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Andreski is most impatient with the "quantified trivialities," which are characteristic of the social sciences. He believes that the really significant traits of people can never be measured, and that most of what can be counted and tabulated—answers to the questionnaires so often distributed by sociologists, for instance—is inconsequential.
Some behavior experts use "pseudo-mathematical decorations" to make their work look scientific, Andreski says. In analyzing myths, for example, Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss portrays a fight between two animals by writing "jaguar = anteater (-1)." If that sign is interpreted in its mathematical sense, the sentence means that a jaguar equals one divided by an anteater—a conclusion that Andreski describes as "phantasmagoric." Yet such signs work like "hallucinogenic incantations, inducing fantasies that the mind has been expanded to computer-like dimensions."
Another symbol, the letter n, which is often borrowed from mathematical formulas by social scientists, is equally hallucinogenic. It stands for the word need. Thus Harvard Psychologist David McClelland, for one, writes n Ach when he wants only to convey a person's need to achieve great things, or n Aff to express the urge to affiliate with or belong to a group. Some of his colleagues, Andreski writes, must in turn be moved by n Bam, the need to bamboozle.
Though he specifically excludes the prominent men named in his book from conscious chicanery, he charges that many social scientists are often less devoted to truth than to money and academic status, both of which may be too readily available. In the social sciences, "utterly ignorant and barely literate individuals find it quite easy to become researchers and professors." To substantiate his charge of illiteracy, Andreski cites a vocabulary test on which English social science students scored lower than everyone else, including engineers and physicists.
Andreski is convinced that "much of what passes as scientific study of human behaviour boils down to sorcery," and suggests that the lay reader learn to differentiate between the mumbo jumbo and the occasional work that is valuable. How? By testing his brainpower on a few hard books like Bertrand Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy and J.H. Woodger's Biological Principles. If these volumes are comprehensible but the work of a particular social scientist seems obscure, "then you can justifiably suspect that it might all be nonsense."