Start ‘Splainin’

Bridget Leopold cleared the breakfast dishes and settled into what promised to be a relaxing Sunday morning. Hours to spend with the Sunday Boston Globe. She reached for the "Ideas" section and was instantly intrigued by the cover story: "Born to Party: New research suggests that our basic political attitudes -- liberal, conservative, or otherwise -- are with us at birth."

If you spend any time reading the news these days, you've undoubtedly encountered similar stories. They tend to run something like this:

• Topic: New insight into why people (think, feel, decide) the way they do.
• Approach: Experiments conducted by (psychologists, social scientists, cognitive scientists).
• Method: A group of subjects (usually university students) is divided into two subgroups. One subgroup is (given, shown, told) X, while the other subgroup is (given, shown, told) Y.
• Result: Those in subgroup A were (more/less) likely to (choose, prefer, decide, express, worry about) Z.

The news media have glommed onto stories like this with a vengeance, in magazine-length feature pieces and bite-sized sidebars.

While the media fascination may be new, the types of experiments that feed these stories are anything but. Ever taken a psych class? Remember studies of identical twins raised in different homes? Remember split-brain experiments (connection severed between right and left hemispheres)? These are variations of experimental designs -- alter one variable, keep other variables constant, measure differences in outcome, and conclude that the differences can be attributed to the altered variable. The approach is elegant and inherently satisfying.

But wherever there's inherent satisfaction, there's also opportunity. Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point) and Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner (Freakonomics) correctly predicted that non-academic audiences would open their collective wallet for books with an experimental design feel--books that use empirical data to explain complex marketplace trends.

The public's appetite for 'splainin' whetted, the market was only too happy to oblige. New books began flooding the shelves, examining everything from how people make judgments (Gladwell's Blink), to the physical processes triggered by music (Daniel Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music), to why you shouldn't worry about your videogame-addled son (Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You). It wasn't long before the news media smelled blood too, which is why you'd be hard-pressed to find an edition of a newspaper or news site that doesn't include a story on the study du jour.

Not everyone is thrilled with how the discipline has been popularized. Take a gander at some recent examples (all reported in my local newspaper, The Boston Globe), and see what you think:

• Did you need a study to tell you that . . . "Couples where the wife was more attractive were characterized by more supportive interaction on the part of both spouses; but, if the husband was more attractive, he was less satisfied."
• And that . . . "When the viewers were rating the faces for attractiveness, the preference for being gazed at directly by smiling eyes was much greater for faces of the opposite sex, especially when they were rated by men."
• Did you really spend money on . . . "Through five psychological experiments, [the authors] demonstrate that the color red makes men feel more amorous toward women."
• Did you check a dictionary before starting? "Perhaps understandably, boredom has never caught the attention of the psychological world. . . . So [the author] set out to examine boredom more closely, with the idea that the feeling must have a purpose."
• Wow, that much? "In a forthcoming paper, [the authors] say that having a winning NFL football team increases the incomes of the people who live and work in its hometown by as much as $120 a year."

Trivial topics. Frequently sloppy interpretation (e.g., correlation mistaken for causation). Minuscule sample sizes. And tree, after tree, after tree, with nary a forest in sight. Some entire books do little more than recount a laundry list of narrowly focused experiments, with only the vaguest attempt at tying them all together (see Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness).

Speaking of vagueness, the vagueness of the topics doesn't help either. It's bad enough that medical research regularly contradicts itself (remind me: is coffee good or bad for you this week?). But at least those results can be objectively measured (cholesterol levels, blood pressure, weight). How do you measure the vagaries of the human heart and head -- attractiveness, charisma? You'd have better luck nailing Jell-O to a wall.

You have to feel sorry for newspaper feature editors and writers in all this. With so much content to churn out, it has to be tough to meet deadlines and still come up with original, creative story approaches. But thankfully, they can take their cue from movie sequels -- create a boilerplate and simply plug in the relevant content.

• Section 1: Tell a personal story as setup
• Section 2: Explain the phenomenon
• Section 3: Describe the phenomenon's history
• Section 4: Give detractors a say
• Section 5: Go back to the personal story and close with affirmation

Back to Bridget, who has just finished the cover story with a vague sense of having learned something meaningful about the human condition. As a bonus, the magazine includes a weekly wrap-up of the latest experiments, which she reads with keen interest. She makes a mental note to whiten her teeth and iron her red blouse today, and checks whether the Patriots are on at 1 or 4.

Go team!