkward or unwelcomed, but often these fears are unfounded. Others may well have the same worries you do and will appreciate your efforts to get to know them.
• Be mindful of your own and other people’s identities and how these identities can be threatened by a specific situation or context. As we saw in chapter 9, putting people in situations in which they fear they will confirm negative stereotypes about their group can be debilitating. Fortunately, there are ways to avoid this, such as by educating people about the dangers of stereotype threat and getting people to affirm their values in areas unrelated to the stereotype.
• Be a good consumer of information. As noted in chapter 9, the U.S. Department of Education created a website called the What Works Clearinghouse, which reviews the research literature and provides educators with descriptions of programs that work (http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/). The Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado evaluates the effectiveness of programs that attempt to reduce violence and drug use, and publishes their results on a website (http://www.colorado.edu/cspv/blueprints/).
Above all, when someone proposes a way to make you happier or more tolerant of others, turn you into a better parent, or help your children avoid alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs, ask politely, “But does it work?”