[shoyer]

Here’s the paper: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/53e2/70a3f29cf556849362130e...

Unfortunately on closer examination the results look pretty meaningless to me. The study involves rather small numbers (e.g., 4/33 vs 10/44 divorces), but an even bigger issue is that the “control” arm in this study wasn’t selected randomly, but rather consisted of couples “declining active treatment” or who “could not be scheduled for active treatment.”

So a better summary might be “Divorce rate cut in half for coupling willing and able to take part in a relationship building program, of any sort.”

If these psychologists had only been a bit less greedy about wanting to compare three different treatment arms rather than a real control arm, they could have set up a study that could actually have taught us something...