Blakely, Singal, and “stories”
I have a new piece in the latest issue of The New Atlantis called “Statistics as Storytelling.” The print journal is in subscribers’ hands; the issue will be online sometime this week, I imagine. (It’s jam-packed full of goodness, by the way: Nicholas Carr, Matthew Crawford, Phil Christman, Ari Schulman, Caitrin Keiper, Addison Del Mastro, and many others.) My piece is a long essay review of Jason Blakely’s book We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power. I’ll link to it in a separate post once it’s up.
You might think of the book as forming a kind of pincer movement with Jesse Singal’s book The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills. Whereas Blakeley’s book is an academic work building on a particular philosophical tradition (Gadamer, Taylor, MacIntyre, et al), Singal’s is a trade book meant for a wide readership. Each chapter is a systematic take-down of the latest fad in “Primeworld,” or the TED Talk–ification of the social sciences, especially psychology.
I mention Singal’s book in the review, but I don’t engage it much more than a sentence or two. I have to say, I wasn’t prepared for just how good The Quick Fix is. Which is a way of saying that I thought the book would partake, at least a wee bit, of the very phenomenon it is criticizing. But it doesn’t. Its depth and breadth of research is impressive. The detail is painstaking. The dismantling is patient, fair, and deserved in every case. Moreover, Singal’s leftist credentials strengthen the book’s persuasive power, simultaneously preventing dismissals of his arguments (“oh, this is just a reactionary/anti-academic screed that doesn’t support progressive values”) and bolstering his counter-proposals (as in, e.g., when he suggests that attending to systems, policies, and institutions will improve the actual lives of people of color, as opposed to pained introspection by well-meaning white liberals).
But there’s one point of discrepancy between Singal and Blakely, and I’m not sure whether it is merely rhetorical or rises to the level of a substantive disagreement. As the title of my review suggests, Blakely interprets social science as a way of making sense of the world through narrative interpretation. But he doesn’t think this is the problem; the problem is that public and popularizing practitioners of social science do not believe this is what they are doing; indeed their cache comes in the dubious supposition that it is precisely not what they are doing, since their art (excuse me, science) is empirical, not humanistic. His argument, then, is not that we need to do away with the social sciences. It’s that they need to be integrated into a larger humanistic approach to the great and never-ending cultural task of interpreting reality through stories. Stories are how human beings make meaning out of the flux of life; they are unavoidable and in fact crucial to even the hardest of hard scientific ways of understanding the world. “Facts” mean nothing apart from context, and for human being that context is ineluctably narrative in shape. What that means is that we need to be aware of what we are doing and, furthermore, we need to develop nuanced and sophisticated ways of depicting reality in complex stories that, for all their subjective character, are nonetheless true.
Compare that account with the following, which comes from pages 277–279 in the Conclusion (titled “Escape from Primeworld”) to The Quick Fix:
As we've seen, there are myriad reasons half-baked behavioral science catches on, and those reasons often have to do with the cultural or institutional context of a given idea—the problem it is attempting to solve, the societal currents it is riding, and so on. As we conclude this book, it's worth taking stock of the more general, less context-specific reasons why bad social science spreads and what the consequences might be, particularly when it comes to Primeworld accounts.
The simplest reasons half-baked ideas tend to prevail is that all else being equal, the human brain has an easier time latching onto simple and monocausal accounts than to complicated and multicausal ones. Such accounts are more likely to be accepted as true and to spread. Our brains are built to be drawn to quick, elegant-seeming answers.
The legendary sociologist Charles Tilly nicely explains this in his account of human storytelling, Why? What Happens When People Give Reasons . . . and Why. He writes, “Stories provide simplified cause-effect accounts of puzzling, unexpected, dramatic, problematic, or exemplary events. Relying on widely available knowledge rather than technical expertise, they help make the world intelligible.” Tilly calls storytelling “one of [the] great social interventions” of the human species, precisely because of its ability to simplify and boil down. But this is the same reason stories can lead us astray. “In our complex world, causes and effects always join in complicated ways,” he writes. “Simultaneous causation, incremental effects, environmental effects, mistakes, unintended consequences, and feedback make physical, biological, and social processes the devil's own work-or the Lord’s—to explain in detail. Stories exclude these inconvenient complications.”
Think of all the stories that have fueled half-baked psychology: “Soldiers can resist PTSD if their resilience is boosted”; “Women can close the workplace gender gap if they feel an enhanced sense of power”; “Poor kids can catch up to their richer peers if they develop more grit.” In emphasizing one particular causal claim about deeply complicated systems and outcomes, these and the other blockbuster hits of contemporary psychology elide tremendous amounts of important detail.
It's likely that just as our brains prefer simple stories, within psychology, too, the professional incentives point toward the development of simpler rather than more complex theories. People who study human nature aren't immune to the siren call of simplicity. In a reply to one of her papers, the psychologist Nina Strohminger criticizes this tendency rather eloquently: “The fetishization of parsimony means that unwieldy theories are often dismissed on these grounds alone. . . No doubt there is something less satisfying about settling for inelegance, but the best theories won't always feel right. Elegance is not a suitable heuristic for veracity.” Scientists often have good reason to prefer parsimony—Occam's razor has its uses—but still: simple-seeming explanations of complex phenomena warrant skepticism.
Of course, simple and elegant and appealing theories are more likely to pay. If you're a psychologist in the twenty-first century, particularly a young one, you face a daunting landscape when it comes to making a name and therefore a career for yourself. Funding is being cut left and right, and the ongoing adjunctification of academia certainly hasn't spared psychology. There's one silver lining, though: the public is more interested in behavioral science than ever before. That's especially true if you can tell a simple, exciting, and above all new story about a subject of great societal concern.
I regret that Singal—and Tilly—use the trope of stories and storytelling for the in itself accurate point they want to make. What they have in view is simplistic or reductive theories of complex phenomena that, because the human mind craves parsimony and the masses love a straightforward tale, gain popularity both in the academy and in intellectual journalism by comparison to the unsexy, the muddled, the multi-factored, the epistemically incomplete explanation. But that has nothing to do with the human propensity for narrative. Tilly’s account is itself a story, perhaps overly reductive: Humans tell stories to cut through the clutter, and this disposition to storytelling explains why fad psychology has such a grip on our collective imagination as a society. But my observing this isn’t a criticism. Every legible sentence and assertion in an argument is unavoidably a kind of compressed story and necessarily, always and everywhere, simplified relative to an exhaustive explanation of the subject in question. Which is just another way of saying it’s human beings doing the thinking and talking. That isn’t an obstacle in the way of our knowledge. It’s how we know anything at all.
In my view, then, Singal’s closing nod to the dangers of “storytelling” is not in material disagreement with Blakeley’s proposal. If the two books form a pincer movement, I would describe their relationship in this way: Blakely’s provides the necessary philosophical framework for a workable theory and practice of science—which is what Singal wants, a reliable habitus of public-facing social sciences like psychology—while Singal’s book shows, in glorious gory detail (through well-told vignettes, by the way!), what Blakely lacks the space to unfold in full: the manifold dysfunctions of scientism in its current dominant ideological form.
Take up and read them both. They make for quite the one-two punch.
