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

To give up overeating, or smoking, or gambling, or World of Warcraft, or any bad habit that was formed through conditioning, you must be prepared to weather the secret weapon of your unconscious—the extinction burst.

Look for alternative rewards and positive reinforcement.

Set goals, and when you achieve them, shower yourself with garlan...

If you know you aren’t being judged as an individual, your instinct is to fade into the background.

As long as you think you are part of a group, you unconsciously put in less effort. No one realizes it, and no one admits to it. This behavior is more likely to show up when the task at hand is simple.

when people are paying attention, they can read you to an extent, but you grossly overestimate how much so.

When your emotions take over, when your own mental state becomes the focus of your attention, your ability to gauge what other people are experiencing gets muted. If you are trying to see yourself through their eyes, you will fail. Knowing this, you can plan for the effect and overcome it.

If, over the course of your life, you have experienced crushing defeat or pummeling abuse or loss of control, you convince yourself over time that there is no escape, and if escape is offered, you will not act—you become a nihilist who trusts futility above optimism.

depressed people will often blame themselves and assume they are stupid.

Any extended period of negative emotions can lead to you giving in to despair and accepting your fate. If you remain alone for a long time, you will decide loneliness is a fact of life and pass up opportunities to hang out with people. The loss of control in any situation can lead to this state.

The survival rate of the group forced to bear the shocks was only 23 percent. Rats suffering from cancer will die faster if placed in an inescapable situation.

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. This research was repeated in prisons. Sure enough, just letting prisoners move furniture and control the television kept them from developing health problems and staging revolts. In homeless shelters where people can’t pick out their own beds or choose what to eat, the residents are less likely to try and get a job or find an apartment.

The leading theory as to how such a strange behavior would evolve is that it springs from all organisms’ desire to conserve resources. If you can’t escape a source of stress, it leads to more stress, and this positive feedback loop eventually triggers an automatic shutdown. At its most extreme, you think if you keep struggling you might die. If you stop, there is a chance the bad thing will go away.

Every day you feel like you can’t control the forces affecting your fate—your job, the government, your addiction, your depression, your money. So you stage micro-revolts. You customize your ring tone, you paint your room, you collect stamps. You choose. Choices, even small ones, can hold back the crushing weight of helplessness,

Warm sensations bring up word associations that include warmth, and those thoughts prime you to behave in a way that could be metaphorically described as warm.

If the angle is askew, you then see the characters or the situation as being off-kilter. If the room is empty and silent, you then see the characters as distant and lonely.

Psychologists call missing information in plain sight inattentional blindness.

The more your attention is engaged, the less you expect something out of the ordinary

Western culture is less concerned with context and more concerned with the center of attention, which means it is possible Westerners are more susceptible to both change blindness and inattentional blindness.

a project will come along that seems so big and challenging you start to question your ability to succeed.

concluded the happier you are, the more likely you will be to seek out ways to delude yourself into maintaining your rosy outlook on life

Sad people, it seems, are more honest with themselves.

men tend to be much more likely to self-handicap than women.

Just believing a future event will happen can cause it to happen if the event depends on human behavior.

most of your life is defined socially, not logically.

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.

So true!

One group was simply asked if they would do it. They said yes. Four percent showed up. The other group was asked if they thought they would show up if they were to be asked. Most said they would show up. Almost all of them did.

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 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.

You have to be happy in the flow of time while simultaneously creating memories you can look back on later. To be happy now and content later, you can’t be focused only on reaching goals, because once you reach them, the experience ends. To truly be happy, you must satisfy both of your selves. Go get the ice cream, but do so in a meaningful way that creates a long-term memory. Grind away to have money for later, but do so in a way that generates happiness as you work.

when you receive new information that threatens your self-image, you react quickly to reaffirm your identity.

overall those young attitudes became more conservative over the course of seventeen years.

Markus showed how when you are young you are more open to changing your opinions. Your partisanship has yet to solidify into a personal philosophy. After gaining enough life experience, you begin to settle into a view of the world and establish your moral outlook.

If you are primed to believe you are an honest person, you will then act as if you are.

If you sign a pledge to be honest and trustworthy, you tend to follow through.

You have no desire to be a hypocrite.

Over time you develop shortcuts to cognition. Categories are a great way to make sense of things.

The odds are fixed, but sometimes you think you can beat them, because you are not so smart.

The researchers concluded most people engage in magical thinking to some degree, assuming their thoughts can influence things outside of their control.

This is why you are far more likely to participate in games of chance when there are some customizable features.

Other people’s behavior is more the result of the situation than their disposition.

I knew the service had more to do with the situation than my own disposition.

When you don’t know much about a person, when you haven’t had a chance to get to know him or her, you have a tendency to turn the person into a character.

You see the person, and ignore his or her surroundings, and then cast blame on only the individual.

When you can’t check for consistency, you blame people’s behavior on their personality.

People are not good at heart, Zimbardo says, but because their environment encourages it.

Anyone, he believes, is capable of becoming a monster if given the power and opportunity.

but remember first impressions are mostly incorrect.