I'm Not Your Guoroo - Is That Your Guaroo?

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i diday im, a programme where you become a pen paw with an immigrant detaine. And i sort of befriended this guy who came here from cameroon and he eventually got out on appeal. He asked for the power of positive thinking, which was a book i make fun of a little bit in the quick fix. I can see how that might be useful for certain people. It's very easy for me to sit here, having never faced any real material hardship, and say, this is silly, but i can understand it. In much the same way as we should have respect for people who have religious beliefs that we don't understand.

Michal Shermer and Jesse Singal discuss: how social scientists determine causality • Primeworld: cognitive priming and how it works (and doesn’t work) • The Malcolm Gladwell-effect (named after the 10,000-hour effect, by Anders Ericsson) • the self-esteem and self-help personal-empowerment movements • power posing and positive psychology • New Age self-help movements • Grit (stick-to-itiveness) (Darwin’s “dogged as does it.”) • Persistence is task specific and context dependent • Big 5 personality as determiners: Grit = Conscientiousness • Implicit Association Test and racism, misogyny, and bigotry • the replication crisis, what caused it, and what to do about it • choice architecture and the nudging of human behavior • race, gender, class, I.Q. and other radioactive topics in group differences • free will and determinism • nature/nurture and how lives turn out • abortion • and U.S. foreign policy.

Jesse Singal is a contributing writer at New York and the former editor of the magazine’s Science of Us online vertical, as well as the cohost of the podcast Blocked and Reported. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Slate, The Daily Beast, The Boston Globe, and other publications. He is a former Robert Bosch Foundation fellow in Berlin and holds a master’s degree from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs.