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

Cognitive biases are predicable patterns of thought and behavior that lead you to draw incorrect conclusions.

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.

When a stimulus in the past affects the way you behave and think or the way you perceive another stimulus later on, it is called priming. Every perception, no matter if you consciously notice, sets off a chain of related ideas in your neural network.

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.

Confirmation bias is seeing the world through a filter.

you want to be right about how you see the world, so you seek out information that confirms your beliefs and avoid contradictory evidence and opinions.

In science, you move closer to the truth by seeking evidence to the contrary. Perhaps the same method should inform your opinions as well.

Hindsight bias is a close relative of the availability heuristic. You tend to believe anecdotes and individual sensational news stories are more representative of the big picture than they are.

The availability heuristic shows you make decisions and think thoughts based on the information you have at hand, while ignoring all the other information that might be out there. You do the same thing with Hindsight Bias, by thinking thoughts and making decisions based on what you know now, not what you used to know.

You see patterns everywhere, but some of them are formed by chance and mean nothing. Against the noisy background of probability things are bound to line up from time to time for no reason at all.

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.

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

Apophenia is an umbrella term that encompasses other phenomena, like the Texas sharpshooter fallacy and pareidolia. When you commit the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, you draw a circle around a series of random events and decide there is some meaning in the chaos that isn’t really there. In pareidolia, you see shapes like clouds or tree limbs as people or faces. Apophenia is refusing to believe in clutter and noise, in coincidence and chance.

The law of truly large numbers is something skeptics like to point out when apophenia strikes. The law says in a large sample of occurrences, many coincidences will emerge.

More often than not, apophenia is the result of the most dependable of all delusions—the confirmation bias. You see what you want to see and ignore the rest.

The endowment effect pops up when you feel like the things you own are superior to the things you do not.

Ownership adds special emotional value to things, even if those things were free.

The Forer effect is part of a larger phenomenon psychologists refer to as subjective validation, which is a fancy way of saying you are far more vulnerable to suggestion when the subject of the conversation is you.

When you need something to be true, you will look for patterns; you connect the dots like the stars of a constellation. Your brain abhors disorder. You see faces in clouds and demons in bonfires. Those who claim the powers of divination hijack these natural human tendencies. They know they can depend on you to use subjective validation in the moment and confirmation bias afterward.

Hyman was using a technique called cold reading, where you start with the wide-angle lens of generalities and watch the other person for cues so you can constrict the focus down to what seems like a powerful insight into the other person’s soul. It works because people tend to ignore the little misses and focus on the hits. As he worked his way through college, another mentalist,

No human institution can efficiently function above 150 members without hierarchies, ranks, roles, and divisions.

As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in his book The Tipping Point, if a company grows beyond 150 people, productivity sharply declines until the company divides its outlying entities into smaller groups.

That’s the paradox of consumer rebellion—everything is part of the system. We all sell out, because we all buy things.

Competition among consumers is the turbine of capitalism.

Competition for status is built into the human experience at the biological level. Poor people compete with resources. The middle class competes with selection. The wealthy compete with possessions.

No one, it seems, believes he or she is part of the population contributing to the statistics generating averages. You don’t believe you are an average person, but you do believe everyone else is. This tendency, which springs from self-serving bias, is called the illusory superiority effect.

When you compare your skills, accomplishments, and friendships with those of others, you tend to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. You are a liar by default, and you lie most to yourself. If you fail, you forget it. If you win, you tell everyone. When it comes to being honest with yourself and those you love, you are not so smart. But self-serving bias keeps you going when the hype machine runs low on fuel.

Research shows people believe others see their contributions to conversation as being memorable, but they aren’t. You think everyone noticed when you stumbled in your speech, but they didn’t. Well, unless you drew attention to it by over-apologizing. The next time you get a pimple on your forehead, or buy a new pair of shoes, or Tweet about how boring your day is, don’t expect anyone to notice. You are not so smart or special.

Whatever groups you don’t belong to become the groups who you think will be bowled over by messages you don’t agree with.

Habits form because you are not so smart, and they cease under the same conditions.

The huge discrepancy between what you think people will understand and what they really do has probably led to all sorts of mistakes in text messages and e-mails.

Kahneman and Tversky’s research suggests that intuition ignores statistics. Intuition is bad at math.

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