Flavor of the Month: Why Smart People Fall for Fads (review)

Perhaps it is fitting that I first stumbled upon Joel Best's latest book, Flavor of the Month, in a bookstore at the airport. Like some of his previous efforts, including Damned Lies and Statistics (University of California Press 2001) and its follow-up More Damned Lies and Statistics (University of California Press 2004), Best's Flavor of the Month presents simplified and easily-digestible sociological arguments to a lay audience. Since the runaway success of The Tipping Point (Little, Brown 2000), in which New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell translates published social scientific research by Neal Gross, Stanley Milgram, Thomas Schelling, Mark Granovetter, David Phillips, Jonathan Crane and others for the general reading public, academics and intellectuals have begun making their own stab at the popular market in slim books about shopping anxieties, crowd behavior and even balderdash (or at least its scatological synonym).

Best's effort to capitalize on this latest trend should serve him and his readers well. Gladwell's The Tipping Point garnered a zealous following among business executives, in part because its lectures on social psychology and cultural diffusion lend themselves to inspiring take-home messages about efficiency, the power of the market and "how little things can make a big difference." Flavor of the Month also targets businesspeople in its warnings to readers about the perils of institutional fads that promise quick success but only deliver disappointing results. In the world of business management, in past years such fads have included quality circles, Total Quality Management, business process reengineering and more recently, Six Sigma – the kinds of trends that have launched a thousand Dilbert cartoons. Best focuses on institutional fads in the areas of education (appraisal planning, whole language instruction) and medicine (diagnoses of multiple-personality disorder), in addition to business, and persuasively argues that unlike pop cultural fads (i.e. the hula hoop, the Macarena), institutional fads have real social costs: they are expensive to implement; intrude on our personal lives in devastating ways (such as fads related to child-rearing, medical diagnosis and treatment, etc.); and postpone the application of more efficient solutions to our problems, leading them to grow worse.

Given the inherent difficulty in predicting whether innovations at the height of their popularity will remain viable or come crashing down, institutions suffer from what Best calls "the illusion of diffusion," the mistaken belief that growing enthusiasm for the latest trend provides evidence of its durable quality. Yet such institutions, particularly in the United States, are rarely alone. Dominant American beliefs – a blind faith in rapid technological development, unrealistic goals of constant social progress and eventual perfectibility, the appeal of dramatic breakthroughs and revolutionary change (exemplified in recent political promises to "reinvent government," "end welfare as we know it," and keep "no child left behind") – practically encourage the organizational embrace of the latest novelty. The decentralization of social institutions like our school districts allows for limitless opportunities for experimentation with strategies of innovation, while professionalized trend promoters (i.e., PR specialists and management consultants) and an inexhaustible 24/7 mass media exhibits an innate bias favoring up-to-the-minute content, wild claims of dramatic progress, and easily hyped signs of the New New Thing.

So why do "smart people fall for fads" as Best's title suggests? Part of his answer lies in framing fads in terms of their breadth and flexibility. For example, Best argues that the reason why school uniforms formed the centerpiece of so many educational improvement proposals during the 1990s was because they seemed a hopeful panacea for a host of wildly divergent problems. Conservatives believed they would make schools disciplined, orderly and more academic-centered, while liberals viewed uniforms as a way of minimizing socioeconomic distinctions among students in the classroom. (Best points out that juvenile boot camps promised similar results during this time.) Institutional fads also gain credence when they are promoted by or identified with a well-known corporation, prestigious university...