Wilson’s new book is likely to stir up controversy because it argues that we bring rationality to public life, and that it is a bad idea to put millions of dollars into programs that are either untested or have been shown to do more harm than good.  Wilson takes aim at the D.A.R.E. program, grief counselors, the Quantum Opportunities Program to reduce teen crime, Scared Straight, and some anti-racism programs, among others.  Time and again he shows that while those who create the programs probably had the best of intentions, and it is possible that some test versions of the programs were promising, but the actual implantation was costly and did no better than having no program at all.  The main message of the book is that next time your local government, school, or university wants to create a full-blown program to help people or solve a social problem when it hasn’t been carefully tested and proven to be successful in trails, then you should tell them to hold a bake-sale to fund it.  Any on-going program should continue to be tested to make sure that it is delivering as promised. 

While this might seem like common sense, people have strong emotional attachments to their do-good-ing ideas, and they will utter inanities such as “if it saves just one person, it is worth it.”  Wilson’s approach is to leave behind ideology and faith and to turn instead to science.  Fortunately there are some programs that have been proven to help, and sometimes people are best left to deal with life on their own, without any help.  Wilson sets out some of the science of helping people through therapy, discussion, activities, and even posters. 

He argues that what works is “story editing”: finding ways to change the narratives people tell about themselves.  One simple technique is for people to write about events in their lives, which helps them make sense of what has happened.  Another simple method is providing different ways for people to make sense of their lives that helps them escape their self-defeating patterns.  There are countless other ways to change the stories people tell about themselves, and this can change their lives.  Wilson emphasizes that small changes can make a big difference.  Not all methods work for all people, and there’s further work to be done in tailoring the right method to the right person.  That too needs to be done in a way that is proven to work. 

Of course, over the years, many approaches have been claimed to be scientifically verified.  Freud himself insisted that psychoanalysis was scientific and that it worked, although his arguments have met with a great deal of skepticism.  One of Wilson’s aims here is to make it clear what it means for a program or method to be shown to work: it has to be tested against a control group, with randomized subjects.  Even then, there can be factors that will interfere with the experimental results. 

One of the nicest examples he gives is near the start of the book, a simple experiment as reported in his co-authored paper “Improving the academic performance of college freshmen: Attribution therapy revisited,” published in 1982.  Struggling first-year students were told that “on the average, college students improve their grades from the freshman to the upperclass years, and they were shown videotaped interviews of upperclassmen who reported that their GPAs had improved since their freshman year.”  Even though this was a very minimal intervention, it had a clear beneficial effect in improving their retention and their academic performance.  This reminds us that providing people with hope can be far more effective than threatening them with fear.  The most successful interventions are surprisingly simple, and the book is full of them.

So Redirect is very useful resource for those wanting to know about the science of personal change, written at a very accessible level, with helpful references.  If reading it can help stop the waste of public resources and improve our society, then it should be required reading. 

© 2011 Christian Perring        

Christian Perring, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York