Recently I’ve had occasion to spend some time with a small group of exceptionally smart people. My work often puts me in contact with scholarly types, but this particular group is full of real outliers—people whose cognitive abilities are far outside the norm, whose differently wired brains are sometimes considered a form of neurodivergence and have often made them feel like misfits in the world at large. These people are fascinating and creative, with minds that work in unique and inspiring ways. I’m deeply in awe of their intellect.
I also discovered that most of them are into some very woo-woo things, like astrology and energy healing. In addition to being brilliant, they seem to have a high level of openness to ideas outside the realm of science and medicine.
Of course, this is not to say that everyone who’s extremely bright is into these sorts of things (or that everyone who’s into woo is brilliant). I know some other people of outlier-level intelligence who wouldn’t be caught dead doing yoga, let alone getting Reiki or talking about the effects of planetary alignment on our lives. Many people with many different neurotypes buy into these practices, and many others don’t. The fact that this small set of prodigies tends to align with certain New Age-y practices could be pure coincidence.
But it got me thinking about something I’ve observed in my years of critiquing wellness culture, which is that some fellow critics tend to paint anyone who likes wellness (and especially its more woo-woo aspects) as foolish, airheaded, unserious.
Among certain groups of scientific skeptics, there’s sometimes an insinuation that people who buy into wellness are intellectually inferior to them, the more “logical” minds. Even if it isn’t said aloud (which it usually isn’t), it’s easy to pick up on. “I often felt like they were very condescending,”
said in our interview last year, discussing her experience with the skeptic community. “Their sentiment was something along the lines of, I just can’t believe that any woman would fall for this [wellness] stuff. And I looked at myself and I looked at my friends and I said, well, we’re not stupid. I mean, I don’t think we’re stupid, and we fell for [it].”Clearly this stereotype is not true, as evidenced by the masses of smart, thoughtful people who are/were attracted to wellness.
In fact, I’ve come to believe that many of us buy into wellness culture precisely because we’re bright and analytical. Far from being evidence of foolishness, I think attraction to wellness woo can sometimes be a byproduct of having an inquisitive mind (though there are obviously many other reasons people are drawn to wellness, too).
In my view, there are three main ways intellect can drive us to seek out unproven wellness practices and make us more vulnerable to their harms. Initially I’d planned to write about all three of them in one post, along with some ways to avoid each of these traps. But I realized (thanks to insightful feedback from my podcast editor/strategist and resident philosophy PhD,
) that the piece needed more expansion and would make more sense as a multi-part series (which, as I shared a few weeks ago, I’m hoping to do more of this season). So over the next few months, I’m going to be exploring each of these ideas in depth. Meanwhile, here’s a preview of those three areas and what we’ll cover:1. Necessity/Balance
First, I think that in some cases, being a very cerebral person actually makes mind-body practices necessary for finding balance and avoiding burnout. I think learning to shift out of our intellects and into different modes of being is incredibly important—and wellness culture often gives us that ability, via practices like meditation, yoga, breathwork, somatic psychotherapy, etc. Yet wellness practices (and the intuition they help us tap into) can also lead us astray and make us vulnerable to misinformation. In the next installment of this series, I’ll share how this happens, what to look out for, and how we can protect ourselves while also reaping the benefits of certain wellness practices for balance and mind-body connection.
2. Values
This is the hardest point to write about succinctly, since it could really be the topic of an entire PhD thesis (and who knows, maybe it will someday). It’s also potentially controversial and needs a lot of explanation and context. That said, the basic idea is that particular kinds of values seem to predict people’s susceptibility to misinformation and their tendency to turn toward non-evidence-based treatments—and values are an even stronger predictor in some cases than dissatisfaction with conventional healthcare. Specifically, some research has found that intensely valuing rationality is associated with a lower risk of believing misinformation, whereas postmodern values are prevalent in wellness misinformation, and holding these values predicts greater use and endorsement of alternative medicine. (These are observational studies, so they can’t say anything about causation, but it does seem more likely that people’s values would drive their behavior than the other way around—or at least that values probably play some role in determining behavior.)
In this piece, I’ll explore how postmodern values have become widespread and the concept of rationality has been maligned in certain circles of highly educated people. I’ll reflect on the good reasons why this has happened, as well as the unintended consequences of that shift. As someone with a bachelor’s degree in Rhetoric (which, at my school, was grounded almost entirely in postmodernism), I think postmodern ideas have been pivotal in challenging outdated ways of thinking and oppressive power structures—and yet they’ve also had some distinct downsides, including opening the door to unproven and potentially harmful wellness practices. I’ll grapple with these ideas and discuss some texts that I’ve found helpful for squaring feminist/postmodern cultural critiques with respect for the notion of objectivity and the practice of science. (Become a paid subscriber for access to the full piece, and this whole series.)
3. Information-Seeking, Analytical Minds, and Confirmation Bias
At some point, many of us find ourselves dealing with symptoms and illnesses that conventional medicine doesn’t have effective treatments for—or that it struggles to diagnose in the first place. For those with a tendency to overthink (hello), these experiences can make us start consuming vast amounts of content about our conditions, in the hope that information will bring some relief. But that thirst for knowledge can sometimes expose us to wellness mis- and disinformation that we might never have encountered otherwise—and social algorithms can quickly lead down even more radical and harmful rabbit holes. What’s more, there’s some evidence that people with an analytical cognitive style may be more likely to buy into particular kinds of pseudoscience than those with other styles of thinking. Cerebral types are also prime targets for what Tim Caulfield calls “scienceploitation,” which is when marketers use preliminary or emerging research out of context to sell unproven products—and we also see a lot of scienceploitation in the work of Andrew Huberman and other popular wellness bros. And once we’ve bought into a form of wellness culture, smart people can succumb to confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, using our intellects to defend our pet theories to the death. In this piece, I’ll explore how these issues manifest—and offer some thoughts on how to avoid these traps.
That’s a preview of how I’m thinking of these things now, but I’m still working on all these pieces and might add to, expand, or nuance some of these ideas as I go. If you want to read the series in its entirety (and hear me read the audio, plus have a chance to comment), you can become a paid subscriber. And thanks so much to all my current paid subscribers for making this project possible!
Why Smart People Fall for Wellness Misinformation (Part 1)