From the Bookshelf of The Reading Challenge Group…

You Are Not So Smart

David McRaney

Start date: December 1, 2016

Finish date: December 31, 2016

Discussion: Group Read Archive 2014-16

Why we're reading this: Genre Group Read (Humour) - December 2016
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Group Read Archive 2014-16

Genre Group Read (Humour) - December 2016 - You Are Not So Smart
By Allison , Quest Hound · 11 posts · 30 views

last updated Dec 28, 2016 04:05PM

Alternate Group Read (Classics) - December 2016 - Mansfield Park
By Allison , Quest Hound · 5 posts · 18 views

last updated Dec 04, 2016 09:34AM

What Members Thought

Dec 13, 2016 Cindy (BKind2Books) rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2016-genre-challenge

This was an entertaining look at how the mind tricks itself - if you've ever watched Brain Games , then you've probably heard of some of these concepts. Of course, it's all clearly part of the entire package - we do things which on the surface look rational, but turn out to be that old friend "monkey mind". We have not come so far evolutionally and are not so smart after all.

Some topics covered:

Priming - priming works best when you are on autopilot. You are unaware of how unaware you are.
Confa This was an entertaining look at how the mind tricks itself - if you've ever watched Brain Games , then you've probably heard of some of these concepts. Of course, it's all clearly part of the entire package - we do things which on the surface look rational, but turn out to be that old friend "monkey mind". We have not come so far evolutionally and are not so smart after all.

Some topics covered:

Priming - priming works best when you are on autopilot. You are unaware of how unaware you are.
Confabulation - You are a story you tell yourself.
The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy - You see patterns everywhere, but some of them are formed by chance and mean nothing.
Procrastination - Procrastination is all about choosing want over should because you don't have a plan for those times when you can expect to be tempted.
Normalcy bias - the sort of people who survive are the sort of people who prepare for the worst and practice ahead of time. Normalcy bias is a state of mind out of which you are attempting to make everything OK by believing it still is.
The Argument from Ignorance - Lack of proof neither confirms nor denies a proposition.
The Straw Man Fallacy - The straw man fallacy takes the facts and assertions of your opponent and replaces them with an artificial argument you feel more comfortable dealing with.
The Just-World Fallacy - You want the world to be fair, so you pretend it is. Just remember the unfair nature of the world, the randomness of birthright, means people often suffer adversity and enjoy opulence through no effort of their own.
The Public Goods Game - Without some form of regulation, slackers and cheaters will crash economic systems because people don't want to feel like suckers.
Groupthink - It turns out, for any plan to work, every team needs at least one asshole who doesn't give a shit if he or she gets fired or exiled or excommunicated. So the next time you are in a group of people trying to reach consensus, be the asshole. Every group needs one, and it might as well be you.
The Affect Heuristic - first impression matter more than you realize. Your risk-avoidance systems are great when the situation is concrete but are pretty crappy when dealing with abstraction.
Selling Out - we all sell out, because we all buy things.
Catharsis - the more effective approach is to just stop. Take your anger off of the stove.
Extinction burst - Classical conditioning keeps you alive. You learn quickly to avoid that which may harm you and seek out that which makes you happy.
Social loafing - Once part of a group, you tend to put in less effort because you know your work will be pooled with others.
Learned Helplessness - When you are able to succeed at easy tasks, hard tasks feel possible to accomplish. When you are unable to succeed at small tasks, everything seems harder. Failing is often the only way to ever get the things you want out of life.
Self-fulfilling Prophecies - when someone believes you are a certain kind of person, you tend to live up to those expectations.
The Illusion of Control - So seek to control the small things, the things that matter, and let them pile up into a heap of happiness.
...more

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Feb 03, 2014 C.C. rated it liked it

Shelves: reviewed, read-in-2014, non-fiction

While I enjoyed this book, I found it a little underwhelming.

First off, I took only two psychology classes at university, and yet I was already familiar with many of topics, more than I expected. While it was nice to learn about them again, I don't feel like I gained a deeper understanding of those concepts, which I had hoped I would.

The book is set up so that each chapter covers a psychology topic/concept. In order to help you understand how that concept works, the author references studies an While I enjoyed this book, I found it a little underwhelming.

First off, I took only two psychology classes at university, and yet I was already familiar with many of topics, more than I expected. While it was nice to learn about them again, I don't feel like I gained a deeper understanding of those concepts, which I had hoped I would.

The book is set up so that each chapter covers a psychology topic/concept. In order to help you understand how that concept works, the author references studies and experiments that proved them. Then he would sometimes talk about how this concept applies, and potentially hinders you, in your life, but it was never the focus, much more time was spent on describing the experiments.

And that was my problem with this book. For a book whose title includes "WHY you have too many friends on Facebook, WHY your memory is mostly fiction", I don't feel like the WHY was addressed very much in any of the chapters. Yes it's true that for some concepts, psychologists simply don't know why, but I was hoping for more of an insight into how I and we act from day to day as we're influenced by our scumbag brain, and not just "this concept exists, and was proved by these experiments, so your brain does this."

Also, again, the way the title is, I thought each chapter would address a question like that that applies DIRECTLY to your life while relating to the concept, but not many of them did. In fact, I don't think we even got a proper answer for the "why you have too many friends on Facebook." The answer was basically because technology allows us to surpass Dunbar's number? That's all I remember about Facebook being mentioned. I'm sure there's a deeper reason than that.

Plus for constantly telling us that we're not so smart, the book didn't offer too many ways to combat the concepts and become smarter, apart from trying to be aware when it's happening.

Also I feel like the order of the chapters could have been different. By the later chapters, I felt like some of the experiments and concepts were getting repetitive or had been mentioned before. The concepts that were closely tied together should have been in succeeding chapters instead of way later in the book.

Overall while it was an interesting read, I was a bit disappointed with the presentation and the lack of insight I gained from it. ...more

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