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

For example, you tend to look for information that confirms your beliefs and ignore information that challenges them. This is called confirmation bias. The contents of your bookshelf and the bookmarks in your Web browser are a direct result of it.

You are a story you tell yourself.

Confirmation bias is seeing the world through a filter.

You watch them not for information, but for confirmation.

Be careful. People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things.

you want to be right about how you see the world, so you seek out information that confirms your beliefs and avoid contradictory evidence and opinions.

In science, you move closer to the truth by seeking evidence to the contrary.

what you think is just common sense usually isn’t.

only the need for meaning changes how you feel about what you see.

Carl Sagan said in the vastness of space and the immensity of time it was a joy to share a planet and epoch with his wife.

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.

You are far more likely to die in a car crash on the way to buy the ticket than you are to win, but this information isn’t as available. You don’t think in statistics, you think in examples, in stories.

the more people present when a person needs emergency help, the less likely it is any one of them will lend a hand.

As the philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, “In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

Any time someone begins an attack with “So you’re saying we should all just . . .” or “Everyone knows . . . ,” you can bet a straw man is coming. When you start or someone else starts to imagine a future hellscape thanks to the ideas of the opposition becoming reality, there is a straw man in the room. Straw men can also be born out of ignorance. If someone says, “Scientists tell us we all come from monkeys, and that’s why I homeschool,” this person is using a straw man, because science doesn’t say we all come from monkeys.

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. For a group to make good decisions, they must allow dissent and convince everyone they are free to speak their mind without risk of punishment.

True groupthink depends on three conditions—a group of people who like one another, isolation, and a deadline for a crucial decision.

groups of friends who allow members to disagree and still be friends are more likely to come to better decisions. 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.

You can maintain relationships and keep up with only around 150 people at once.

Competition among consumers is the turbine of capitalism.

To defeat feelings of inadequacy, you first have to imagine a task as being simple and easy. If you can manage to do that, illusory superiority takes over.

you pay close attention to the successes and failures of friends more than you do to those of strangers. You compare yourself to those who are close to you in order to judge your own worth.

People devote little attention to you unless prompted to.

most people would believe they were less gullible than the majority. But remember, you can’t be in the minority of every category.

Never be afraid to question authority when your actions could harm yourself or others. Even in simple situations, like the next time you see a line of people waiting to get into a classroom or a movie or a restaurant, feel free to break norms—go check the door and look inside.

no matter how strong an emotion or how powerful an idea, it never seems as intense or potent to the world outside your mind as it does to the one within. This is the illusion of transparency.

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. Besides death, your destiny is not inescapable.

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.

In psychology, true objectivity is pretty much considered to be impossible. Memories, emotions, conditioning, and all sorts of other mental flotsam taint every new experience you gain. In addition to all this, your expectations powerfully influence the final vote in your head over what you believe to be reality.

a study by James Henslin in 1967 showed people tend to throw harder when they need high numbers in a game of craps and toss gently when they want low ones.