Fight ‘The Power’
By CHRISTOPHER CHABRIS and DANIEL SIMONS
Published: September 24, 2010Here is a lengthy section from the review, with all the relevant points you will need to dismiss this crap.
Read the whole article.The law of attraction states that whatever you experience in life is a direct result of your thoughts. It really is that simple. If you think about being fat, you will get fatter. If you think about thin people, you will become thin yourself. If you think about your bills, you will get more bills, but if you think about checks instead, your mailbox will overflow with them. According to “The Secret” and “The Power,” your thoughts and feelings have magnetic properties and “frequencies.” They “vibrate” and resonate with the “universe,” somehow attracting events that share those frequencies back to their thinker.
“The Secret” and “The Power” deliver their wisdom in an ex cathedra voice reminiscent of the “Saturday Night Live” segment “Deep Thoughts.” And Byrne offers no scientific evidence for the absurd physics behind the law of attraction. But that doesn’t mean her books don’t take advantage of up-to-the-minute science. The problem is, it’s not the science she thinks it is.
The law of attraction has been around for millenniums; Byrne cites Plato, Galileo, Beethoven, Edison, Carnegie, Einstein and even Jesus himself as adepts. Just in the past century, it has been repeatedly expressed in essentially the same form as Byrne’s version by Wallace Wattles (“The Science of Getting Rich”), Napoleon Hill (“Think and Grow Rich”) and many other writers. Byrne’s idea of “the universe” plays the same role as Wattles’s “intelligent substance” or Hill’s “infinite intelligence” — a godlike agent that provides whatever we desire. Why is this particular pseudoscientific concept so persistent?
The message of “The Power” and “The Secret” might best be understood as an advanced meme — a sort of intellectual virus — whose structure has evolved throughout history to optimally exploit a suite of weaknesses in the design of the human mind. Had Byrne and the other purveyors of “The Secret” (including Oprah Winfrey, who repeatedly plugged it on her show) set out to reap huge profits by manipulating cognitive biases wired into the brain, they could hardly have done a better job. More likely, they caught the virus themselves and are unwittingly spreading it as far as they can.
The first trick they use is what psychologists call “social proof.” People like to do things other people are doing because it seems to prove the value of their own actions. That is why QVC displays a running count of how many viewers have bought each item for sale, and why advice seems more credible if it appears to come from many different people rather than one. “The Secret” is peppered with quotations from a group of about 20 “teachers” or “avatars,” many of whom are themselves popular self-help gurus. In “The Power,” Byrne also quotes sages like Thoreau, Gandhi and St. Augustine. This ploy, an example of a related logical fallacy called the argument from authority, taps our intuitive beliefs so forcefully that we psychology professors spend time training our introductory students to actively resist it.
Byrne also activates what might be called the illusion of potential, our readiness to believe that we have a vast reservoir of untapped abilities just waiting to be released. This illusion helps explain the popularity of products like “Baby Mozart” and video games that “train your brain” and entertain you at the same time. Unfortunately, rigorous empirical studies have repeatedly shown that none of these things bring about any meaningful improvement in intelligence.
“The Power” and “The Secret” are larded with references to magnets, energy and quantum mechanics. This last is a dead giveaway: whenever you hear someone appeal to impenetrable physics to explain the workings of the mind, run away — we already have disciplines called “psychology” and “neuroscience” to deal with those questions. Byrne’s onslaught of pseudoscientific jargon serves mostly to establish an “illusion of knowledge,” as social scientists call our tendency to believe we understand something much better than we really do. In one clever experiment by the psychologist Rebecca Lawson, people who claimed to have a good understanding of how bicycles work (and who ride them every day) proved unable to draw the chain and pedals in the correct location.
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