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

beliefs that look good on paper but fall apart in practice. When those beliefs fall apart, you tend not to notice. You have a deep desire to be right all of the time and a deeper desire to see yourself in a positive light both morally and behaviorally. You can stretch your mind pretty far to achieve these goals.

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.

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.

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 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.

If you neglect your personal space and allow chaos and clutter to creep in, it will affect you, and perhaps encourage further neglect. Positive feedback loops should improve your life, not detract from it. You can’t prime yourself directly, but you can create environments conducive to the mental states you wish to achieve.

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 tendency to react more rapidly and to a greater degree when considering information you are familiar with is called the availability heuristic.

had a lot to do with the argument from authority. Freeman and others had jumped the gun on the scientific evidence. Without all the facts in place,

the science caught up to Freeman and revealed that what he was doing was unnecessary from a medical standpoint and horrific from a moral one.

those who are held in high regard can cause a lot of damage when no one is willing to question their authority.

If something is controversial, it usually means there are many experts who disagree. You would be wise to come to your own conclusions based on the evidence, not the people delivering it.

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.

beware of the other side—the dark places that conformity can lead to. Never be afraid to question authority when your actions could harm yourself or others.

Choices, even small ones, can hold back the crushing weight of helplessness,