I am, by nature, an optimist. I almost always think things will turn out well, and even when they break I am confident that I can fix them. My optimism, however, has not always served me well. Twice I have been hit by cars while cycling— full-on, through-the-windshield impacts that were entirely the result of my blissful attitude that the street corners I had successfully negotiated hundreds of times before would not suddenly materialize an automobile in my path. Such high-impact, unpredictable and rare events are what author Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “black swans.” Given enough time, no upward sloping trend line is immune from dramatic collapse.

A bike crash as a black swan is, in fact, an apt metaphor for what the investigative journalist and natural-born skeptic Barbara Ehrenreich believes happened to America as a result of the positive-thinking movement. In her engaging and tightly reasoned book Bright-Sided (order on DVD Ehrenreich’s lecture at Caltech), she shows how the positive-psychology movement was born in the halcyon days of the 1990s when the economy was soaring, housing prices were skyrocketing, and positive-thinking gurus were cashing in on the motivation business. Academic psychologists, armed with a veneer of scientific jargon, wanted in on the action.

The shallow bafflegab of such positive-thinking pioneers as Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking, 1952) and Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich, 1960) or the “prosperity gospel” preachings of such contemporary “pastorpreneurs” as Frederick “Reverend Ike” Eikerenkoetter, Robert Schuller and Joel Osteen are predictably data-light and anecdote-heavy. But one expects better of respected experimental psychologists such as Martin E. P. Seligman, who almost singlehandedly launched the positive-psychology movement in academia that is, according to the Positive Psychology Center website, “the scientific study of the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive.” Ehrenreich systematically deconstructs—and then demolishes—what little science there is behind the positive psychology movement and the allegedly salubrious effects of positive thinking. Evidence is thin. Statistical significance levels are narrow. What few robust findings there are often prove to be either nonreplicable or contradicted by later research. And correlations (between, say, happiness and health) are not causations. Seligman and his colleagues drank the positive-thinking Kool-Aid, Ehrenreich shows, but she provides the antidote.

Take Seligman’s “happiness equation” (physics envy lives!): H = S + C + V (Happiness = your Set range + the Circumstances of your life + the factors under your Voluntary control). As Ehrenreich notes, “if you’re going to add these things up you will have to have the same units [of measurement] for H (happy thoughts per day?) as for V, S, and C.” When she confronted Seligman with this problem in an interview, “his face twisted into a scowl, and he told me that I didn’t understand ‘beta weighting’ and should go home and Google it.” She did, “finding that ‘beta weights’ are the coefficients of the ‘predictors’ in a regression equation used to find statistical correlations between variables. But Seligman had presented his formula as an ordinary equation, like E = mc², not as an oversimplified regression analysis, leaving himself open to literal-minded questions like: How do we know H is a simple sum of the variables, rather than some more complicated relationship, possibly involving ‘second order’ effects such as CV, or C times V?” We don’t know, thereby rendering the equation nothing more than a slogan gussied up in math.

Isn’t positive thinking better than negative thinking? All other things being equal, sure, but the alternative to being either an optimist or a pessimist is to be a realist. “Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things ‘as they are,’ or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions,” Ehrenreich concludes. “What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings.”

Feelings matter, of course, but the first principle of skepticism is not to fool ourselves, and feelings—both positive and negative—too often trump reason. In the end, reality must take precedence over fantasy, regardless of how it makes us feel.

An old yarn about a classic marketing con game on the secret of wealth instructs you to write a book about how to make a lot of money and sell it through the mail. When your marks receive the book, they discover the secret — write a book about how to make a lot of money and sell it through the mail.

A confidence scheme similar to this can be found in The Secret (Simon & Schuster, 2006), a book and DVD by Rhonda Byrne and a cadre of self-help gurus that, thanks to Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement, have now sold more than three million copies combined. The secret is the so-called law of attraction. Like attracts like. Positive thoughts sally forth from your body as magnetic energy, then return in the form of whatever it was you were thinking about. Such as money. “The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts,” we are told. Damn those poor Kenyans. If only they weren’t such pessimistic sourpusses. The film’s promotional trailer is filled with such vainglorious money mantras as “Everything I touch turns to gold,” “I am a money magnet,” and, my favorite, “There is more money being printed for me right now.” Where? Kinko’s?

A pantheon of shiny, happy people assures viewers that The Secret is grounded in science: “It has been proven scientifically that a positive thought is hundreds of times more powerful than a negative thought.” No, it hasn’t. “Our physiology creates disease to give us feedback, to let us know we have an imbalanced perspective, and we’re not loving and we’re not grateful.” Those ungrateful cancer patients. “You’ve got enough power in your body to illuminate a whole city for nearly a week.” Sure, if you convert your body’s hydrogen into energy through nuclear fission. “Thoughts are sending out that magnetic signal that is drawing the parallel back to you.” But in magnets, opposites attract — positive is attracted to negative. “Every thought has a frequency … If you are thinking that thought over and over again you are emitting that frequency.”

The brain does produce electrical activity from the ion currents flowing among neurons during synaptic transmission, and in accordance with Maxwell’s equations any electric current produces a magnetic field. But as neuroscientist Russell A. Poldrack of the University of California, Los Angeles, explained to me, these fields are minuscule and can be measured only by using an extremely sensitive superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) in a room heavily shielded against outside magnetic sources. Plus, remember the inverse square law: the intensity of an energy wave radiating from a source is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from that source. An object twice as far away from the source of energy as another object of the same size receives only onefourth the energy that the closer object receives. The brain’s magnetic field of 10^–15 teslas quickly dissipates from the skull and is promptly swamped by other magneticsources, not to mention the earth’s magnetic field of 10^–5 teslas, which overpowers it by 10 orders of magnitude!

Ceteris paribus, it is undoubtedly better to think positive thoughts than negative ones. But in the real world, all other things are never equal, no matter how sanguine your outlook. Just ask the survivors of Auschwitz. If the law of attraction is true, then the Jews—along with the butchered Turkish-Armenians, the raped Nanking Chinese, the massacred Native Americans and the enslaved African-Americans — had it coming. The latter exemplar is especially poignant given Oprah’s backing of The Secret on her Web site: “The energy you put into the world — both good and bad — is exactly what comes back to you. This means you create the circumstances of your life with the choices you make every day.” Africans created the circumstances for Europeans to enslave them?

Oprah, please, withdraw your support of this risible twaddle — as you did when you discovered that James Frey’s memoir was a million little lies — and tell your vast following that prosperity comes from a good dollop of hard work and creative thinking, the way you did it.

According to self-help guru Tony Robbins, walking barefoot across 1,000-degree red-hot coals “is an experience in belief. It teaches people in the most visceral sense that they can change, they can grow, they can stretch themselves, they can do things they never thought possible.”

I’ve done three fire walks myself, without chanting “cool moss” (as Robbins has his clients do) or thinking positive thoughts. I didn’t get burned. Why? Because wood is a poor conductor of heat, particularly through the dead calloused skin on the bottom of your feet and especially if you scoot acros the bed of coals as quickly as fire walkers are wont to do. Think of a cake in a 400-degree oven — you can touch the cake, a poor conductor, without getting burned, but not the metal cake pan. Physics explains the “how” of fire walking. To understand the “why,” we must turn to psychology.

In 1980 I attended a bicycle industry trade convention whose keynote speaker was Mark Victor Hansen, now well known as the coauthor of the wildly popular Chicken Soup for the Soul book series that includes the Teenage Soul, Prisoner’s Soul and Christian’s Soul (but no Skeptic’s Soul). I was surprised that Hansen didn’t require a speaker’s fee, until I saw what happened after his talk: people were lined up out the door to purchase his motivation tapes. I was one of them. I listened to those tapes over and over during training rides in preparation for bicycle races.

The “over and over” part is the key to understanding the “why” of what investigative journalist Steve Salerno calls the Self-Help and Actualization Movement (SHAM). In his new book Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless (Crown Publishing Group, 2005), he explains how the talks and tapes offer a momentary boost of inspiration that fades after a few weeks, turning buyers into repeat customers.

While Salerno was a self-help book editor for Rodale Press (whose motto at the time was “to show people how they can use the power of their bodies and minds to make their lives better”), extensive market surveys revealed that “the most likely customer for a book on any given topic was someone who had bought a similar book within the preceding eighteen months.” The irony of “the eighteen month rule” for this genre, Salerno says, is this: “If what we sold worked, one would expect lives to improve. One would not expect people to need further help from us — at least not in that same problem area, and certainly not time and time again.”

Surrounding SHAM is a bulletproof shield: if your life does not get better, it is your fault — your thoughts were not positive enough. The solution? More of the same self-help — or at least the same message repackaged into new products. Consider the multiple permutations of John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus — Mars and Venus Together Forever, Mars and Venus in the Bedroom, The Mars and Venus Diet and Exercise Solution — not to mention the Mars and Venus board game, musical and Club Med getaway. SHAM takes advantage by cleverly marketing the dualism of victimization and empowerment. Like a religion that defines people as inherently sinful so that they require forgiveness (provided exclusively by that religion), SHAM gurus insist that we are all victims of our demonic “inner children” who are produced by traumatic pasts that create negative “tapes” that replay over and over in our minds. Redemption comes through empowering yourself with new “life scripts,” supplied by the masters themselves, for prices that range from $500 one-day workshops to Robbins’s $5,995 “Date with Destiny” seminar.

Do these programs work? No one knows. According to Salerno, no scientific evidence indicates that any of the countless SHAM techniques — from fire walking to 12-stepping — works better than doing something else, or even doing nothing. The law of large numbers means that given the millions of people who have tried SHAMs, inevitably some will improve. As with alternative-medicine nostrums, the body naturally heals itself and whatever the patient was doing to help gets the credit.

Patient, heal thyself — the true meaning of self-help.