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

If you get accustomed to blowing off steam, you become dependent on it. The more effective approach is to just stop. Take your anger off of the stove.

The Misinformation Effect THE MISCONCEPTION: Memories are played back like recordings. THE TRUTH: Memories are constructed anew each time from whatever information is currently available, which makes them highly permeable to influences from the present.

Not only is your memory easily altered by the influence of others, you also smooth over the incongruences, rearrange time lines, and invent scenarios, but rarely notice you’re doing this until you see yourself in a video, or hear another person’s version of the events.

Scientists generally agree memories aren’t recorded like videos or stored like data on a hard drive. They are constructed and assembled on the spot as if with Legos from a bucket in your brain.

Memory is imperfect, but also constantly changing. Not only do you filter your past through your present, but your memory is easily infected by social contagion. You incorporate the memories of others into your own head all the time. Studies suggest your memory is permeable, malleable, and evolving. It isn’t fixed and permanent, but more like a dream that pulls in information about what you are thinking about during the day and adds new details to the narrative.

Conformity THE MISCONCEPTION: You are a strong individual who doesn’t conform unless forced to. THE TRUTH: It takes little more than an authority figure or social pressure to get you to obey, because conformity is a survival instinct.

Asch messed around with the conditions of the experiment, trying it with varying numbers of actors and unwitting subjects. He found one or two people had little effect, but three or more was all he needed to get a small percentage of people to start conforming. The percentage of people who conformed grew proportionally with the number of people who joined in consensus against them.

Milgram’s work was a response to the Holocaust. He wondered if an entire nation could have its moral compass smashed, or if conformity and obedience to authority were more likely the root of so much compliance to commit unspeakable evil. Milgram concluded his subjects, and probably millions of others, saw themselves as instruments instead of people. When they became extensions of the person doing the terrible act, their own will was put aside where it could remain clean of sin.

Extinction Burst THE MISCONCEPTION: If you stop engaging in a bad habit, the habit will gradually diminish until it disappears from your life. THE TRUTH: Any time you quit something cold turkey, your brain will make a last-ditch effort to return you to your habit.

Extinction bursts are a component of extinction, one of the principles of conditioning. Conditioning is among the most basic factors shaping the way any organism—including you—reacts to the world. If you get rewarded by your actions, you are more likely to continue them. If punished, you are more likely to stop.

Just before you give up on a long-practiced routine, you freak out. It’s a final desperate attempt by the oldest parts of your brain to keep getting rewarded.

Social Loafing THE MISCONCEPTION: When you are joined by others in a task, you work harder and become more accomplished. THE TRUTH: Once part of a group, you tend to put in less effort because you know your work will be pooled together with others’.

You put in less effort when in a group than you would if working alone on the same project.

This phenomenon has been observed in every possible situation involving group effort. Communal farms always produce less than individually owned farms. Factories where people do repetitive tasks with no supervision are less productive than ones where each person has an individual quota to reach.

The Illusion of Transparency THE MISCONCEPTION: When your emotions run high, people can look at you and tell what you are thinking and feeling. THE TRUTH: Your subjective experience is not observable, and you overestimate how much you telegraph your inner thoughts and emotions.

Pick a song everyone knows, like your national anthem, and have someone else sit across from you. Now tap out the song with your fingertips. After a verse or two, ask the other person what you were tapping. In your mind, you can hear every note, every instrument. In their mind, they can hear your fingers tapping.

Did they figure out what you were trying to play? Probably not. In Newton’s study, the tappers predicted the listeners would be able to guess the tune half of the time, but the listeners correctly guessed about 3 percent of the songs.

The huge discrepancy between what you think people will understand and what they really do has probably led to all sorts of mistakes in text messages and e-mails. If you are like me, you often have to back up and restate your case, or answer questions about your tone, or reword everything and try sending it again.

Learned Helplessness THE MISCONCEPTION: If you are in a bad situation, you will do whatever you can do to escape it. THE TRUTH: If you feel like you aren’t in control of your destiny, you will give up and accept whatever situation you are in.

A study in 1976 by Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin showed in nursing homes where conformity and passivity are encouraged and every whim is attended to, the health and well-being of the patients declines rapidly. If, instead, the people in these homes are given responsibilities and choices, they remain healthy and active.

Choices, even small ones, can hold back the crushing weight of helplessness, but you can’t stop there.

You must fight back your behavior and learn to fail with pride. Failing often is the only way to ever get the things you want out of life.

Embodied Cognition THE MISCONCEPTION: Your opinions of people and events are based on objective evaluation. THE TRUTH: You translate your physical world into words, and then believe those words.

The Anchoring Effect THE MISCONCEPTION: You rationally analyze all factors before making a choice or determining value. THE TRUTH: Your first perception lingers in your mind, affecting later perceptions and decisions.

they asked a group of students to volunteer as camp counselors two hours per week for two years. They all said no. The researchers followed up by asking if they would volunteer to supervise a single two-hour trip. Half said yes. Without first being asked for the two-year commitment, only 17 percent agreed.

Remember this study when you are in a negotiation—make your initial request far too high. You have to start somewhere, and your initial decision or calculation greatly influences all the choices that follow, cascading out, each tethered to the anchors set before.

Attention THE MISCONCEPTION: You see everything going on before your eyes, taking in all the information like a camera. THE TRUTH: You are aware only of a small amount of the total information your eyes take in, and even less is processed by your conscious mind and remembered.

The truth, though, is you see only a small portion of your environment at any one moment. Your attention is like a spotlight, and only the illuminated portions of the world appear in your perception.

when the spell of your attention breaks. The problem with inattentional blindness is not that it happens so often, it’s that you don’t believe it happens.

Human eyes aren’t video cameras, and the memories formed aren’t videos.

Self-Handicapping THE MISCONCEPTION: In all you do, you strive for success. THE TRUTH: You often create conditions for failure ahead of time to protect your ego.

If you succeed, you can say you did so despite terrible odds. If you fall short, you can blame the events leading up to the failure instead of your own incompetence or inadequacy.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies THE MISCONCEPTION: Predictions about your future are subject to forces beyond your control. THE TRUTH: Just believing a future event will happen can cause it to happen if the event depends on human behavior.

When you fear you will confirm a negative stereotype, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy not because the stereotype is true, but because you can’t stop worrying that you could become an example proving it.

a version of the self-fulfilling prophecy called labeling theory shows how when someone believes you are a certain kind of person, you tend to live up to those expectations. If your teacher thinks you are smart, the teacher treats you like a smart person. You get extra attention and respect. You react with more effort, more drive, and the positive feedback loop leads to the fulfillment of your label.

If you want a better job, a better marriage, a better teacher, a better friend—you have to act as if the thing you want out of the other person is already headed your way.

A negative outlook will lead to negative predictions, and you will start to unconsciously manipulate your environment to deliver those predictions.

The Moment THE MISCONCEPTION: You are one person, and your happiness is based on being content with your life. THE TRUTH: You are multiple selves, and happiness is based on satisfying all of them.

Your sense of self is just that—a sense. The person you imagine yourself to be is a story you tell to yourself and to others differently depending on the situation, and the story changes over time.

For now, it is useful to imagine there are two selves active at any given time in your head—the current self and the remembering self.

The experiencing self can easily choose what to do. Sex, skiing, restaurants, concerts, parties—all of these things are about being happy during the event. The remembering self is not so sure.

The current self is happy when experiencing nice things. The remembering self is happy when you look back on your life and pull up plenty of positive memories.

Consistency Bias THE MISCONCEPTION: You know how your opinions have changed over time. THE TRUTH: Unless you consciously keep tabs on your progress, you assume the way you feel now is the way you have always felt.

Consistency bias is part of your overall desire to reduce the discomfort of cognitive dissonance, the emotions you feel when noticing that you are of two minds on one issue. When you say one thing and do another, the ickiness of feeling hypocritical must be dealt with or else you find it difficult to proceed.

You need to feel that you can predict your own behavior, and so you rewrite your own history sometimes so you can seem dependable to yourself.

The Representativeness Heuristic THE MISCONCEPTION: Knowing a person’s history makes it easier to determine what sort of person they are. THE TRUTH: You jump to conclusions based on how representative a person seems to be of a preconceived character type.

Expectation THE MISCONCEPTION: Wine is a complicated elixir, full of subtle flavors only an expert can truly distinguish, and experienced tasters are impervious to deception. THE TRUTH: Wine experts and consumers can be fooled by altering their expectations.

Expectation, as it turns out, is just as important as raw sensation. The buildup to an experience can completely change how you interpret the information reaching your brain from your otherwise objective senses.

All things being equal—you refer back to the advertising or the packaging or conformity with your friends and family. Presentation is everything.

Your expectations are the horse, and your experience is the cart. You get this backward all the time because you are not so smart.