In recent years there has been an influx of pop psychology into training courses in companies. I suppose they need to talk about something to justify their salaries.
For example there is a claim that content is almost irrelevant when making a big presentation and that what counts most is body language. I never bought into this. When I challenged it about 10 years ago as being focussed on USA culture, the reply I got was that it has been tested across a range of cultures and is universal. I call bullshit on that. Content is important, certainly in many cultures and countries. The USA has developed such a fake and superficial approach to work and information that it might even have some truth there but the USA is a country packed full of craziness.
More recently, training courses by consultants have been telling the story that willpower is a limited resource. When you use it up, you run out. The story goes that this is why diets fail, why projects fail, etc etc. We should conserve our willpower for the “right things” and let it recharge like a battery. It turns out these consultants were selling Roy F. Baumeister’s ideas on self-regulation, willpower and ego-deletion which are quite possibly just artefacts of publication bias and other types of bias. The consultancy and training industry which profits from disseminating these ideas will no doubt carry on spreading this rubbish before moving onto some alternative rubbish, maybe even preaching the opposite in a few years time.
Why do big companies waste everyone’s time with this unsubstantiated poppycock?
Liam Mor's Blog