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 ultimatum game,

Half of the business-primed group tried to stiff the other party.

not one person mentioned the objects in the room.

take a blank sheet of paper and draw on it a dot about the size of a dime. Now, about two inches to the right, draw another. Close your left eye and focus on the left-hand dot. Move the paper closer to you until the right-hand dot disappears. There it is, one of your blind spots.

split-brain patient whose left hemisphere believed in God, but whose right hemisphere was an atheist.

You are lulled by the signal. You forget about noise. With meaning, you overlook randomness, but meaning is a human construction. You have just committed the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

By painting a bull’s-eye over a cluster of bullet holes, the cowboy places artificial order over natural random chance.

Give this problem to a computer, and it will take anything above zero. Something is better than nothing to a purely logical mind. Give this problem to a human, and you must deal with 3 million years of evolution.

He became a being of pure rational thought, seeing every bit of information flowing into his mind with cold logic.

Take out a piece of paper and get ready to write. Really do it; it will be fun.

The guards said they were only following orders.