UVA psych professor Timothy Wilson's book Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change begins with a horror story. A police officer in Florida is the first to arrive at a house engulfed in flames. There are screams for help coming from the structure, and through a window the officer sees a trapped man. The officer tries to break down the heavily bolted front door, but when it finally gives way, it's too late.
"He was curled up like a baby in in his mother's womb," says the officer. "That's what someone burned to death looks like."
The next day, when the officer reads the local newspaper, he realizes the victim was a friend. The officer couldn't sleep or eat, and so his superiors scheduled a Critical Incident Stress Debriefing, which is basically a therapy session with professional counselors designed to prevent post-traumatic stress disorder. Survivors of the 9/11 attacks and the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings underwent similar interventions.
Sounds like the compassionate, common sense things to do, right? Express yourself and work through the trauma so that you don't repress the feelings.
The problem is it doesn't work. Four years after the fire, Wilson alleges, the police officer was still haunted. As Wilson reveals in Redirect, such post-trauma debriefings not only don't help, they may even cause psychological problems.
"Tim demonstrates in Redirect how some of our most cherished public programs fail the tests that measure their efficacy, and yet continue to receive support," says Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard professor of psychology and Wilson's long-time research collaborator. "Tim is begging us all to be empiricists– to develop ideas to change the world for the better but to submit those ideas to empirical scrutiny and then cast them aside when they prove ineffective."
Wilson takes aim at many widely implemented social programs, including D.A.R.E (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), Healthy Families America (a popular home visitation program to prevent child abuse), and Scared Straight, the renowned program that supposedly scares at-risk kids away from a life of crime.
"Reliable studies have shown that these programs are largely ineffective," says Wilson, "but they continue to be funded."
Indeed, D.A.R.E America, which originally took its cue from Nancy Reagan's "Just say No" campaign back in the 1980s, has enjoyed enormous support at the local, state, and federal levels. It's estimated that the non-profit program– which gets police officers to administer multi-week anti-drug classes– is administered in 80 percent of America's school districts with an annual cost of nearly $1 billion, much of it covered by government grants.
About a decade ago, information began to surface that showed the program was ineffective and could even lead to future drug use. For instance, the results of a 10-year study published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology showed that D.A.R.E. was no more effective than no program at all. One thousand 10-year-olds had been surveyed about their drug use and self-esteem; ten years later, the same kids were surveyed again. The results: the kids who'd been in D.A.R.E. were no less likely to smoke pot, drink, or succumb to peer pressure than kids not in the program.
As Wilson points out, random assignment studies (those that compare those who participate in social programs with a randomly-assigned control group), are the "gold standard" in social science research. One such study in 2009 found that after four years 31 percent of kids who went through the D.A.R.E. program used marijuana– the exact same percentage as kids who didn't go through the program.
"To their credit, the D.A.R.E. organization finally heeded the evidence and revamped their curriculum with the Keeping' it Real program," says Wilson.
Indeed, under heavy criticism, D.A.R.E. began implementing the new program developed by Penn State researchers, which takes a page from Wilson's research by using a "narrative" approach.
The new approach "prepares children to act decisively, confidently, and comfortably by teaching them how to say no in difficult situations," according to public statements by D.A.R.E. executive director Francisco Pegueros. "Students also learn how to recognize risk, value their perceptions and feelings, and make choices that support their values," says Pegueros.
But Wilson remains skeptical.
"To my knowledge, this program has never been evaluated rigorously when used by D.A.R.E., that is when police officers deliver the program," says Wilson. "This worries me, because as I speculate in Redirect, it may be that at-risk kids are not easily reached by law enforcement officers."
Of course, D.A.R.E officials are quick to defend.
"I know what D.A.R.E. has done for so many children," says Scott Gilliam, the group's director of training, who bristles at Wilson's skepticism. "I know how communities have benefited by this early introduction to a police officer in a positive light. I have also discovered how research can produce almost any outcome based on how it is set up."
Such sentiments are common with popular social programs, says Wilson, and there's no reason not to believe that kids, communities, schools, and police departments have developed more positive relationships. But the leading random assignment studies over the years, says Wilson, have shown that the program has been largely ineffective.
Same goes for Scared Straight, the popular program designed to keep at-risk youth out of trouble by taking at-risk youth into prisons to get yelled at by hardened criminals, who "scare" them into realizing what a life of crime really entails. Not only have several random assignment studies demolished the efficacy promises of Scared Straight, the studies indicate that participating actually increases the likelihood of criminal behavior.
"My biggest beef is that we implement these programs widely before they are adequately tested," says Wilson. "Why not test them first with rigorous studies, find out what works best, and then implement them?"
In Redirect, Wilson likens the use of D.A.R.E, Scared Straight, and other programs to the old medical practice of "bloodletting," once widely believed to be a cure for various illnesses but one which, as Wilson points out, likely hastened and possibly caused the death of George Washington, who, suffering from a throat infection, had nearly a gallon of blood drawn.
Wilson believes the same phenomenon is in play with certain popular social programs, which seem to make sense to their founders and continue to get implemented because they are popular. Eventually, good science stopped the practice of bloodletting, and Wilson hopes more good science will lead to the implementation of social programs that actually work.
So what does work?
Says Wilson: "story-editing interventions."
Story editing?
"The idea is to "redirect" people's stories in a positive way," explains Wilson. "Sometimes, it means just making small tweaks in their narrative."
That's it?
Wilson nods.
As Wilson explains in Redirect, had the traumatized Florida police officer instead been asked to write a narrative about his experience to bring it into clear focus over a four-day story editing program developed by researchers, his trauma might not have haunted him for so long.
"When people structure their problems into a narrative," says Wilson, "they can let it go."
For instance, Wilson highlights a program called LifeSkills Training. It was developed in the early 1980s to reduce drug and alcohol use by giving kids actual projects to improve self-esteem, plus tips on overcoming shyness and being more assertive. Instead of "scaring" kids into avoiding drug use and at-risk behavior, the program offers practical advice and information.
For instance, kids are shown actual research that social approval of cigarette and drug use is in decline and that the number of kids abusing drugs isn't as high as they've been led to believe. Wilson says that random assignment studies have shown the program to be "significantly effective" at reducing drug and alcohol use among high schoolers.
Other studies have shown that simply performing volunteer work in their communities can lower drug use and at-risk behavior among teens. As for child abuse, Wilson says that story-editing can work for parents at risk of becoming abusive. Such parents, "reinterpret why their children act up," says Wilson.
"Many people think science is something that happens in a lab and involves beakers and test tubes," says Gilbert. "Tim shows how we can– and why we must– use science to evaluate the stuff of which our everyday lives are made."
Who is Tim Wilson?
When journalist Malcolm Gladwell was a fellow at UVA's Batten Institute in 2005, he was at the top of his game. His books The Tipping Point and Blink had both sold over two million copies in the United States and gone on to become international best sellers. In both books, Gladwell used new research in the social sciences to reveal some unexpected consequences of human behavior. During a talk he gave at UVA, however, a mild-mannered UVA psychology professor sitting in the front row unnerved the famous author.
"I had the distinctly uncomfortable feeling, half way through," Gladwell would later write, "that I was simply giving the audience a kind of popularized version of Wilson's own work."
Gladwell would admit that Wilson's research had had a profound influence on his own work and that Wilson's first book, Strangers to Ourselves, was “probably the most influential book I've ever read.”
"Imagine giving a talk on physics, in 1910, and saying "you know, there's this thing called relativity," wrote Gladwell about his UVA experience, "and then spotting Einstein in the front row."
Wilson, like Gladwell, has a knack for exposing the ways in which we deceive ourselves, sometimes by playfully deceiving readers (and study participants) with their own preconceptions, before revealing, as if by sleight of hand, that things aren't what they seem.
"One of the biggest changes in psychology in the last couple of decades has been our discovery that most of what we do is guided unconsciously," says Gerald Clore, a colleague of Wilson's at UVA. "The reasons we give for our choices, even when accurate, are not so much insights as after-the-fact constructions. This idea, only now commonly accepted in psychology, was shown experimentally by Wilson over thirty years ago."
"Just as extraordinarily famous people can get away with having one name (Leonardo, Aristotle, Madonna), Professor Wilson produces experiments that the entire field knows by one phrase: the Coin Study, the Stocking Study, and the Jam Study, " says Gilbert. "That fact tells you something important about his contributions: they are not just findings, they are memes."
What's more, Wilson is probably one of the more unassuming writers one might meet in Charlottesville. For several years in the 1990s, a reporter played senior league baseball with Wilson, and he never once mentioned what it was he did. Even for those not playing baseball, the chances are pretty good that Wilson's ideas have touched your life in some way.
"Tim is one of the most influential psychologists in the world today, and this is really not an overstatement," says UVA colleague Shigehiro Oishi<