How do science journalists decide whether a psychology study is worth covering?
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Complex research papers and data flood academic journals daily, and science journalists play a pivotal role in disseminating that information to the public. This can be a daunting task, requiring a keen understanding of the subject matter and the ability to translate dense academic language into narratives that resonate with the general public.
Several resources and tip sheets, including the Know Your Research section here at The Journalist’s Resource, aim to help journalists hone their skills in reporting on academic research.
But what factors do science journalists look for to decide whether a social science research study is trustworthy and newsworthy? That’s the question researchers at the University of California, Davis, and the University of Melbourne in Australia examine in a recent study, “How Do Science Journalists Evaluate Psychology Research?” published in September in Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science.
Their online survey of 181 mostly U.S.-based science journalists looked at how and whether they were influenced by four factors in fictitious research summaries: the sample size (number of participants in the study), sample representativeness (whether the participants in the study were from a convenience sample or a more representative sample), the statistical significance level of the result (just barely statistically significant or well below the significance threshold), and the prestige of a researcher’s university.
The researchers found that sample size was the only factor that had a robust influence on journalists’ ratings of how trustworthy and newsworthy a study finding was.
University prestige had no effect, while the effects of sample representativeness and statistical significance were inconclusive.
But there’s nuance to the findings, the authors note.
“I don’t want people to think that science journalists aren’t paying attention to other things, and are only paying attention to sample size,” says Julia Bottesini, an independent researcher, a recent Ph.D. graduate from the Psychology Department at UC Davis, and the first author of the study.
Overall, the results show that “these journalists are doing a very decent job” vetting research findings, Bottesini says.
Also, the findings from the study are not generalizable to all science journalists or other fields of research, the authors note.
“Instead, our conclusions should be circumscribed to U.S.-based science journalists who are at least somewhat familiar with the statistical and replication challenges facing science,” they write. (Over the past decade a series of projects have found that the results of many studies in psychology and other fields can’t be reproduced, leading to what has been called a ‘replication crisis.’)
“This [study] is just one tiny brick in the wall and I hope other people get excited about this topic and do more research on it,” Bottesini says.
More on the study’s findings
The study’s findings can be useful for researchers who want to better understand how science journalists read their research and what kind of intervention — such as teaching journalists about statistics — can help journalists better understand research papers.
“As an academic, I take away the idea that journalists are a great population to try to study because they’re doing something really important and it’s important to know more about what they’re doing,” says Ellen Peters, director of Center for Science Communication Research at the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. Peters, who was not involved in the study, is also a psychologist who studies human judgment and decision-making.
Peters says the study was “overall terrific.” She adds that understanding how journalists do their work “is an incredibly important thing to do because journalists are who reach the majority of the U.S. with science news, so understanding how they’re reading some of our scientific studies and then choosing whether to write about them or not is important.”
The study, conducted between December 2020 and March 2021, is based on an online survey of journalists who said they at least sometimes covered science or other topics related to health, medicine, psychology, social sciences, or well-being. They were offered a $25 Amazon gift card as compensation.
Among the participants, 77% were women, 19% were men, 3% were nonbinary and 1% preferred not to say. About 62% said they had studied physical or natural sciences at the undergraduate level, and 24% at the graduate level. Also, 48% reported having a journalism degree. The study did not include the journalists’ news reporting experience level.
Participants were recruited through the professional network of Christie Aschwanden, an independent journalist and consultant on the study, which could be a source of bias, the authors note.
“Although the size of the sample we obtained (N = 181) suggests we were able to collect a range of perspectives, we suspect this sample is biased by an ‘Aschwanden effect’: that science journalists in the same professional network as C. Aschwanden will be more familiar with issues related to the replication crisis in psychology and subsequent methodological reform, a topic C. Aschwanden has covered extensively in her work,” they write.
Participants were randomly presented with eight of 22 one-paragraph fictitious social and personality psychology research summaries with fictitious authors. The summaries are posted on Open Science Framework, a free and open-source project management tool for researchers by the Center for Open Science, with a mission to increase openness, integrity and reproducibility of research.
For instance, one of the vignettes reads:
“Scientists at Harvard University announced today the results of a study exploring whether introspection can improve cooperation. 550 undergraduates at the university were randomly assigned to either do a breathing exercise or reflect on a series of questions designed to promote introspective thoughts for 5 minutes. Participants then engaged in a cooperative decision-making game, where cooperation resulted in better outcomes. People who spent time on introspection performed significantly better at these cooperative games (t (548) = 3.21, p = 0.001). ‘Introspection seems to promote better cooperation between people,’ says Dr. Quinn, the lead author on the paper.”
In addition to answering multiple-choice survey questions, participants were given the opportunity to answer open-ended questions, such as “What characteristics do you [typically] consider when evaluating the trustworthiness of a scientific finding?”
Bottesini says those responses illuminated how science journalists analyze a research study. Participants often mentioned the prestige of the journal in which it was published or whether the study had been peer-reviewed. Many also seemed to value experimental research designs over observational studies.
Considering statistical significance
When it came to considering p-values, “some answers suggested that journalists do take statistical significance into account, but only very few included explanations that suggested they made any distinction between higher or lower p values; instead, most mentions of p values suggest journalists focused on whether the key result was statistically significant,” the authors write.
Also, many participants mentioned that it was very important to talk to outside experts or researchers in the same field to get a better understanding of the finding and whether it could be trusted, the authors write.
“Journalists also expressed that it was important to understand who funded the study and whether the researchers or funders had any conflicts of interest,” they write.
Participants also “indicated that making claims that were calibrated to the evidence was also important and expressed misgivings about studies for which the conclusions do not follow from the evidence,” the authors write.
In response to the open-ended question, “What characteristics do you [typically] consider when evaluating the trustworthiness of a scientific finding?” some journalists wrote they checked whether the study was overstating conclusions or claims. Below are some of their written responses:
- “Is the researcher adamant that this study of 40 college kids is representative? If so, that’s a red flag.”
- “Whether authors make sweeping generalizations based on the study or take a more measured approach to sharing and promoting it.”
- “Another major point for me is how ‘certain’ the scientists appear to be when commenting on their findings. If a researcher makes claims which I consider to be over-the-top about the validity or impact of their findings, I often won’t cover.”
- “I also look at the difference between what an experiment actually shows versus the conclusion researchers draw from it — if there’s a big gap, that’s a huge red flag.”
Peters says the study’s findings show that “not only are journalists smart, but they have also gone out of their way to get educated about things that should matter.”
What other research shows about science journalists
A 2023 study, published in the International Journal of Communication, based on an online survey of 82 U.S. science journalists, aims to understand what they know and think about open-access research, including peer-reviewed journals and articles that don’t have a paywall, and preprints. Data was collected between October 2021 and February 2022. Preprints are scientific studies that have yet to be peer-reviewed and are shared on open repositories such as medRxiv and bioRxiv. The study finds that its respondents “are aware of OA and related issues and make conscious decisions around which OA scholarly articles they use as sources.”
A 2021 study, published in the Journal of Science Communication, looks at the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the work of science journalists. Based on an online survey of 633 science journalists from 77 countries, it finds that the pandemic somewhat brought scientists and science journalists closer together. “For most respondents, scientists were more available and more talkative,” the authors write. The pandemic has also provided an opportunity to explain the scientific process to the public, and remind them that “science is not a finished enterprise,” the authors write.
More than a decade ago, a 2008 study, published in PLOS Medicine, and based on an analysis of 500 health news stories, found that “journalists usually fail to discuss costs, the quality of the evidence, the existence of alternative options, and the absolute magnitude of potential benefits and harms,” when reporting on research studies. Giving time to journalists to research and understand the studies, giving them space for publication and broadcasting of the stories, and training them in understanding academic research are some of the solutions to fill the gaps, writes Gary Schwitzer, the study author.
Advice for journalists
We asked Bottesini, Peters, Aschwanden and Tamar Wilner, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas, who was not involved in the study, to share advice for journalists who cover research studies. Wilner is conducting a study on how journalism research informs the practice of journalism. Here are their tips:
1. Examine the study before reporting it.
Does the study claim match the evidence? “One thing that makes me trust the paper more is if their interpretation of the findings is very calibrated to the kind of evidence that they have,” says Bottesini. In other words, if the study makes a claim in its results that’s far-fetched, the authors should present a lot of evidence to back that claim.
Not all surprising results are newsworthy. If you come across a surprising finding from a single study, Peters advises you to step back and remember Carl Sagan’s quote: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
How transparent are the authors about their data? For instance, are the authors posting information such as their data and the computer codes they use to analyze the data on platforms such as Open Science Framework, AsPredicted, or The Dataverse Project? Some researchers ‘preregister’ their studies, which means they share how they’re planning to analyze the data before they see them. “Transparency doesn’t automatically mean that a study is trustworthy,” but it gives others the chance to double-check the findings, Bottesini says.
Look at the study design. Is it an experimental study or an observational study? Observational studies can show correlations but not causation.
“Observational studies can be very important for suggesting hypotheses and pointing us towards relationships and associations,” Aschwanden says.
Experimental studies can provide stronger evidence toward a cause, but journalists must still be cautious when reporting the results, she advises. “If we end up implying causality, then once it’s published and people see it, it can really take hold,” she says.
Know the difference between preprints and peer-reviewed, published studies. Peer-reviewed papers tend to be of higher quality than those that are not peer-reviewed. Read our tip sheet on the difference between preprints and journal articles.
Beware of predatory journals. Predatory journals are journals that “claim to be legitimate scholarly journals, but misrepresent their publishing practices,” according to a 2020 journal article, published in the journal Toxicologic Pathology, “Predatory Journals: What They Are and How to Avoid Them.”
2. Zoom in on data.
Read the methods section of the study. The methods section of the study usually appears after the introduction and background section. “To me, the methods section is almost the most important part of any scientific paper,” says Aschwanden. “It’s amazing to me how often you read the design and the methods section, and anyone can see that it’s a flawed design. So just giving things a gut-level check can be really important.”
What’s the sample size? Not all good studies have large numbers of participants but pay attention to the claims a study makes with a small sample size. “If you have a small sample, you calibrate your claims to the things you can tell about those people and don’t make big claims based on a little bit of evidence,” says Bottesini.
But also remember that factors such as sample size and p-value are not “as clear cut as some journalists might assume,” says Wilner.
How representative of a population is the study sample? “If the study has a non-representative sample of, say, undergraduate students, and they’re making claims about the general population, that’s kind of a red flag,” says Bottesini. Aschwanden points to the acronym WEIRD, which stands for “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic,” and is used to highlight a lack of diversity in a sample. Studies based on such samples may not be generalizable to the entire population, she says.
Look at the p-value. Statistical significance is both confusing and controversial, but it’s important to consider. Read our tip sheet, “5 Things Journalists Need to Know About Statistical Significance,” to better understand it.
3. Talk to scientists not involved in the study.
If you’re not sure about the quality of a study, ask for help. “Talk to someone who is an expert in study design or statistics to make sure that [the study authors] use the appropriate statistics and that methods they use are appropriate because it’s amazing to me how often they’re not,” says Aschwanden.
Get an opinion from an outside expert. It’s always a good idea to present the study to other researchers in the field, who have no conflicts of interest and are not involved in the research you’re covering and get their opinion. “Don’t take scientists at their word. Look into it. Ask other scientists, preferably the ones who don’t have a conflict of interest with the research,” says Bottesini.
4. Remember that a single study is simply one piece of a growing body of evidence.
“I have a general rule that a single study doesn’t tell us very much; it just gives us proof of concept,” says Peters. “It gives us interesting ideas. It should be retested. We need an accumulation of evidence.”
Aschwanden says as a practice, she tries to avoid reporting stories about individual studies, with some exceptions such as very large, randomized controlled studies that have been underway for a long time and have a large number of participants. “I don’t want to say you never want to write a single-study story, but it always needs to be placed in the context of the rest of the evidence that we have available,” she says.
Wilner advises journalists to spend some time looking at the scope of research on the study’s specific topic and learn how it has been written about and studied up to that point.
“We would want science journalists to be reporting balance of evidence, and not focusing unduly on the findings that are just in front of them in a most recent study,” Wilner says. “And that’s a very difficult thing to as journalists to do because they’re being asked to make their article very newsy, so it’s a difficult balancing act, but we can try and push journalists to do more of that.”
5. Remind readers that science is always changing.
“Science is always two steps forward, one step back,” says Peters. Give the public a notion of uncertainty, she advises. “This is what we know today. It may change tomorrow, but this is the best science that we know of today.”
Aschwanden echoes the sentiment. “All scientific results are provisional, and we need to keep that in mind,” she says. “It doesn’t mean that we can’t know anything, but it’s very important that we don’t overstate things.”
Authors of a study published in PNAS in January analyzed more than 14,000 psychology papers and found that replication success rates differ widely by psychology subfields. That study also found that papers that could not be replicated received more initial press coverage than those that could.
The authors note that the media “plays a significant role in creating the public’s image of science and democratizing knowledge, but it is often incentivized to report on counterintuitive and eye-catching results.”
Ideally, the news media would have a positive relationship with replication success rates in psychology, the authors of the PNAS study write. “Contrary to this ideal, however, we found a negative association between media coverage of a paper and the paper’s likelihood of replication success,” they write. “Therefore, deciding a paper’s merit based on its media coverage is unwise. It would be valuable for the media to remind the audience that new and novel scientific results are only food for thought before future replication confirms their robustness.”
Additional reading
Uncovering the Research Behaviors of Reporters: A Conceptual Framework for Information Literacy in Journalism
Katerine E. Boss, et al. Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, October 2022.
The Problem with Psychological Research in the Media
Steven Stosny. Psychology Today, September 2022.
Critically Evaluating Claims
Megha Satyanarayana, The Open Notebook, January 2022.
How Should Journalists Report a Scientific Study?
Charles Binkley and Subramaniam Vincent. Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, September 2020.
What Journalists Get Wrong About Social Science: Full Responses
Brian Resnick. Vox, January 2016.
From The Journalist’s Resource
8 Ways Journalists Can Access Academic Research for Free
5 Things Journalists Need to Know About Statistical Significance
5 Common Research Designs: A Quick Primer for Journalists
5 Tips for Using PubPeer to Investigate Scientific Research Errors and Misconduct
What’s Standard Deviation? 4 Things Journalists Need to Know
This article first appeared on The Journalist’s Resource and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Watermelon vs Grapes – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing watermelon to grapes, we picked the watermelon.
Why?
It was close! And certainly both are very healthy.
Both fruits are (like most fruits) good sources of water, fiber, vitamins, and minerals. Any sugar content (of which grapes are slightly higher) is offset by their fiber content and polyphenols.
See: Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
While both are good sources of vitamins A and C, watermelon has about 10x as much vitamin A, and about 6x as much vitamin C (give or take individual plants, how they were grown, etc, but the overall balance is clearly in watermelon’s favor).
When it comes to antioxidants, both fruits are good, but again watermelon is the more potent source. Grapes famously contain resveratrol, and they also contain quercetin, albeit you’d have to eat quite a lot of grapes to get a large portion.
Now, having to eat a lot of grapes might not sound like a terrible fate (who else finds that the grapes are gone by the time the groceries are put away?), but we are comparing the fruits here, and on a list of “100 best foods for quercetin”, for example, grapes took 99th place.
Watermelon’s main antioxidant meanwhile is lycopene, and watermelon is one of the best sources of lycopene in existence (better even than tomatoes).
We’ll have to do a main feature about lycopene sometime soon, so watch this space
Take care!
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Decoding Hormone Balancing in Ads
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It’s Q&A Time!
This is the bit whereby each week, we respond to subscriber questions/requests/etc
Have something you’d like to ask us, or ask us to look into? Hit reply to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom, and a Real Human™ will be glad to read it!
Q: As to specific health topics, I would love to see someone address all these Instagram ads targeted to women that claim “You only need to ‘balance your hormones’ to lose weight, get ripped, etc.” What does this mean? Which hormones are they all talking about? They all seem to be selling a workout program and/or supplements or something similar, as they are ads, after all. Is there any science behind this stuff or is it mostly hot air, as I suspect?
Thank you for asking this, as your question prompted yesterday’s main feature, What Does “Balancing Your Hormones” Even Mean?
That’s a great suggestion also about addressing ads (and goes for health-related things in general, not just hormonal stuff) and examining their claims, what they mean, how they work (if they work!), and what’s “technically true but may
be misleading* cause confusion”*We don’t want companies to sue us, of course.
Only, we’re going to need your help for this one, subscribers!
See, here at 10almonds we practice what we preach. We limit screen time, we focus on our work when working, and simply put, we don’t see as many ads as our thousands of subscribers do. Also, ads tend to be targeted to the individual, and often vary from country to country, so chances are good that we’re not seeing the same ads that you’re seeing.
So, how about we pull together as a bit of a 10almonds community project?
- Step 1: add our email address to your contacts list, if you haven’t already
- Step 2: When you see an ad you’re curious about, select “share” (there is usually an option to share ads, but if not, feel free to screenshot or such)
- Step 3: Send the ad to us by email
We’ll do the rest! Whenever we have enough ads to review, we’ll do a special on the topic.
We will categorically not be able to do this without you, so please do join in—Many thanks in advance!
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Deskbound – by Kelly Starrett and Glen Cordoza
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We’ve all heard that “sitting is the new smoking”, and whether or not that’s an exaggeration (the jury’s out), one thing that is clear is that sitting is very bad.
Popular advice is “here’s how to sit with good posture and stretch your neck sometimes”… but that advice tends to come from companies that pay people to sit for a long time. They might not be the a very unbiased source.
Starrett and Cordoza offer better. After one opening chapter covering the multifarious ways sitting ruins our health, the rest of the book is all advice, covering:
- The principles of how the body is supposed to be
- The most important movements that we should be doing
- A dynamic workstation setup
- This is great, because “get a standing desk” tends to present more questions than answers, and can cause as much harm as good if done wrong
- The authors also cover how to progressively cut down on sitting, rather than try to go cold-turkey.
- They also recognize that not everyone can stand at all, and…
- Optimizing the sitting position, for when we must sit
- Exercises to maintain our general mobility and compensate about as well as we can for the body-unfriendly nature of modern life.
The book is mostly explanations, so at 682 pages, you can imagine it’s not just “get up, lazybones!”. Rather, things are explained in such detail (and with many high-quality medical diagrams) so that we can truly understand them.
Most of us have gone through life knowing we should have “better posture” and “move more”… but without the details, that can be hard to execute correctly, and worse, we can even sabotage our bodies unknowingly with incorrect form.
This book straightens all that out very comprehensively, and we highly recommend it.
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Rebuilding Milo – by Dr. Aaron Horschig
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The author, a doctor of physical therapy, also wrote another book that we reviewed a while ago, “The Squat Bible” (which is also excellent, by the way). This time, it’s all about resistance training in the context of fixing a damaged body.
Resistance training is, of course, very important for general health, especially as we get older. However, it’s easy to do it wrongly and injure oneself, and indeed, if one is carrying some injury and/or chronic pain, it becomes necessary to know how to fix that before continuing—without just giving up on training, because that would be a road to ruin in terms of muscle and bone maintenance.
The book explains all the necessary anatomy, with clear illustrations too. He talks equipment, keeping things simple and practical, letting the reader know which things actually matter in terms of quality, and what things are just unnecessary fanciness and/or counterproductive.
Most of the book is divided into chapters per body part, e.g. back pain, shoulder pain, ankle pain, hip pain, knee pain, etc; what’s going on, and how to fix it to rebuild it stronger.
The style is straightforward and simple, neither overly clinical nor embellished with overly casual fluff. Just, clear simple explanations and instructions.
Bottom line: if you’d like to get stronger and/or level up your resistance training, but are worried about an injury or chronic condition, this book can set you in good order.
Click here to check out Rebuilding Milo, and rebuild yourself!
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Early Bird Or Night Owl? Genes vs Environment
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A Sliding Slope?
In Tuesday’s newsletter, we asked you how much control you believe we have over our sleep schedule, and got the above-depicted, below-described, set of responses:
- 45% said “most people can control it; some people with sleep disorders cannot
- 35% said “our genes predispose us to early/late, but we can slide it a bit
- 15% said: “going against our hardwired sleep schedules is a road to ruin”
- 5% said “anyone can adjust their sleep schedule with enough willpower”
You may be wondering: what’s with those single-digit numbers in the graph there? And the answer is: Tuesday’s email didn’t go out at the usual time due to a scheduling mistake (sorry!), which is probably what affected the number of responses (poll response levels vary, but are usually a lot higher than this).
Note: yes, this does mean most people who read our newsletter don’t vote. So, not to sound like a politician on the campaign trail, but… Your vote counts! We always love reading your comments when you add those, too—often they provide context that allow us to tailor what we focus on in our articles
However, those are the responses we got, so here we are!
What does the science say?
Anyone can adjust their sleep with enough willpower: True or False?
False, simply. It’s difficult for most people, but for many people with sleep disorders, it is outright impossible.
In a battle of narcolepsy vs willpower, for example, no amount of willpower will stop the brain from switching to sleep mode when it thinks it’s time to sleep:
❝Narcolepsy is the most common neurological cause of chronic sleepiness. The discovery about 20 years ago that narcolepsy is caused by selective loss of the neurons producing orexins sparked great advances in the field
[There is also] developing evidence that narcolepsy is an autoimmune disorder that may be caused by a T cell-mediated attack on the orexin neurons and explain how these new perspectives can inform better therapeutic approaches.❞
~ Dr. Carrie Mahoney et al. (lightly edited for brevity)
Source: The neurobiological basis of narcolepsy
For further reading, especially if this applies to you or a loved one:
Our genes predispose us to early/late, but we can slide it a bit: True or False?
True! First, about our genes predisposing us:
…and also:
Gene distinguishes early birds from night owls and helps predict time of death
Now, as for the “can slide it a bit”, this is really just a function of the general categories of “early bird” and “night owl” spanning periods of time that allow for a few hours’ wiggle-room at either side.
However, it is recommended to make any actual changes more gradually, with the Sleep Foundation going so far as to recommend 30 minutes, or even just 15 minutes, of change per day:
Sleep Foundation | How to Fix Your Sleep Schedule
Going against our hardwired sleep schedule is a road to ruin: True or False?
False, contextually. By this we mean: our “hardwired” sleep schedule is (for most of us), genetically predisposed but not predetermined.
Also, genetic predispositions are not necessarily always good for us; one would not argue, for example, for avoiding going against a genetic predisposition to addiction.
Some genetic predispositions are just plain bad for us, and genes can be a bit of a lottery.
That said, we do recommend getting some insider knowledge (literally), by getting personal genomics tests done, if that’s a viable option for you, so you know what’s really a genetic trait (and what to do with that information) and what’s probably caused by something else (and what to do with that information):
Genetic Testing: Health Benefits & Methods
Take care!
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In Praise of Slowness – by Carl Honoré
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This isn’t just about “taking the time to smell the roses” although yes, that too. Rather, it’s mostly about looking at what drives us to speed everything up in the first place, and correcting where appropriate.
If your ancestors had time to eat fruit and lie in the sun, then why, with all of modern technology now available, are you harangued 16+ hours a day by the pressures of universally synchronized timepieces?
Honoré places a lot of the blame squarely on the industrial revolution; whereas previously our work would be limited by craftsmen who take a year to complete something, or the pace of animals in a field, now humans had to keep up with the very machines that were supposed to serve us—and it’s only got worse from there.
This book takes a tour of many areas affected by this artificial “need for speed”, and how it harms not just our work-life balance, but also our eating habits, the medical attention we get, and even our love lives.
The prescription is deceptively simple, “slow down”. But Honoré dedicates the final three chapters of the book to the “how” of this, when of course there’s a lot the outside world will not accommodate—but where we can slow down, there’s good to be gained.
Bottom line: if you’ve ever felt that you could get all of your life into order if you could just pause the outside world for a week or two, this is the book for you.
Click here to check out In Praise of Slowness, and make time for what matters most!
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