Showing posts with label The Secret. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Secret. Show all posts

Saturday, October 28, 2017

Scam Psychology: The Secret's real secret is victim-blaming and reckless thinking

Recently, I came across MLM "inspirational" propaganda that permeated social media. An example is embeded below, along with my reply:


The original tweet is an attempt to reframe sunk cost fallacy as a virtue, when it's really a cognitive bias that leads you into making irrational decisions.

Think about it... Why is "working through" the pain is preferred way to resolve the pain, when it is just as easy to stop the pain altogether?  Yet that is clearly the implication of the original tweet... by implying that your setbacks are only temporary, and as long as you dedicate sufficient effort you will succeed.

This is unrealistic, dangerous and utterly reckless thinking, yet what MLMers call "positive thinking".  Positive thinking was repopularized recently because some author copied a 1910 book and added some pseudoscience to unproven pop psychology. And MLMers ate it up. 

Yes, I am talking about "The Secret".

First of all, the Secret is not new. As I said, it's a rewrite of a 1910 book with some new pseudo-science references to quantum physics that really made no sense. It is basically magical think: if you ask and believe, you shall receive. It's a rephrase of Bible Matthew 21:22, yet somehow this was generalized to anything in life.

Yet there are a lot of stuff you don't know that's in The Secret...  And they are things you won't hear about from the MLMers who don't want to read about "negativity", even if it's in the book that taught them about positivity.


Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Why Law of Attraction / The Secret is bull****, according to Psychology Professor

What is "The Secret"? Some new-age mumbo-jumbo about just think positive and good things will happen to you because "Law of Attraction". What is law of attraction? It can summarized as "happy thoughts attract happy happenings (wealth, health, happiness)".  Why? Some bogus reference to ether, mind transfer, "positive electrons", and other pseudo-science.

Now you ask, why is this important? The short answer: it isn't, except it appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show. And anything touched by Oprah (or her spawn, "Dr. Oz") automatically becomes a popular phenomenon... and often, they are absolutely bogus.

The author of "The Secret", Rhonda Byrne, basically rewrote Wallace Wattle's 1910 book "The Science of Getting Rich", and melded other lessons from authors that echoed similar sentiment such as Napoleon Hill. But whereas Napoleon Hill and others advocate action, Byrne advocates laziness. According to the law of of attraction, just THINKING positively means good things will happen to you... no action needed.

The Secret is so lame, it got made fun of in The Simpsons ("Bart Gets a 'Z'") and Family Guy ("Brian Writes a Bestseller")

But do you know WHY is The Secret so lame? Let a psychology professor explain it to you...