You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself

by David McRaney

THE MISCONCEPTION: You are a rational, logical being who sees the world as it really is. THE TRUTH: You are as deluded as the rest of us, but that’s OK, it keeps you sane.

Instead, you create narratives, little stories to explain away why you gave up on that diet, why you prefer Apple over Microsoft, why you clearly remember it was Beth who told you the story about the clown with the peg leg made of soup cans when it was really Adam, and it wasn’t a clown.

Your brain is better at seeing the world in some ways, like social situations, and not so good in others, like logic puzzles with numbered cards.

The three main subjects in this book are cognitive biases, heuristics, and logical fallacies.

Cognitive biases are predicable patterns of thought and behavior that lead you to draw incorrect conclusions.

For example, you tend to look for information that confirms your beliefs and ignore information that challenges them. This is called confirmation bias.

Heuristics are mental shortcuts you use to solve common problems. They speed up processing in the brain, but sometimes make you think so fast you miss what is important.

Logical fallacies are like math problems involving language, in which you skip a step or get turned around without realizing

Priming THE MISCONCEPTION: You know when you are being influenced and how it is affecting your behavior. THE TRUTH: You are unaware of the constant nudging you receive from ideas formed in your unconscious mind.

Confabulation THE MISCONCEPTION: You know when you are lying to yourself. THE TRUTH: You are often ignorant of your motivations and create fictional narratives to explain your decisions, emotions, and history without realizing it.

Split-brain confabulation is an extreme and amplified version of your own tendency to create narrative fantasies about just about everything you do, and then believe them. You are a confabulatory creature by nature. You are always explaining to yourself the motivations for your actions and the causes to the effects in your life, and you make them up without realizing it when you don’t know the answers.

Mirror neurons provide empathy and help you learn. One of the greatest discoveries in recent years was to find that mirror neurons fire also when you do things. It is as if part of your brain is observing yourself as an outsider. You are a story you tell yourself.

Who you think you are is sort of like a movie based on true events, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The details may be embellished, but the big picture, the general idea, is probably a good story worth hearing about.

Hindsight Bias THE MISCONCEPTION: After you learn something new, you remember how you were once ignorant or wrong. THE TRUTH: You often look back on the things you’ve just learned and assume you knew them or believed them all along.

When he asked them to evaluate the phrase “Love is stronger than fear,” they agreed with it. When he presented them the opposite, “Fear is stronger than love,” they agreed with that too. He was trying to show how what you think is just common sense usually isn’t.

You are always looking back at the person you used to be, always reconstructing the story of your life to better match the person you are today.

Once you learn from your mistakes, or replace bad info with good, there isn’t much use in retaining the garbage, so you delete it. This deletion of your old, incorrect assumptions de-clutters your mind. Sure, you are lying to yourself, but it’s for a good cause.

If you see lots of shark attacks in the news, you think, “Gosh, sharks are out of control.” What you should think is “Gosh, the news loves to cover shark attacks.”

The availability heuristic shows you make decisions and think thoughts based on the information you have at hand, while ignoring all the other information that might be out there. You do the same thing with Hindsight Bias, by thinking thoughts and making decisions based on what you know now, not what you used to know.

By painting a bull’s-eye over a cluster of bullet holes, the cowboy places artificial order over natural random chance. If you have a human brain, you do this all of the time. Picking out clusters of coincidence is a predictable malfunction of normal human logic.

Procrastination THE MISCONCEPTION: You procrastinate because you are lazy and can’t manage your time well. THE TRUTH: Procrastination is fueled by weakness in the face of impulse and a failure to think about thinking.

This is sometimes called present bias—being unable to grasp that what you want will change over time, and what you want now isn’t the same thing you will want later. Present bias explains why you buy lettuce and bananas only to throw them out later when you forget to eat them.

Faced with two possible rewards, you are more likely to take the one that you can enjoy now over one you will enjoy later—even if the later reward is far greater.

Hyperbolic discounting makes later an easy place to throw all the things you don’t want to deal with, but you also overcommit to future plans for the same reason.

You run out of time to get things done because you think in the future, that mysterious fantastical realm of possibilities, you’ll have more free time than you do now.

The now-you may see the costs and rewards at stake when it comes time to choose studying for the test instead of going to the club, eating the salad instead of the cupcake, writing the article instead of playing the video game. The trick is to accept that the now-you will not be the person facing those choices, it will be the future-you—a person who can’t be trusted.

THE MISCONCEPTION: Your fight-or-flight instincts kick in and you panic when disaster strikes. THE TRUTH: You often become abnormally calm and pretend everything is normal in a crisis.

This strange counterproductive tendency to forget self-preservation in the event of an emergency is often factored into fatality predictions in everything from ship sinkings to stadium evacuations. Disaster movies get it all wrong. When you and others are warned of danger, you don’t evacuate immediately while screaming and flailing your arms.

the sort of people who survive are the sort of people who prepare for the worst and practice ahead of time. They’ve done the research, or built the shelter, or run the drills. They look for the exits and imagine what they will do.

Normalcy bias is stalling during a crisis and pretending everything will continue to be as fine and predictable as it was before.

the brain must go through a procedure before the body acts—cognition, perception, comprehension, decision, implementation, and then movement. There’s no way to overclock this, but you can practice until these steps individually are no longer complex, and thus no longer take up valuable brain computation cycles.

Survivors of 9/11 say they remember gathering belongings before leaving offices and cubicles. They put on coats and called loved ones. They shut down their computers and had conversations. Even in their descent, most moved at a leisurely pace—no screaming or running. There was no need for anyone to say “Remain calm everyone,” because they weren’t freaking out.

THE MISCONCEPTION: You know why you like the things you like and feel the way you feel. THE TRUTH: The origin of certain emotional states is unavailable to you, and when pressed to explain them, you will just make something up.

when you are faced with a decision in which you are forced to think about your rationale, you start to turn the volume in your emotional brain down and the volume in your logical brain up. You start creating a mental list of pros and cons that would never have been conjured up if you had gone with your gut.

When you ask people why they do or do not like things, they must then translate something from a deep, emotional, primal part of their psyche into the language of the higher, logical, rational world of words and sentences and paragraphs. The problem here is those deeper recesses of the mind are perhaps inaccessible and unconscious.

Later, when you attempt to justify your decisions or emotional attachments, you start worrying about what your explanation says about you as a person, further tainting the validity of your inner narrative.

THE MISCONCEPTION: With the advent of mass media, you understand how the world works based on statistics and facts culled from many examples. THE TRUTH: You are far more likely to believe something is commonplace if you can find just one example of it, and you are far less likely to believe in something you’ve never seen or heard of before.

The Bystander Effect THE MISCONCEPTION: When someone is hurt, people rush to their aid. THE TRUTH: The more people who witness a person in distress, the less likely it is that any one person will help.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect THE MISCONCEPTION: You can predict how well you would perform in any situation. THE TRUTH: You are generally pretty bad at estimating your competence and the difficulty of complex tasks.

These performances are terrible, and not in a self-aware, ironic way. No, they are genuinely awful, and you wonder why someone would put themselves on a worldwide stage in such an embarrassing way. The thing is, they don’t imagine the worldwide audience as being more sophisticated than the small audience of friends, family, and peers they usually stand before.

Whether it’s playing guitar or writing short stories or telling jokes or taking photos—whatever—amateurs are far more likely to think they are experts than actual experts are. Education is as much about learning what you don’t know as it is about adding to what you do.

Apophenia THE MISCONCEPTION: Some coincidences are so miraculous, they must have meaning. THE TRUTH: Coincidences are a routine part of life, even the seemingly miraculous ones. Any meaning applied to them comes from your mind.

Brand Loyalty THE MISCONCEPTION: You prefer the things you own over the things you don’t because you made rational choices when you bought them. THE TRUTH: You prefer the things you own because you rationalize your past choices to protect your sense of self.

if the product is unnecessary, like an iPad, there is a great chance the customer will become a fanboy because he had to choose to spend a big chunk of money on it. It’s the choosing of one thing over another that leads to narratives about why you did it, which usually tie in to your self-image.

Ownership adds special emotional value to things, even if those things were free.

The Argument from Authority THE MISCONCEPTION: You are more concerned with the validity of information than the person delivering it. THE TRUTH: The status and credentials of an individual greatly influence your perception of that individual’s message.

The Argument from Ignorance THE MISCONCEPTION: When you can’t explain something, you focus on what you can prove. THE TRUTH: When you are unsure of something, you are more likely to accept strange explanations.

The Straw Man Fallacy THE MISCONCEPTION: When you argue, you try to stick to the facts. THE TRUTH: In any argument, anger will tempt you to reframe your opponent’s position.

When you get into an argument about either something personal or something more public and abstract, you sometimes resort to constructing a character who you find easier to refute, argue, and disagree with, or you create a position the other person isn’t even suggesting or defending. This is a straw man.

In creating a fantasy scenario where the world goes mad if the other person’s argument were to win, you have constructed a straw man.