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. You hold in your hands a compendium of information about self-delusion and the wonderful ways we all succumb to it. You think you know how the world works, but you really don’t. You move through life forming opinions and cobbling together a story about who you are and why you did the things you did leading up to reading this sentence, and taken as a whole it seems real. The truth is, there is a growing body of work coming out of psychology and cognitive science that says you have no clue why you act the way you do, choose the things you choose, or think the thoughts you think. 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.

The three main subjects in this book are cognitive biases, heuristics, and logical fallacies. These are components of your mind, like organs in your body, which under the best conditions serve you well. Life, unfortunately, isn’t always lived under the best conditions. Their predictability and dependability have kept confident men, magicians, advertisers, psychics, and peddlers of all manner of pseudoscientific remedies in business for centuries. It wasn’t until psychology applied rigorous scientific method to human behavior that these self-deceptions became categorized and quantified.

Cognitive biases are predicable patterns of thought and behavior that lead you to draw incorrect conclusions. You and everyone else come into the world preloaded with these pesky and completely wrong ways of seeing things, and you rarely notice them. Many of them serve to keep you confident in your own perceptions or to inhibit you from seeing yourself as a buffoon. The maintenance of a positive self-image seems to be so important to the human mind you have evolved mental mechanisms designed to make you feel awesome about yourself. Cognitive biases lead to poor choices, bad judgments, and wacky insights that are often totally incorrect. 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.

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. Instead of taking the long way around and deeply contemplating the best course of action or the most logical train of thought, you use heuristics to arrive at a conclusion in record time. Some heuristics are learned, and others come free with every copy of the human brain. When they work, they help your mind stay frugal. When they don’t, you see the world as a much simpler place than it really is. For example, if you notice a rise in reports about shark attacks...

Logical fallacies are like math problems involving language, in which you skip a step or get turned around without realizing it. They are arguments in your mind where you reach a conclusion without all the facts because you don’t care to hear them or have no idea how limited your information is. You become a bumbling detective. Logical fallacies can also be the result of wishful thinking. Sometimes you apply good logic to false premises; at other times you apply bad logic to the truth. For instance, if you hear Albert Einstein refused to eat scrambled eggs, you might assume scrambled eggs are probably bad for you. This is called the argument from authority. You assume if someone is super-smart, then all of that person’s decisions must be good ones, but maybe Einstein just had peculiar taste. With each new subject in these pages you will start to see yourself in a new w...

You can’t be sure how you came to be reading these words at this moment instead of languishing on a street corner or sailing around the world. Why didn’t you go in for the kiss? Why did you say those horrible things to your mother? Why did you buy that laptop? Why are you really angry with that guy? What is the truth about who you are and why you are here?

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. Over time, these explanations become your idea of who you are and your place in the world. They are your self.

You are a story you tell yourself. You engage in introspection, and with great confidence you see the history of your life with all the characters and settings—and you at the center as protagonist in the tale of who you are. This is all a great, beautiful confabulation without which you could not function.

Since the early 1900s, psychologists have wrestled with the conundrum of how, at a certain level, subjective experience can’t be shared. For instance, what does red look like? What do tomatoes smell like? When you stub your toe, what does it feel like? What would you say if you had to explain any of these to someone who had never experienced them? How would you describe red to a person blind from birth or the scent of a fresh tomato to someone who had never smelled before? These are qualia, the deepest you can tunnel down into your experience before you hit rock. Most everyone has seen red but can’t explain what it is like to do so. Your explanations of experience can build up from qualia but can’t go any lower. These are the ineffable building blocks of consciousness. You can explain them only in relation to other experiences, but you can never completely describe the experience of qualia to another person, or yourself.

How do you separate fantasy from reality? How can you be sure the story of your life both from long ago and minute to minute is true? There is a pleasant vindication to be found when you accept that you can’t. No one can, yet we persist and thrive. 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.

THE MISCONCEPTION: Your opinions are the result of years of rational, objective analysis. THE TRUTH: Your opinions are the result of years of paying attention to information that confirmed what you believed, while ignoring information that challenged your preconceived notions.

An Ohio State study in 2009 showed people spend 36 percent more time reading an essay if that essay aligns with their opinions. Another study at Ohio State in 2009 showed subjects clips of the parody show The Colbert Report, and people who considered themselves politically conservative consistently reported “Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said.” Over time, by never seeking the antithetical, through accumulating subscriptions to magazines, stacks of books, and hours of television, you can become so confident in your worldview that no one can dissuade you. Remember, there’s always someone out there willing to sell eyeballs to advertisers by offering a guaranteed audience of people looking for validation. Ask yourself if you are in that audience. In science, you move closer to the truth by seeking evidence to the contrary. Perhaps the same method should inform your opinions as well.

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. “I knew they were going to lose.” “That’s exactly what I thought was going to happen.” “I saw this coming.” “That’s just common sense.” “I had a feeling you might say that.” How many times have you said something similar and believed it? Here’s the thing: You tend to edit your memories so you don’t seem like such a dimwit when things happen you couldn’t have predicted. When you learn things you wish you had known all along, you go ahead and assume you did know them. This tendency is just part of being a person, and it is called the Hindsight Bias.

Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy were both presidents of the United States, elected one hundred years apart. Both were shot and killed by assassins who were known by three names with fifteen letters, John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, and neither killer would make it to trial. Spooky, huh? It gets better. Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln. They were both killed on a Friday while sitting next to their wives, Lincoln in the Ford Theater, Kennedy in a Lincoln made by Ford. Both men were succeeded by a man named Johnson—Andrew for Lincoln and Lyndon for Kennedy. Andrew was born in 1808, Lyndon in 1908. What are the odds?

In 1898, Morgan Robertson wrote a novel titled Futility. Given that it was written fourteen years before the Titanic sank, eleven years before construction on the vessel even began, the similarities between the book and the real event are eerie. The novel describes a giant boat called the Titan which everyone considers unsinkable. It is the largest ever created, and inside, it seems like a luxury hotel—just like the as yet unbuilt Titanic. Titan had only twenty lifeboats, half of what it would need should the great ship sink. The Titanic had twenty-four, also half what it needed. In the book, the Titan hits an iceberg in April four hundred miles from Newfoundland. The Titanic, years later, would do the same in the same month in the same place. The Titan sinks, and more than half of the passengers die, just as with the Titanic. The number of people on board who die in the book and the number in the future accident are nearly identical. The similarities don’t stop there. The fictional Titan and the real Titanic both had three propellers and two masts. Both had a capacity of three thousand people. Both hit the iceberg close to midnight. Did Robertson have a premonition? I mean, what are the odds?

In any perilous event, like a sinking ship or a towering inferno, a shooting rampage or a tornado, there is a chance you will become so overwhelmed by the perilous overflow of ambiguous information that you will do nothing at all. You will float away and leave a senseless statue in your place. You may even lie down. If no one comes to your aid, you will die.

Much of your behavior is an attempt to lower anxiety. You know you aren’t in any danger when everything is safe and expected. Normalcy bias is self-soothing through believing everything is just fine. If you can still engage in your normal habits, still see the world as if nothing bad is happening, then your anxiety stays put. Normalcy bias is a state of mind out of which you are attempting to make everything OK by believing it still is.

In a 1985 paper published in the International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters, sociologists Shunji Mikami and Ken’Ichi Ikeda at the University of Tokyo identified the steps you are likely to go through in a disaster. They said you have a tendency to first interpret the situation within the context of what you are familiar with and to greatly underestimate the severity. This is the moment, when seconds count, that normalcy bias costs lives. A predictable order of behaviors, they said, will then unfold. You will seek information from those you trust first and then move on to those nearby. Next, you’ll try to contact your family if possible, and then you’ll begin to prepare to evacuate or seek shelter. Finally, after all of this, you’ll move. Mikami and Ikeda say you are more likely to dawdle if you fail to understand the seriousness of the situation and have never been exposed to advice about what to do or been in a similar circumstance. Even worse, you stall longer if you fall back on the old compare-and-contrast tendencies where you try to convince yourself the encroaching peril is not much different than what you are used to—normalcy bias.

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.

If someone you know gets sick from taking a flu shot, you will be less likely to get one even if it is statistically safe. In fact, if you see a story on the news about someone dying from the flu shot, that one isolated case could be enough to keep you away from the vaccine forever. On the other hand, if you hear a news story about how eating sausage leads to anal cancer, you will be skeptical, because it has never happened to anyone you know, and sausage, after all, is delicious. The tendency to react more rapidly and to a greater degree when considering information you are familiar with is called the availability heuristic.

So the Dunning-Kruger effect isn’t always influencing you to think that you are awesome when you are actually mediocre. It breaks down like this: The more skilled you are, the more practice you’ve put in, the more experience you have, the better you can compare yourself to others. As you strive to improve, you begin to better understand where you need work. You start to see the complexity and nuance; you discover masters of your craft and compare yourself to them and see where you are lacking. On the other hand, the less skilled you are, the less practice you’ve put in, and the fewer experiences you have, the worse you are at comparing yourself to others on certain tasks. Your peers don’t call you out because they know as little as you do, or they don’t want to hurt your feelings. Your narrow advantage over novices leads you to think you are the shit. Charles Darwin said it best: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” 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.

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.

Based on the data I’ve collected from the comments, e-mails, and other browsing information generated by the You Are Not So Smart blog, all cross-referenced with demographics information prepared in marketing studies for the placement of this book on shelves around the world, I have a pretty good idea of who you are. Here are my findings: You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worried and insecure on the inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself on being an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic. Does this sound accurate? Does it describe you? It should. It describes everyone. All the above statements came from a 1948 experiment by Bertram R. Forer. He gave his students a person...

Since you are always in your own head, thoughts about what it means to be you take up a lot of mental space. With some cultural variations, most people are keen on being individuals, unique and special persons whose hopes and dreams and fears and doubts are all their own. If you have the means, you personalize everything: your license plate, your ring tone, your computer’s desktop wallpaper, your bedroom’s walls. Everything around you says something about your personality. Cultivating an incomparable self either through consumption or creation is not something you take lightly. Yet somewhere between nature and nurture, we are all far more similar than we think. Genetically, you and your friends are almost identical. Those genes create the brain that generates the mind from which your thoughts spring. Thus, genetically, your mental life is as similar to everyone else’s as the feet in your shoes. Culturally, we differ. Our varying experiences in our varying environments shape us. Still, deep below, we are the same, and the failure to notice this can be exploited.

The research shows that 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.

Psychologist David Buss has spent his career studying the preferences of men and women when it comes to selecting a mate both for short-term flings and long-term relationships. In his book The Evolution of Desire, he points to one crucial aspect which seems to be held above all others when men are making a snap judgment about physical attraction—the hip-to-waist ratio. In many studies around the world, no matter what cultural significance is placed on body type, a ratio in which the waist is about 70 percent the width of the hips is always preferred. According to Buss, a hip-to-waist ratio of .67 to .80 correlates to health, reproductive and otherwise. Women with this ratio truly are healthier, and this is something men know unconsciously. Psychologist Devendra Singh’s 1993 study of Playboy centerfolds showed although the women in the magazine had become thinner over the years, their average hip-to-waist ratio remained a constant .70.

Having a dissenting opinion on movies, music, or clothes, or owning clever or obscure possessions, is the way middle-class people fight one another for status. They can’t out-consume one another because they can’t afford it, but they can out-taste one another. Since everything is mass-produced, and often for a mass audience, finding and consuming things that appeal to your desire for authenticity is what moves these items and artists and services and goods up from the bottom to the top—where they can be mass-consumed. Hipsters, then, are the direct result of this cycle of indie, authentic, obscure, ironic, clever consumerism. Which, in itself, is ironic—but not like a trucker hat or Pabst Blue Ribbon. It is ironic in the sense the very act of trying to run counter to the culture is what creates the next wave of culture people will in turn attempt to counter.

In the early days of psychology there was a prevailing belief among scientists. They thought just about everyone had low self-esteem, inferiority complexes, and a cluster of self-loathing neuroses. Those old beliefs are still reverberating in the public consciousness, but they were mostly wrong. The research conducted over the last fifty years has revealed the complete opposite to be true. Day to day, you think you are awesome, or at least far more awesome than you are. This is good. Self-esteem is mostly self-delusion, but it serves a purpose. You are biologically driven to think highly of yourself in order to avoid stagnation. If you were to stop and truly examine your faults and failures, you would become paralyzed by fear and doubt. Despite this, from time to time in your life, your personal hype machine sputters to a stop. You get depressed and anxious. You question yourself and your abilities. Usually, it passes as your psychological immune system fights off the negative attitudes. In some places, like the modern United States, this hype machine is reinforced by a culture of exceptionalism. This tendency to see yourself as above average is also bad. If you never see how much you are screwing up your life, mistreating your friends, and being a complete douche bag, you can destroy yourself without realizing how bad things have become.

When the third person effect leads you to condone censorship, take a step back and imagine the sort of messages people on the other side might think are brainwashing you, and then ask yourself if those messages should be censored too.

If you want some chicken nuggets, you know you can’t just snap your fingers and have them appear. You must engage in a long sequence of actions—acquire language, acquire money, acquire a car, acquire clothes, acquire fuel, learn to drive, learn to use money, learn where nuggets are sold, drive to the nuggets, use language, exchange money, etc. This string of behaviors could be sliced up into smaller and smaller components if we wanted to really dig down into the conditioning you have endured in order to be able to get nuggets in your mouth.