Category: Self-Help

Although it’s hard to believe, luck is actually something that can be learned. Richard Wiseman, a psychologist, known for studying quirky topics, decided to spend a few years using science to learn what luck actually is, and how people can get it. His book The Luck Factor describes his findings, which I’ll review here. Luck seems like a strange thing to study scientifically, but as you’ll see, it can be done.

The common sense notion of ‘luck’ is that it’s what you get when you mix chance with benefit; and both have to be present. For example, accidentally leaving your science experiment out overnight is probably quite a rare occurrence, but it’s not lucky, because it’s not beneficial. Unless your name is Alexander Fleming, that is, and a piece of mould falls into your petri dish leading you to discover penicillin. That’s lucky!

So you’d think that being lucky, by definition, is something you can’t control. Because once you start to control it, you’re taking chance out of the equation. You’re moving away from the concept of luck, and into something else; ‘strategy’, maybe. But isn’t it interesting, that when we talk about luck as a trait – when we say someone is a ‘lucky’ person – we don’t seem to worry about chance? We don’t investigate what they did to improve their odds, we just see some beneficial things and say “they’re lucky.”

From one point of view, luck exists, and is random. From another point of view, nothing is based purely on luck – just better or worse odds. From that perspective, there are things you can do to improve your luck. This doesn’t involve influencing the outcome of completely random events, like lottery draws; it means increasing the chance of certain outcomes happening, like buying more tickets.

This, in part, is what ‘lucky’ people do – buy more ‘tickets’ in all areas of their lives. They think and act in different ways to unlucky people. The end result of these thoughts and actions is more ‘wins’; but as it’s not apparent that they are doing anything different, it seems like pure luck.

Wiseman spent years researching luck, by studying exceptionally lucky and unlucky people, and noticing the differences between them. From this work he devised a system that people can use to become luckier. The system boils down to the following four principles:

1) Maximise Your Chance Opportunities

You’re more likely to win the lottery if you buy more tickets. There are many similar things you can do to increase your chance of having a ‘lucky’ experience. Networking is the main one. The more people you know and are open to knowing, the more likely you are to meet someone who knows of a job vacancy. or has a single friend you’d get on with. This explains why extraverts tend to be luckier than introverts.

But you also need to keep a relaxed attitude. Lucky people buy more tickets, but they are also good at noticing ticket stands when they see them. I’ve mentioned in a previous article that positive emotions have the effect of broadening your attention, while negative emotions tend to narrow it. It stands to reason then, that the more relaxed and happy you are, the more opportunities you’re likely notice. This explains why lucky people also tend to be less neurotic than unlucky people.

The final way that lucky people buy more tickets is by being open to new experiences. They are more likely to try new things, and as a result expose themselves to more potential opportunities – if you do the same things all the time, you’re limiting your chances of having a lucky event happen to you. Of course, the same holds true of having unlucky things happen to you, which is why you need to employ the other principles too!

2) Listen to your Lucky Hunches

Intuition is an interesting thing. Put very simply, intuition works like this: We take in a lot of information as we go through our lives. A a lot this gets stored in our brains. Our brains make links between this information. When we’re in a situation similar to one we’ve experienced before, our brains look to see what that similar thing links up to. Then we get a feeling about it, based on that stored information.

We get a feeling because it’s a fast way to get information to us. Our brain could just as easily flash a string of words into our minds – and that might be fine if we’re choosing between red and green pesto. But our brains evolved in the wild, where decisions are more important. By the time we’ve thought out “better watch out, there’s probably a dangerous animal in that bush ahead of you!”, we might be dead. So we get hunches instead.

Lucky people trust these intuitions, and are better at ‘hearing’ them. They have strategies to help them tune into their intuitions more; things like meditation, and ways of clearing their heads. Unlucky people, in contrast, tend to ignore their hunches, and miss out on some useful information their brains have stored up.

3) Expect Good Fortune

Positive thinking can be quite an annoying thing. At least, reading about it can. It gets thrown around the internet ad nauseum, you can’t read anything about it without getting the predictable picture of a rainbow, and the language used to describe it is always so…cheesy. But believe it or not, that’s not actually why it’s annoying. What’s annoying, is that all those hippies are actually right: expecting good things to happen does tend to make good things happen.

Lucky people, unsurprisingly, are very optimistic. They expect things to go well, so they don’t give up as easily – even when the odds are slim and they’ve already encountered setbacks. They expect to meet good, friendly people, and this attitude is reflected back by the people they meet. Unlucky people are the exact opposite. They expect to fail, so they give up at the first setback, and they expect interactions to go badly – making them nervous.

4) Turn Bad Luck into Good

As well as being optimistic about the future, lucky people are also optimistic about past setbacks. They are well trained in finding a positive spin on a situation, and don’t see setbacks as an opportunity to indulge in negative emotions. An example Wiseman used is this – say you’re in a queue at a bank when all of a sudden a robbery occurs, during which you get shot in the arm. Was this lucky or unlucky?

Unlucky people say things like “Duh, it’s unlucky, unless you like being shot!” Lucky people say things like “Wow! You’re lucky you weren’t shot in the head! Plus you can sell the story to the newspapers and make some money!”

Whether a situation is absolutely positive or negative isn’t the issue here. The relevant point is just the way lucky people think. They find the good fortune in the bad, are convinced things will work out for the best, and don’t sit around dwelling on their ill fortune.

Being Lucky

The risk with correlational research is that the findings might be reversed – maybe luck creates good intuition, sociability, and positive thinking, not the other way around. The only way to find out is to do experiments – teach people these principles, and see if they become luckier. Wiseman did exactly this, creating his very own ‘Luck School’.

He explains what happened on graduation day in detail in his book, but essentially he found that luck was the end result of these principles, not the cause. After luck school, unlucky people got lucky, and lucky people got even luckier.

The overview I’ve given here of the principles should be enough to get you started, but if you really want to improve your luck I highly recommend getting a copy of Wiseman’s book, The Luck Factor. It’s very readable and has several laugh-out-loud moments, as well as questionnaires and exercises you can use to measure and improve your luck. And unlike most self-help books, this one is based on years of research – so it might actually work!

“…question any claim to truth, asking for clarity in definition, consistency in logic, and adequacy of evidence.”
– Paul Kurtz

There are thousands of self-help books available for sale, and they can’t all be good. In fact, good ones are probably the minority. If you are a buyer of self-help literature, what strategy do you use to separate the good from the bad and the ugly? Do you exert any kind of conscious effort to find the good ones? Or is your buying decision based purely on what the book claims it can give you?

That’s not good enough, you know. More thought should go into your purchase. This type of book is a big investment – financially speaking, it’s not much – it’s about the same price as a meal out. But you’re putting a lot of other stuff on the line: your time, your world view, what/how you think, your beliefs, what actions you’ll take over the coming weeks and months, and so on. That’s a big investment.

If you’re not planning to invest these things, why are you buying this type of book? You’d be better off going out for a nice meal. If you are, you should be as sure possible you’ll get a return on your investment. So you need more than a quick flick through at the bookshop!

This is a list of a few ways to evaluate a book before buying it. I wrote this with self-help books in mind, so the examples lean in that direction, but the general methods apply to books, newspapers, blogs; anything really.

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking, the buzzword of universities, is exactly what it sounds like: being critical of an idea, and looking into it’s truth before accepting it. Critical thinking doesn’t mean to be a critic. The point isn’t to search for faults and flaws until you find them; it’s to put ideas through fair but tough testing.

It’s very easy for emotions to sway you into accepting or denying an argument. Marketers and the media know this well. And when you throw your pre-existing biases into the mix as well, you can sometimes end up even further from a logical response. So if you’re reading a self-help book, and it’s making claims that you want to be true, and using emotional language to get you pumped up, you might end up getting swept along in the moment. If you apply critical thinking to the same book, you may end up going through, saying “this point is not supported…that’s a circular argument….that evidence is not sufficient”. You might be surprised at how much is not up to scratch.

Instead of buying the next self-help book you plan to get, get a text on critical thinking (like this one, for instance). It still counts as self-help, and fits in perfectly with your plans to improve yourself. It’s a mental skill that you’ll be able to apply to everything you read from then on. You’ll have a better idea of what is good and bad, and your future efforts will be more streamlined.

I must warn you though, after learning this skill, you’ll find newspapers and other forms of media very, very frustrating. You’ll see exactly how they are intended to sway opinion, how there is no substance to the arguments, how emotion is used rather than reason. It will frustrate you even more when you hear people repeat these things back to you, people who haven’t looked any deeper into the issue than what they have been told to think. You have been warned!

Unless a sufficient explanation is given for a claim, don’t believe it! Don’t accept things because they sound clever or the author sounds authoritative. Things will always sound clever. The author will always sound authoritative. As such, these things alone are not good enough. Feel free to disagree with things you read; it’s better to find the 10% of a book that’s good than believe the other 90% that’s incorrect.

Bad Evidence

Keep an eye out for the evidence given for an argument. Some self-help authors are very clever about using ‘evidence’. They use methods of illustrating points that are very touching, but do not actually support their arguments.  Your critical thinking book will give you more detail, but here are three commonly used tactics that are NOT to be regarded as sufficient evidence for an argument:

Personal experiences, testimonials or anecdotes

Very often, you’ll find a story about someone’s experience, that seems to back up a point. However, one person’s experience can only illustrate a point, not support it. Here’s an example:

“The healing power of brown rice was highlighted to me over 7 years ago. I was suffering from migranes. I saw every kind of doctor I could, they ran all sorts of tests but all were baffled; no one could find the cause or the cure. Every night I found myself in incredible pain. Most nights I didn’t sleep a wink. It was only when I learned to direct the energy frequency of food that I saw the answer. I was vibrating at too low a frequency, and the low-frequency energy was being stored in the head, causing the migranes. I started eating brown rice twice a day, and I could feel the energy frequency of my body start to rise every day. Within a week, the migraines were gone. The doctors couldn’t explain it.”

Does this format sound familiar? The author claims to have had some ailment, applied his method, and cured it. This is NOT evidence for the method! It explains why the author thinks what he does, but does not prove whether what he thinks is correct. Again, there are many unanswered questions: How does he know the migraines did not stop spontaneously? What is energy frequency? How does he know his energy frequency was raised? And so on.

Even if the author gave 10 anecdotes, even that would not be enough. If I looked hard enough, I could probably find 10 people whose migranes disappeared soon after they added brown rice to their diet. It means nothing if I ignore the 1000 people whose migraines didn’t disappear after eating brown rice.

In The Last Self-Help Book You’ll Ever Need, Paul Pearsall recounts a story of a self-help obsessed couple who came to him for marriage counselling, after the husband unexpectedly hit his wife. The reason for the attack was a tumor in the area of the brain involved with motivational control. The signs had been there all along, but had been missed by leaders of the self-help groups they went to. They misinterpreted his symptoms, saying he had been suppressing his hidden rage, which itself was caused by his wife’s low self-esteem. Tumours of the type he had can be removed safely if found early enough. Unfortunately, by the time Pearsall referred the man for neurological assessment, it was too late. He died two months later.

It would be a fairly simple matter to find 10 or so disasters of self-help such as this, fill a book with them, write it in an authoritative tone, and make a huge argument against self-help. But this would be no more valid than the self-help books that use this technique themselves. In both cases, the examples are pre-selected to support the argument in question. Because there is an example for everything, you can support anything with a testimonial. Because you can support anything with a testimonial, a testimonial can support nothing.

An analogy for testimonials would be this: if I threw a dart at a wall, then drew a bull’s eye and the rest of the dart board around it, it would seem I had a perfect aim. In reality, you have no idea how good my aim is.

Clinical experience

This is something that can seem convincing. The reports of a professional doing his job must be a reliable source of information, right? Quite possibly, but the real question is how relevant is it to you, as the reader of a book?

It’s just one person’s perspective. The only source of data are the people that go in and out of the clinic. If you go to a counsellor for some problem, and see an improvement after six weeks, what do you do? Probably go back for another six weeks. If someone else goes to the same counsellor and doesn’t see an improvement, what do they do? Probably go somewhere else. But that counsellor only deals with the people coming back, the successes. So maybe there’s a bit of bias there.

Also, we don’t process all experiences the same way. One striking incident will take precedence over many non-emotional experiences. If you’re reading a book by some professional, are they giving you the statistics for all their clinical experiences? Or do they just give a few special examples? What about the experiences of their peers?

Remember also that if you go to see a professional, they will talk to you and pick the best treatment for you. If they sense that you won’t benefit or might even be harmed by a particular treatment, they will refer you to someone else, as Pearsall did in the example above. If you’re just reading a book by that professional, he might well have many pearls of wisdom, but you are missing out on that expert diagnosis.

A book is far removed from a one-to-one clinical setting, and the same treatment might not carry over to the written word. The therapist’s presence might be essential. If tests had been done to ensure that the treatments are effective in writing as well as in person, evidence of that should be given in the book. I like to think most one-to-one professionals are good people and highly skilled at what they do – the point here is how well that skill translates into book format.

Circular Arguments

Self-help books are full of these. A circular argument is where the evidence given to support an argument assumes that the original argument is true. For example:

“Vanilla is the nicest flavour of ice-cream. Why? Because the other flavours don’t taste as nice!”

In order for the reason to support the premise, the premise has to already be true. Remember the brown rice/migraine example above? Circular reasoning might go something like this: “Brown rice increases energy frequency, which improves health. How do I know this? I once had migraines. After I ate brown rice, they disappeared. Brown rice must have increased my energy frequency, because my health improved.”

Circular arguments might seem persuasive, but when you break them down you see they don’t tell you anything useful.

It All Makes Perfect Sense! (Or does it…)

Take a look at the following fairly obvious findings from social psychology, which came out of studies of soldiers in the 1940s:

1. Better-educated soldiers suffered more adjustment problems than did less-educated soldiers. (Intellectuals were less prepared for battle stresses than street-smart people).

2. Southern soldiers coped better with the hot South Sea Island climate than did Northern soldiers. (Southerners were accustomed to hot weather).

3. White privates were more eager for promotion than were Black privates. (Years of oppression take a toll on achievement motivation).

4. Southern Blacks preferred Southern to Northern officers (because Southern officers were more experienced and skilled in interacting with Blacks).

What university did these come from? The University of the Blatantly Obvious? Is this really what academics get paid for? Well, I’m assuming that you’re fairly intelligent, and given the topic of this article, you may have guessed that in each case, the actual finding was the complete opposite of the above statements.

If that might was quite obvious to you right now, it wasn’t to the participants of Paul Lazarsfeld’s 1949 study, in which these statements were used. Most of the participants of that study said the findings were “obvious”. It just demonstrates that presentation and authority can trigger that ‘makes sense’ intuition in you – regardless of accuracy – this is what self-help must rely on, being largely a non-evidence based field.(1)

Its important to keep this in mind, because not only do self-help authors have authority, and a snappy, persuasive writing style to throw at you, but they are also saying a lot of things that you want to be true. So can become difficult to resist the temptation of blind acceptance. Resist it!

Look for References

A good rule of thumb: no references, no purchase. Self-help books aren’t peer-reviewed, so there are no restrictions on what the author can write. References do not guarantee quality, and lack of references doesn’t necessarily mean a book is bad. But, if the references are there, at least you can see where authors are getting their ideas from, and you can see how much other work they are aware of in the same area. If you want to, you can look up the references.

If there are references, take a look at them. Are they scientific journals or magazine articles? Or are they references to similar books, just there to give the illusion of research, or are they genuine attempts to back up the arguments?

Author Credibility

Always research the author of the book before buying. Google them, see if there are any major controversies or disputes that might be relevant to your purchase.

What’s the authors claim to competence? Are they an expert in the field they are writing in? A celebrity cashing in on fame? A concerned citizen?

Don’t assume that a ‘Dr’ in front of a name means something. Look into what field the authors doctorate is in, and look up their other qualifications. Check the other areas they have done work in. Some authors have a PhD in one area, but write in another. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, of course – but something to keep in mind.

Remember that celebrity doesn’t always equal credibility. If you’re looking at a book from a self-help celebrity, look at their previous works. If you find they’ve written 15 books that are all slight variations on a single theme, you can be pretty sure they are just cashing in on an idea!

A good way to find credible authors in a particular area is to go to a library and flick through a psychology text book. Get one of those huge ones that cover almost every topic in psychology. Go to the section covering the area you want help with, and see who the ‘big names’ are in that field. Write them all down, and then search Amazon for them, see if they’ve written anything for the general reader.

Ignore the Cover

The cover is nearly useless in helping you decide whether or not to buy. It has the title, the name of the author and the price, but the rest is pretty much useless. The blurb will tell you what it’s about, but it won’t tell you how good it is. It’s not going to say “This book is mostly excellent but some parts are a bit sketchy, be careful while reading!” It’s always going glowing. Ignore the testimonials and celebrity quotes too. For the same reason, they are no use to you.

Also, note that there’s no regulation or law governing the use of the term “best-seller”. It means nothing, and besides, popularity doesn’t always correlate with quality (you only need to look at boy bands for proof of that!).

Final Thoughts

Never buy on impulse. The thought and effort you put into buying books that offer you benefits, should be in proportion with the benefit that you want from it. So if you’re looking for advice on how to make a martini, a 5 minute flick through the books on the shelf is good enough. If you’re looking for advice on how to make your marriage work, put a bit more effort in than that!

Being critical and skeptical does not mean being closed minded. You have to stay open to new ideas and perspectives, but the point is that some ideas are just plain wrong, and it helps to know which ones they are. As the saying goes, “be open-minded, but not so much that your brain falls out.”

Recommended Reading:

• The Last Self-Help Book You’ll Ever Need
• Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless

References
(1) Lazarsfeld, P.F. (1949). The American Soldier: An Expository Review. Public Opinion Quarterly, 13(3), 377-404

One sunny day when I was 19 or so, I came across a very intriguing book.  It was written by a tall man named Anthony Robbins, and it informed me that I had unlimited power.  Things that can be done by one human being, it said, could be done by any other.  It’s a mere matter of strategy; find someone who was once in the position you are in, but but got to where you want to be, and simply copy what they did.  This greatly interested me, for like many others I held fanciful dreams of the many incredible things I wanted to do.  At the time, I was greatly interested in becoming a famous rockstar.  I actually made a plan using this book, and started following the steps through.

That plan didn’t quite work out (although I can still play a few Weezer songs fairly well on guitar).  But what’s interesting, as I look back on that experience, is how easily I bought into those ideas.  Without question, I accepted the idea that I could be whatever I wanted.  I read many self-help books after that one, all with a similar level of acceptance.

My reaction did make sense; we all want to believe we can attain our loftiest desires.  If someone writes a book saying “I can get you those things”, it’s going to sell – no question.  People are going to believe it because they want to believe it.  Not to mention the fact that something in print carries an automatic air of authority.

I’m obviously not alone in my reaction.  There are many books of this kind, all claiming the secret to success or the means to avail you of some malady or other.  In 2003, sales of self-improvement products reached $8.56 billion in all formats.  That’s in the US alone.  This industry is massive, which raises a very important question:

Do self-help books work?  Do they deliver what they promise?

(OK two questions)

Unfortunately, this is pretty much impossible to say.  Do they work at what?  Each book makes a different claim.  The authors of individual books typically provide no support for their advice.  Sometimes, rarely, you’ll get references linking you to evidence behind the advice.  This usually happens because a psychologist has been studying an area for years and then decides to write a book about it (eg, The Luck Factor, Learned Optimism).  You don’t get people wanting to write a self-help book, but thinking “Wait!  Maybe I’d better test all this out first!”, and spending the next decade doing research.  They just write the book and people buy it.  

Buyers tend to be repeat customers too, and just like myself read several self-help books, which makes it even harder to measure any overall impact.  No studies have been done on the industry as a whole, and it’s impossible to know the impact it has.

Some self-help critics (for example, Steve Salerno) try to use indirect evidence to make a case against self-help: things like increases in psychiatric drug use over the years.  The aim is to raise the question: why are these things so, if self-help books are having a positive impact on society?  This is thought provoking, but ultimately it’s impossible to link self-help to any other statistic without studying it directly.  It’s a (cleverly disguised) 100% complete guess.  

Some self-help sub-fields have had attention in journals; mostly alternative therapies like homeopathy.  But the more general “self-improvement” variety of book is basically untested.  So we have to take a different approach to answer these questions, starting with another question…

Is it possible for self-help books to work?

Let’s start from the scratch: Is it possible for written advice to have a positive impact?  Obviously I think it is, or this website wouldn’t exist.  But to what extent is this true?

It depends on the specific claim being made.  There are self-help books making big claims; the cure for depression, end to phobias, and remedies for all sorts of serious conditions.  For things like this, I would say no, it isn’t possible.  Or at least, it’s highly unlikely.  Even regular therapy sessions with trained and experienced professionals doesn’t get the results that some of these books claim.  

There are many curable mental health issues, given the proper treatment.  However, a major factor in successful treatment is the relationship between the client and therapist.  Some studies even suggest this is more important than the style of therapy used.  In other words, the most important part of the treatment is exactly the part you miss in a book.

Whenever you see a big and unbelievable claim, be cautious.  Find out what the professionals in that area do, and what results they get for their clients.  If you see a book telling you it can get you millions from investments, look at what other investors do.  How much do professionals make?  Or the people they advise?  Don’t just look at the top 5% either!  If the book claims it can get you much more than the average that the pros get, ask yourself: why?  If someone who’s worked in the field for years gets a certain amount from investing, how could you get 20 times more from reading a book?  Is everyone really just missing out on this one vital piece of information?  It’d be unlikely, wouldn’t it?

So larger claims you can safely ignore.  What about smaller claims, or books on general self-improvement, where the aim is just to take you up one step, rather than a whole flight of stairs in one leap?  Here there’s no doubt that written words can work – loads of studies are done by post or over the internet, and find positive results.  

But that doesn’t help us much, because there’s also no doubt that written words can be useless, even detrimental.  And there isn’t a professional field to compare these claims against.

Once again, we have been lead to another question…

What is the quality of the self-help industry likely to be?

Think about this:

There are a LOT of self-help books out there.  Over 3000 new ones come out each year.  By the law of averages, there has to be some good ones, some bad ones, some average ones.  And because there are no entry requirements to write a self-help book – no credentials needed, no peer-review, no need to support advice with evidence, etc. – the variance in quality is likely to be quite large.  

If quality isn’t controlled by an external body, then the only people who can control it are the buyers and sellers.  Either the authors employ some kind of quality control system, or the buyers discriminate when buying.  Let’s look at these:

The authors – This is unlikely – I’ve already mentioned the lack of testing on the part of the authors.  Quality control just doesn’t seem to happen often.  Even simple backing ideas up with evidence doesn’t happen much.  Then there are examples of authors displaying unscrupulous practices in the creation and promotion of their work.  I won’t go into details of who and how, but the controversy is easy to find if you look for it.

The buyers – Do buyers discriminate? This is hard to say.  It’s probably true to a point, but not to the point of having any effect on the industry overall.  Again there is no evidence, but I can’t imagine any conscious discrimination that could outweigh hype and mass-marketing.  Plus it’s easy to conceive a way that books that don’t produce the results they offer could do well; maybe they are just hope-inducing, with all the positive motivational statements in them, and that’s why people keep buying more books. 

So it seems possible, even likely, that there are more bad self-help books than good ones.  But…

Is that a problem?  It’s all just harmless fun isn’t it?

Well, not really.  These aren’t cook books – they are not saying “put these ingredients in a pan, heat them up, and eat it”.  They are saying “this is how the world is, this is how you are, and this is how to live your life.”  If the author doesn’t have good reasons for saying things like this, they shouldn’t be saying them at all.  

It’s unethical to use a position of authority to spread a certain model of the world, without sufficient evidence to back it up.  Your results in any particular area are only as good as your model; if your model’s wrong then your results will be bad.  When it comes to life in general, a bad model leads to bad decisions.  An author couldn’t know the accuracy of their model unless they test it.  Freedom of speech is  a great thing, but it doesn’t absolve responsibility for what you said!  

I find it quite telling that few self-help books are based on huge research efforts.  In fact, you don’t need any idea of the research that has been done in an area!  That seems very strange.  If you’re an author writing about how some strange alternative therapy that develops, say, self-confidence, shouldn’t you at least be familiar with the science of that area?  Shouldn’t you address it, and present the reasons that your ideas are better?  Isn’t it irresponsible, arrogant, or negligent to simply ignore what’s already out there?  

There are good and bad books.  If you can’t tell the difference, you’re in trouble – you’ll get swept along by hype and authority, and accept almost any information into your model of the world.  There needs to be a filter in place, before that information gets to your brain.  If you have a good filter, you’re potentially able to avoid the bad books, and even pull the one or two good paragraphs from them and ignore the rest.  

If self-help authors are unwilling to control the quality of their products, it’s down to the readers to do it.  If Self-help buyers were all trained to evaluate arguments, and they all did research before buying, they would be able to separate the wheat from the chaff.  Weaker books would die off by natural selection, authors would be forced to up their game.  On the larger scale, this would be very hard, if not impossible to do.  On an individual level though, many readers would benefit from making their next purchase a book on critical thinking.  If you’re a self-help reader, seriously consider this.  It will give you a filter, and improve the purchases you make after that.

Recommended Reading:

• The Last Self-Help Book You’ll Ever Need
• Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless