Debunking Fake Research

Richard Bolstad

The Yale (or Harvard) University Goalsetting Study That Never Happened

When I first wrote my book Transforming Communication, in 1993, I reported several research studies related to goalsetting and success. The book was used as a text in various University programs, both in New Zealand and overseas. Unfortunately some of those research studies turned out to be fake. One clue is that I did not have a link to the original research articles and was simply referencing  other personal development books.

Here’s how the first fake story goes: “In 1953, researchers surveyed Yale’s graduating seniors class to determine how many of them had specific, written goals for their future. The answer: only 3%. Twenty years later, researchers polled the surviving members of the Class of 1953 – and found that the 3% with goals had accumulated more personal financial wealth than the other 97% of the class combined!” Wow. That is way cool. It is quoted in Tony Robbins’ book “Unlimited Power”

Lawrence Tabak of Fast Company Consultant Debunking Unit investigated the research and Robbins Research International (RRI) told him Tony Robbins got the facts from motivational speaker Brian Tracy (who does also quote the research), who in turn directed him to motivational speaker Zig Ziglar. Zig Ziglar’s Dallas office suggested that Mr Ziglar had probably gotten the research from Tony Robbins. Silas Spengler, secretary of the Yale Class of 1953 told Tabak that he never wrote down any personal goals, nor did he and his classmates ever participate in a research study on personal goals.

Finally Tabak contacted Yale University itself, and Yale University Research Associate Beverly Waters explained that, despite articles citing the study in publications as diverse as Dental Economics and Success magazines, there is no evidence that such a study had ever been conducted. “We are quite confident that the ‘study’ did not take place. We suspect it is a myth.” she said. Brian Tracy, in Solana Beach California, responded to Ms Waters’s findings by explaining: “Heard this story originally from Zig Ziglar. If it’s not true it should be.”

Except, if it’s not true, you shouldn’t be publishing claims about it. I took it out of the next edition of my own book. Here is Tony Robbins still advertising it in 2015, with revised fake dates: this time it only took 10 years to achieve the miracle.

Stephen Spielberg and the Clerical Job at Universal Studios

Another great story told in Tony Robbins’ “Unlimited Power” concerns his former client and movie director Steven Spielberg. This time, the story is corroborated by Spielberg. In a 1969 interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Spielberg claimed that during that summer he sneaked into Universal Studios and created his own “back door” into Hollywood. “Every day, for three months in a row, I walked through the gates dressed in a sincere black suit and carrying a briefcase. I visited every set I could, got to know people, observed techniques, and just generally absorbed the atmosphere.” By 1985, Spielberg had pushed the timing of his story back four years and added the detail that he first made his way onto the Universal lot by sneaking away from a studio tour in 1965.

Snopes co-founder David Mikkelson quotes Spielberg: “So during a bathroom break I snuck away and wandered over there, just watching. I met a man who asked what I was doing, and I told him my story. Instead of calling the guards to throw me off the lot, he talked with me for about an hour. His name was Chuck Silvers, head of the editorial department. He said he’d like to see some of my little films, and so he gave me a pass to get on the lot the next day. I showed him about four of my 8-mm films. He was very impressed. Then he said, ‘I don’t have the authority to write you any more passes, but good luck to you.'” Mikkelson continues “The next day a young man wearing a business suit and carrying a briefcase strode past the gate guard, waved and heaved a silent sigh. He had made it! “It was my father’s briefcase,” Spielberg says. “There was nothing in it but a sandwich and two candy bars. So every day that summer I went in my suit and hung out with directors and writers and editors and dubbers. I found an office that wasn’t being used, and became a squatter. I went to a camera store, bought some plastic name titles and put my name in the building directory: Steven Spielberg, Room 23C.”” Again, cool story!

Chuck Silvers recalls the story completely differently though. Silvers was a friend of a friend of Spielberg’s father, who called him and said “The son of an old friend of mine from GE is here. He’s in high school and he’s a real film bug. Would you mind showing him around postproduction?” After Spielberg returned to Arizona, he kept up an occasional correspondence with Chuck Silvers and returned to Universal during the summer of 1964 to work as an unpaid clerical assistant for his office manager Julie Raymond. In that role, it is true that he didn’t have a permanent pass to the Universal studios lot, but he didn’t really set up his own room with a name on the door. That, biographer Joseph McBride says, was just “an embellishment”.  Julie Raymond’s response is more blunt: “He made up a lot of stories about finding an empty editing office and moving into it. That’s a bunch of horseshit.”

The Thirty-Sixth Monkey

It’s not just within the NLP field that such completely fabricated stories gain traction. As another example, consider the wonderful story told in Ken Keyes’ book “The Hundredth Monkey” (1982), and shared in many other books and even a movie or two. The story originates in Lyall Watson’s book “Lifetide” (1979). In 1953-1967, primatologists began providing Japanese macaque monkeys on islands in Miyazaki Prefecture, Kyushu with sweet potatoes to stop them raiding local farms for food. One monkey on Koshima island learned to wash dirt off the sweet potatoes (kumara, as we call them in New Zealand), and several other monkeys in its troop copied that monkey. Watson then explains “One has to gather the rest of the story from personal anecdotes and bits of folklore among primate researchers, because most of them are still not quite sure what happened. So I am forced to improvise the details…. An unspecified number of monkeys on Koshima were washing sweet potatoes in the sea. Let us say, for arguments sake, that the number was ninety-nine and that at 11.00am on a Tuesday, one further concert was added to the fold in the usual way. But the addition of the hundredth monkey apparently carried the number across some sort of threshold, pushing it through a kind of critical mass…. The habit seems to have jumped natural barriers and to have appeared spontaneously on other islands.” (Watson, 1979, p 2-8). Wow, cool!

Actually though, we don’t have to “improvise the details”, because we have the research from the primatologists. Scientists don’t “improvise the details” and ignore the research! Primatologist Masao Kawai (1965) wrote an actual scientific report. 36 out of the 49 monkeys on the island of Koshima copied the behaviour of sweet potato washing. The younger ones were more able to learn it – the oldest monkeys never learned. The monkeys also learned to wash wheat, to gesture for primatologists to feed them, and to wash themselves in the ocean. Monkeys on 3 other islands (one per island) learned to wash sweet potatoes at random times over the 14 years, but no other monkeys on their islands copied them. The subject of interest to Kawai and his fellow primatologists was how the monkeys on Koshima learned. To restate, there was no “hundredth monkey moment” when suddenly all monkeys knew how to do the task, and there was no evidence of sudden transfer of skills from one island to others. All the observed behaviours are within the normal range of learned behaviours.

Why People Believe Weird Things

It is such a cool idea that the 3% of us with goals can earn more money than the 97% without goals, just by writing down what we want, and that ultra-successful people are just way more determined and goal focused rather than having better family connections, and that ideas are transmitted across the world by magic once a certain critical mass is attained. And hey, these ideas may sometimes be part of the story. But when something sounds too good to be true, we are well advised to check it out.

Michael Shermer looks at this whole issue in his book “Why People Believe Weird Things”. He points out that being smart does not ensure us against believing stupid stuff, and in particular that being knowledgeable in one field does not stop us believing stupid stuff in another field. AAP Factchecker (see below) pointed out that Anthony Robbins, a self-styled expert in NLP and motivational speaker, made several erroneous claims about Covid-19 in 2020, for example. In his videos he claimed that the death rate overall in the USA had not risen due to Covid-19. In other videos he claimed that quarantines of healthy people were destroying the American economy, and “the only way we will build resistance to this virus is by getting out there and getting it.” These are non-scientific claims which bordered on the claims of conspiracy theorists at the time.

There are some age correlations with believing unusual things, Shermer shows, but they vary from subject to subject. Children are more likely than adults to believe that wishing things makes them happen (actually the hope that this could be true gets less and less appealing as subjects get older), but on the other hand older people are more likely to believe in their own power of premonition than younger people, a fact which may well be explained by the error of confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the effect that increases paranoia, so that when people are looking for a secret plot against them, they inevitably accumulate evidence for it.

Science, as discussed in previous articles I have written, is a method for continuously evaluating our perceptions, and finding theories that actually work because they match reality. Let me give you a well-known example of why science is important. This is called the birthday paradox. Imagine you are in a training group with 23 people. What are the chances that two people in that group have an identical birthday? Wouldn’t you be amazed if two did? I mean that would surely be proof of some amazing synchronicity. Well, actually the chances are better than 50%. There are 365 days in a year, and most people think that the chances are about one in twenty, because they only count connections to themselves and they realise that there are 22 others compared to 365 possible choices. Science Buddies (2012) explain “But when all 23 birthdays are compared against each other, it makes for much more than 22 comparisons. How much more? Well, the first person has 22 comparisons to make, but the second person was already compared to the first person, so there are only 21 comparisons to make. The third person then has 20 comparisons, the fourth person has 19 and so on. If you add up all possible comparisons (22 + 21 + 20 + 19 + … +1) the sum is 253 comparisons, or combinations. Consequently, each group of 23 people involves 253 comparisons, or 253 chances for matching birthdays.”

The thing is, our brain isn’t really designed for stuff like this – it’s designed for quick intuitive ideas about how to avoid being eaten. But science and mathematics are tools that take us beyond our guesses.

References

• AAP Factchecker “Tony Robbins’ COVID-19 death toll claims are fatally flawed” https://www.aap.com.au/tony-robbins-covid-19-death-toll-claims-are-fatally-flawed/
• Anthony Robbins, 1988, “Unlimited Power”, Simon & Schuster, London
• David Mikkelson “Did Steven Spielberg Get His Start by Sneaking Into an Empty Universal Studios Office?” 18 November 2003 http://www.snopes.com/movies/other/spielberg.asp
• Joseph McBride, 1997, “Steven Spielberg: A Biography”, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson
• Lawrence Tabak “If Your Goal Is Success, Don’t Consult These Gurus” from Fast Company Consultant Debunking Unit ( CDU ), Issue 6, page 38 https://www.fastcompany.com/27953/if-your-goal-success-dont-consult-these-gurus
• Lyall Watson, 1979, “Lifetide”, Simon & Schuster, New York
• Masao Kawai, 1965, “Newly-acquired Pre-cultural Behavior of the Natural Troop of Japanese Monkeys on Koshima Islet”, Primates, Volume 6, No. 1 https://www.j-monkey.jp/lng/pdf/sweet-potato-washing/Kawai-(1965)-Monkey-culture-PRIMATES.pdf
• Michael Shermer, 1997, “Why People Believe Weird Things” Henry Holt and Co., New York
• Mike Morrison “Harvard Yale Written Goals Study – fact or fiction?” 18/08/2010 https://rapidbi.com/harvard-yale-written-goals-study-fact-or-fiction/
• Science Buddies 2012 “Probability and the Birthday Paradox” Scientific American, March 29, 2012