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Fashionable Nonsense

Behavioral science is bullshit A "mind-reading" apparatus, 1931. | Library of Congress

Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselvesby Alison Wood Brooks. Crown, 336 pages. 2025.

You’ve heard the rumors. People named Dennis are more likely to become dentists. If you do a little ritual before you go on stage, you’ll perform better. If you give your employees chocolate chip cookies, they will become, as if by magic, more motivated. What you think, and the judgments you make, are conditioned by “bias” that you need to overcome with data. With statistics. With science.

This heady cocktail of assertions and recommendations comes from the world of “behavioral science,” a strain of psychology with a storied academic history that has spilled into the worlds of publishing, public policy, and management theory.

The problem is that it’s all bullshit.

Over the last two years, a series of articles has revealed that the superstars of the field are in all likelihood frauds, their methods and conclusions generally bunk. First came Dan Ariely, author of 2008’s Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions and the inspiration behind NBC’s middling primetime drama The Irrational. Ariely has made his career studying dishonesty and the heuristics and biases that humans use to make decisions, revealing the unconscious patterns of our actions. But in September 2023, Gideon Lewis-Kraus published a long article in TheNew Yorker revealing that Ariely had cooked his books, manipulating experiment data on his way to publishing deals, bestseller lists, consulting gigs, and a sinecure helming Duke’s Center for Advanced Hindsight. The article also singled out Ariely’s sometime collaborator, the Harvard Business School psychology professor Francesca Gino, for manipulating her own data to produce splashy, attention-generating outcomes. The following month, the New York Times published a report on Gino—whom Harvard put on leave and threatened to strip of tenure—and her battles with the investigative unit Data Colada, which audits scientific papers.The irony was in the headlines: dishonesty researchers had been caught in a lie.

The fraud charges continue to spread. In the January issue of The Atlantic, Daniel Engber detailed the extent of the rot. Engber focused on another collaborator of Ariely and Gino’s, Juliana Schroeder, who self-audited her own work after the revelations and appears to have—accidentally?—proven that she alsomanipulated data in her research into social behavior and the way we understand other minds. The “science” might be fraudulent, its conclusions unreplicable, but it seems that, felix fortuna, someone forgot to tell business schools, media outlets, TV executives, and publishing houses—because the field’s influence shows no signs of waning.

Case in point is another Harvard Business School superstar swept up in the maelstrom: Alison Woods Brooks, whose book Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselveswas published earlier this year. Prototypical pop science, it promises nothing less than an experimentally proven way to improve your ability to communicate.

“Conversation is surprisingly tricky and high stakes. Are you ready to do it better?” Brooks asked in a LinkedIn post promoting Talk. If we follow the steps laid out in the acronym of the book’s title—Topics, Asking, Levity, Kindness—we’ll be on track to optimize conversation. It’s just not really clear what that means. Thankfully, she’s got a parade of scientific studies to help make things clear.

But first, Brooks offers a potted history of the art of conversation and its study. To do so, she draws on an illustrious series of intellectuals who thought about and practiced conversation deeply. Immanuel Kant—who, contrary to his ill-deserved image as a dour self-disciplinarian and hermit, held famous dinner parties structured to realize the spirit of Enlightenment conversation—is joined by philosophers like J.L. Austin and Paul Grice, who studied natural and everyday language, and the sociologist Erving Goffman, who had an uncanny ability to pass, chameleon-like, through social settings where he could observe hierarchies, slights, and jealousies. These are the most compelling parts of the book; the rest of it reads like a manual for a corporate retreat.

Talk rides the line between what’s called “positive psychology”—Martin Seligman’s term for a branch of the science that studies positive emotions and “human flourishing”—and positivity doctrine, which was popularized by Norman Peale’s 1952 book The Power of Positive Thinking. Today it manifests as, well, “manifestation”: thinking your way into having what you want, with Christian variants like Joel Osteen’s “power thinking” and Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret. Brooks wants to tell us that there’s a scientific version of this stuff. “My research shows that reframing negative emotions can have a powerful effect on your emotional experiences (you’ll feel excited rather than anxious), on your behavior (you’ll be a better conversation partner), and on how others perceive you (as more confident and competent),” she writes. Drawing on her dissertation research, Brooks suggests that conversation performance improves when you simply reframeyour anxiety as “excitement” to yourself.

In this way, she blends the squishy self-help message of Peale and Byrne with the supposed objectivity of the scientific study. Summarizing her case for asking more questions of conversational partners, Brooks writes that “asking more questions causedan increase in likability” and “more open-ended questions cause. . . positive outcomes.” The claim here is that the experiments she cites in which people systematically ask more questions can tell us more about our actions than we can ever know, so long as they are properly randomized and controlled, the results dispassionately interpreted.

Kindness and levity are also essential. “The enjoyment that levity brings—that fizz, that sparkle—makes us behave (and think) differently,” she writes. Fizz and its derivatives appear ad nauseam in the book. Spark is a favorite vocabulary word too. The basic goal is to make people happy because, “as the economist Andrew Oswald and his colleagues have shown, when you make randomly selected people feel happier, they become 12 percent more productive.” Brooks cites the organizational psychologist Teresa Amabile, who “has shown that feeling happy provokes greater creativity,” causing people to “generate more ideas—with a higher proportion that are novel and actionable.” Humor is scientifically proven—whatever that means—to improve conversation too. One experiment Brooks includes shows that bosses who attempthumor—even if they are bad at it—are 27 percent more effective at motivating their employees. But the very idea that you can quantify motivation in this manner is managerial psychobabble.

As the foregoing makes clear, this particular brand of twaddle is relentlessly fixated on improving economic outcomes above all else. In this, it hardly deviates from the canon of behavioral science books written for a mainstream audience. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (2008) by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein is by far the most influential dispatch from the realm of behavioral psychology—more properly, behavioral economics, a true creature of the business school. In it, Thaler and Sunstein advance the idea of “l(fā)ibertarian paternalism”: the notion that modest adjustments to our environment produce better outcomes for everyone. Putting carrots before cake in a cafeteria line, for instance, will make people choose the healthy option more often; making organ-donation opt-out instead of opt-in will raise participation rates—these are the titular “nudges” Sunstein and Thaler envision.

The concept of nudgingspread like wildfire, with dozens of governments, including our own here in the US of A, opening “nudge units.” It provided a cheap set of ostensible solutions to real political problems. Instead of paying for school lunches to be actually healthy, why not just nudge parents or students to choose the healthier option already there? For the Obama administration, and many other late-stage technocratic neoliberal governments around the world, this approach offered a way to claim they were addressing deep-seated problems without doing the hard work of structural reform. The nudge was peak Democrat neoliberal policy, relying on markets, individual choice, and the manipulation of that choice in lieu of progressive, redistributive policy. The problem, again, was that it was all bullshit. Large swaths of the foundational experiments Sunstein and Thaler cited either failed to replicate when the experiments were done again, or were the effect of “publication bias,” in which publishing only surprising and positive results provides a misleading picture of the evidence. When this bias was corrected for, no evidence for the effectiveness of nudges remained, according to a 2022 study.

Over the years, fraud and just plain fatuousness have blended to produce a psychology that leans into the idea that a mixture of self-help, government policy, and app-style gamification could optimize individuals and society. It’s not just the bestselling trade books that suffer from these flaws. The enterprise is rotten all the way down.

Maybe it’s not surprising that research done in business schools is on the side of enterprise. But the case of behavioral psychology is not a story of cynical adaptation to capital, even if its superstars tend to cut utterly vapid, craven figures—all TED Talk and no ideas.

No, this science was instrumental in the creation of what we can think of as the belief-industrial complex, through which experimentation measuring social behavior also produced, for the first time in human history, a massive amount of data about human minds, beliefs, and social interactions. Without that datafication—which started long before a company like Google had its grand realization that they were sitting on a data gold mine—it wasn’t just that capital lacked the tools to exploit human minds in this way. It also lacked a broad consensus that something like the human soul could be measured and parsed. It took a massive, interdisciplinary effort to establish one. And the backbone of this ideology is a reduction of the human to the entrepreneur.

The entrepreneur is creative and charismatic, a fount of growth and value—as Erik Baker ably details in his recent book Make Your Own Job. Following in a tradition of critique of Homo economicusthat comes from Michel Foucault and extends forward through the political scientist Wendy Brown and the sociologist Melinda Cooper, Baker reconstructs a long history of American entrepreneurialism. The genre of the “make your own job” work ethic is popular psychology, and Baker makes much of Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking. He also recounts the story of the psychologist David McClelland, whose work at none other than the Harvard Business School in the late 1950s was dedicated to the psychologization of economics, which meant the shift from a focus on managers and workers and prices to the self-generating positive psychology of the entrepreneur. Baker shows how American business culture and psychology have formed a crucible for the weirdest excesses of exploitation in the modern economy, a royal lineage into which Brooks’s book fits cleanly.

Between Brooks and Baker, one can begin to see how academic and popular psychology merged into a repudiation of any shred of independence from industry that science had once aspired to. This tectonic shift that has brought huge portions of the social sciences into near-total subjection to the spirit of capitalism. Baker notes that “it is sometimes difficult to resist the feeling that the entrepreneurial work ethic had been demanding a technology like the digital platform all along, the necessary infrastructure for its full expression.” There is more to it than that: behavioral research produced both the actual data and the attitude that the mind could be datafied, which together meet almost every definition of ideologyfrom Marx down to today. As Baker argues, the entrepreneur is the personification of a normal contradiction in capitalism itself: as Marx and then John Maynard Keynes after him observed, varying rates of unemployment, and the turn-style of having and not having a job, are features, not bugs, of capital’s dominance over society. Psychology’s role has been to prepare us to view such contradictions as natural.

It requires a mind-numbing amount of relativism to think of employment rates as natural facts. The way to prepare people to accept that is to convince them that their minds, and their relationships, are not really theirs—that the truth of those things lies in statistics. Then you can give those objects back to them, with guardrails: optimize your conversations using science. Date better; do friendship deeper; knuckle under and accept your subjection to your boss and the bottom line in order to get ahead, knowing the science backs you up. Brooks’s message—and the message of the field of behavioral psychology more broadly—just so happens to be in harmony with the business school’s closed picture of the world. This is the self, fully integrated into capital.