Recently, someone asked how the “5% success rate” stat was made up. Here is my answer, edited to give more information and context.
To summarize, the real success rate, based on current science and randomized high quality studies, is 42%. The 5% stat has been discredited. There’s actually two primary places the discredited number comes from, as well as a third figure which I haven’t seen used for a long time.
For
people who have long since forgotten their math, a numerator is the
number we divide (the top of a fraction); the denominator is the amount
we divide by (the bottom of a fraction). For example, 3/4 (.75 or 75%) has a
numerator of three and a denominator of four.
The 1990 Triennial Survey
One is a 1990 survey of AA membership. It included a graph which was poorly labeled and confusing to read. People misread it, and thought it showed a 5% “success rate”, when, in fact, the graph shows a 26% one-year retention rate (PDF file).
Don McIntire, in a 2000 paper entitled “How Well Does A.A. Work?”, claimed, without evidence, that there was a 81% first month dropout rate, and that “at the end of 90 days, only 10% of newcomers are still present”. [1] This, despite the fact the original triennial survey directly contradicts him, stating that “about half those who come to A.A. are gone within three months.” There is nothing in the original 1990 triennial survey discussing an 81% one-month dropout rate; the number appears to come from people who didn't understand the graph and decided that's what it showed without any thought of how AA was supposed to measure the people who dropped out in their first month, since AA doesn't keep membership records nor meeting attendance records.
The actual numerator was the number of alcoholics in their 12th month sober; the denominator was all the alcoholics in their first year in the survey.
The Sober Truth
The other big source for the 5% figure comes from a 2014 book by Lance Dodes, The Sober Truth. What Lance Dodes did was look at a then 34-year-old study (and not the 8-year-old Moos and Moos 2006 study he was aware of—he mentions it elsewhere—but which has better numbers for AA success) and decide only people who both had 2.5 years or more sober and were still regularly attending AA were a “success”. Sober, but not regularly going to AA, not a “success”. Regularly going to AA, but only 2 years sober, also not a “success”. Rather disingenuous on Dodes’s part if you ask me, especially since Dodes ignored the fact that 1980 study showed that, the more people went to AA, the more likely they would be sober (e.g. 42% of regular AA attenders were sober one year or more in the graph Dodes used to calculate his 5% figure, compared to 16% for people who never went to AA). [2]
The numerator was the alcoholics in a survey both regularly going to AA and with over 2.5 years sober; the denominator was all of the people in the survey who went to at least one AA meeting.
Reading Vaillant poorly
This hasn’t been attributed to Vaillant since about 2015 or so; it is usually described as being a “Harvard study” which supposedly shows a 95% recidivism rate.
The old Orange Papers site claimed that Vaillant's book The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited showed a
5% success rate, but that is a myth. The old green-papers site from the same era refuted
it quite nicely: http://web.archive.org/web/20150329052802/http://green-papers.org/ “95% of patients had relapsed at some time during the study, even
though many of these eventually attained sobriety. [...] It's well known
that most severe alcoholics only get sober after many relapses, to the
extent that relapses can be considered part of the recovery process. So
don't pretend that's a failure. [...] And anyway, this was a study of a
health network, not AA.”
Cochrane 2020: 42% success rate
Now that we have gone over three discredited figures, let’s show some more accurate figures for AA’s success rate. The 2020 Cochrane Report on Alcoholics Anonymous shows a 42% success rate for AA-centered therapies, compared to 35% for the other therapies.
The numerator here is all of the people who were abstinent from alcohol one year after the survey was started; the denominator is people serious enough about their sobriety to get regular therapy.
Footnotes