3
TAKE THEIR PERSPECTIVE
Forty-one alcoholics walked into a treatment center (I promise, it’s not the setup to a bad joke). A few of these study participants were given a self-help book, while the rest were divided among nine therapists to receive different kinds of alcoholism counseling. At the end of a 12-week period, the people who received the self-help book had a 60 percent success rate. The average success rate for the nine counselors was 61 percent.1
Now, if we stop there, it seems like good evidence that alcoholism counseling and reading a self-help book deliver the same results. Why would anyone spend money and time on counselors when an inexpensive book works just as well? But the researchers didn’t stop there. They looked beyond the ...
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