Haven't we had enough of authors pitching an oversimplified analysis of something important? It's great to boil things down into plain language, but when an entire book is based on A Big Idea, complicated things are glossed over, evidence is cherry-picked, we get bamboozled. (And books are sold. Maybe I'm just jealous.)
Writing in New York Magazine, Kathryn Schulz takes Tina Rosenberg to task for touting a "social cure", formerly known as peer pressure, "a panacea so powerful that it can help you quit smoking, lose weight, escape poverty, ace calculus, combat Islamic terrorism, overthrow a dictator". (Thanks to Elizabeth Lusk, @gestaltKT, for the link. Here's her Evidence Soup interview.)
Group Think praises Rosenberg's earlier work (she is a MacArthur Foundation grant recipient). But Schulz has a bone to pick with her latest book, Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World. [Photo courtesy of New York Magazine.] She explains:
Big Idea books have been around for a long time; see The Communist Manifesto. But the Big Idea Book Club (I mean “club” as Rosenberg defines it: an identifiable in-group with enough status to influence the behavior of others) is a recent phenomenon. Its accidental founder and president in apparent perpetuity is Malcolm Gladwell. Its membership, like the membership of most powerful groups, is largely male. Its combined sales are stratospheric; whatever these books are hawking, we can’t stop buying it.
As for the books themselves, I’ll generalize (as, often, do they). Big Idea tomes typically pull promiscuously from behavioral economics, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology. They coin phrases the way Zimbabwe prints bills. They relish upending conventional wisdom: Not thinking becomes thinking, everything bad turns out to be good, and the world is—go figure—flat.
(With Gladwell’s Blink, this mania for the counterintuitive runs top-speed into a wall, crumples to the ground, and stares dizzily at the little birds circling overhead. This is, let me remind you, a best-selling book about the counterintuitive importance of thinking intuitively.) What troubles me about the Big Idea Book Club is the way ideas often slide toward ideologies - grand unifying theories of culture, cognition, happiness, talent, the Internet, the future, you name it.
Well said, Ms. Schulz.
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