Beyond Belief: How Evidence Shows What Really Works (Book Review)

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Image by Hilda Bastian, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

There are several reasons to buy Helen Pearson’s excellent new book, Beyond Belief: How Evidence Shows What Really Works—whether you want to learn about movements for better evidence in various fields, or even if you already know a lot about one or two of them. It’s an engrossing page turner, with an overview of evidence advocacy in medicine—the OG evidence movement—social policy, policing, conservation, business, and education. (If you would like to know more about the scope of this book, there are excellent summaries in book reviews here and here.)

“Understanding evidence,” writes Pearson, “is empowering. It allows people to think more critically about the claims they encounter in their own lives—that a wonder drug will improve health, a government policy will bolster schools, or a parenting fad will benefit children.”

She explains all this by telling stories. A major strength for the accessibility of the book’s ideas is its focus on some leaders of the movements Pearson highlights, based on extensive interviews. This, she writes, enabled her to “show their motivations, personalities, and, through their eyes, the obstacles they encountered and how they dealt with them.” Pearson acknowledges that this inevitably reflects their passions, without the counterweight of the views of critics.

The stories make Pearson’s book, and its ideas, engrossing reading. Even though I have heard some of these origin stories dozens and dozens of times, Pearson has extracted more detail about them than the usual telling. This adds a lot of richness to the folklore. Even when there isn’t new detail, she tells the stories so well, I kept reading—except when she put Emily Oster forward as a leading light. (Don’t get me started!)

Picking the wrong role models isn’t the only pitfall of the heroes’ journeys method, and Pearson acknowledges some of the limitations. After all, some of the claims that we have to think critically about are the claims we make about ourselves. That kept striking me as I read. I am bothered by the semi-mythical way the historical record of the evidence-based movement is skewing.

I was part of this scene from the 1980s, and I’ve been deeply involved in several other kinds of movements over the years. I’ve never encountered one that wasn’t packed with soap-opera-level drama and its fair share of conflict-loving and ambitious big egos. Those aspects don’t have to define a group, but they do cause damage along the way, and sometimes quite a lot of it. Passion can be a great source of energy—and of poor judgments. It’s critical to include fervor-driven harms in the picture, I think, to understand a movement and its failures as well as its successes.

Going only to the keepers of the flame wouldn’t be a great way to write a history or analyze a movement, and of course, that’s not what this book sets out to do. It is a way, though, to spread ideas and inspire others. High-level awareness-raising about the importance of reliable evidence is critically needed right now, and I think Pearson’s book does that wonderfully well. I hope it reaches far and wide.

Sign up for free online events with Helen Pearson talking about the book in May and June 2026 here.

Read an excerpt or buy the book from Princeton University Press, or shop online.

Follow Helen Pearson on Bluesky or LinkedIn.

You can keep up with my work at my newsletter, Living With Evidence. And I’m active on Mastodon: @hildabast@mastodon.online and less so on BlueSky (hildabast.bsky.social).

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Disclosure: I got involved with the evidence movement in medicine in the last half of the 1980s. I’m mentioned in this book, as co-chair with Peter Tugwell of the meeting that officially founded the Cochrane Collaboration in 1993. One of the leaders Pearson spotlights is a close friend of mine, and another was my PhD supervisor.

The cartoon is my own (CC BY-NC-ND license). (More cartoons at Statistically Funny.)