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

This is why the invention of written language was such an important step in your history—it allowed you to take notes and preserve data outside the limited capacity of the rational mind.

maybe with just a smile and a thank-you, you can affect the way others feel—hopefully for the best.

Patients with Korsakoff’s syndrome have amnesia surrounding recent events but can recall their past.

Anosognosia sufferers are paralyzed but won’t admit it.

• A person with Capgras delusion believes their close friends and family have been replaced by impostors.

Those with Cotard’s syndrome believe they have died.

what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds

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.

Believing you understand your motivations and desires, your likes and dislikes, is called the introspection illusion.

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

You don’t think in statistics, you think in examples, in stories.

pluralistic ignorance—a situation where everyone is thinking the same thing but believes he or she is the only person who thinks it.

“In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

Education is as much about learning what you don’t know as it is about adding to what you do.

the more expensive a purchase, the greater the loyalty to it.

Wondering whether or not someone can be trusted and wondering whether or not someone is telling the truth are two different things.

You want the world to be fair, so you pretend it is.

The tendency to believe vague statements designed to appeal to just about anyone is called the Forer effect,

your capacity to fool yourself is greater than the abilities of any conjurer, and conjurers come in many guises.

When someone claims he or she can see into your heart, realize that all of our hearts are much the same.

The tendency to make poor decisions and ignore odds in favor of your gut feelings is called the affect heuristic.

Everyone who lives above the poverty line but isn’t wealthy pretty much has no choice but to work for a living doing something that rewards them with survival tokens.

No one, it seems, believes he or she is part of the population contributing to the statistics generating averages.

When you are able to succeed at easy tasks, hard tasks feel possible to accomplish. When you are unable to succeed at small tasks, everything seems harder.

The future is the result of actions, and actions are the result of behavior, and behavior is the result of prediction.

But people naturally change over time. Consistency bias is the failure to admit it.

This is the gambler’s fallacy, assuming the odds change based on the history of the outcomes so far.