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

You aren’t a computer connected to two cameras. Reality isn’t a vacuum where you objectively survey your surroundings. You construct reality from minute to minute with memories and emotions orbiting your sensations and cognition; together they form a collage of consciousness that exists only in your skull. Some objects have personal meaning, like the blow-pop ring your best friend gave you in middle school or the handcrafted mittens your sister made you. Other items have cultural or universal meanings, like the moon or a knife or a handful of posies. They affect you whether or not you are aware of their power, sometimes so far in the depths of your brain you never notice.

Priming works best when you are on autopilot, when you aren’t trying to consciously introspect before choosing how to behave. When you are unsure how best to proceed, suggestions

bubble up from the deep that are highly tainted by subconscious primes. In addition, your brain hates ambiguity and is willing to take shortcuts to remove it from any situation.

Of course, you can choose to become an agent yourself. You can prime potential employers with what you wear to a job interview. You can prime the emotions of your guests with how you set the mood when hosting a party. Once you know priming is a fact of life, you start to understand the power and resilience of rituals and rites of passage, norms and ideologies.

Just remember, you are most open to suggestion when your mental cruise control is on or when you find yourself in unfamiliar circumstances. If you bring a grocery list, you’ll be less likely to arrive at the checkout with a cart full of stuff you had no intention of buying when you left the house. 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. Just like the briefcase on the table, or the clean aroma in the room, you can fill your personal spaces with paraphernalia infused with meaning, or find meaning in the larger idea of owning little. No matter, when you least expect it, those meanings may nudge you.

THE MISCONCEPTION: Your opinions are the result of years of rational, objective analysis. THE TRUTH: Your opinions are the result of years of paying attention to information that confirmed what you believed, while ignoring information that challenged your preconceived notions.

If you are having a baby, you start to see babies everywhere. Confirmation bias is seeing the world through a filter.

Punditry is an industry built on confirmation bias. Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann, Glenn Beck and Arianna Huffing-ton, Rachel Maddow and Ann Coulter—these people provide fuel for beliefs, they pre-filter the world to match existing worldviews. If their filter is like your filter, you love them. If it isn’t, you hate them. You watch them not for information, but for confirmation.

Without confirmation bias, conspiracy theories would fall apart. Did we really put a man on the moon? If you are looking for proof we didn’t, you can find it.

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

when you learn something new, you quickly redact your past so you can feel the comfort of always being right.

availability heuristic. You tend to believe anecdotes and individual sensational news stories are more representative of the big picture than they are. If you see lots of shark attacks in the news, you think, “Gosh, sharks are out of control.” What you should think is “Gosh, the news loves to cover shark attacks.” 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.

Looking at the factors from a distance, you can accept the reality of random chance. 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.

When you are dazzled by the idea of Nostradamus predicting Hitler, you ignore how he wrote almost one thousand ambiguous predictions, and most of them make no sense at all.

differences, all of which you ignored, but when you draw the bull’s-eye around the clusters, the similarities—whoa. If hindsight bias and confirmation bias had a baby, it would be the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

Today, one in seventy male children has some form of autism spectrum disorder. It seemed absolutely nuts when those numbers were first released. Parents around the world panicked. Something must be causing autism numbers to rise, right? Early on, a bull’s-eye was painted around vaccines because symptoms seemed to show up about the same time as kids were getting vaccinated. Once they had a target, a cluster, people failed to see all the other correlations. After years of research and millions of dollars, vaccines have been ruled out, but many refuse to accept the findings. Singling out vaccines while ignoring the millions of other factors is the same as noting the Titan hit an iceberg but omitting it had sails.

Lucky streaks at the casino, hot hands in basketball, a tornado sparing a church—these are all examples of humans finding meaning after the fact, after the odds are tallied and the numbers have moved on. You are ignoring the times you lost, the times the ball missed the basket, and all the homes the tornado blindly devoured.

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. It’s just how the math works out.

When you are making plans, your better angels point to the nourishing choices, but in the moment you go for what tastes good. This is sometimes called 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.

You are going to lose weight and forge a six-pack of abs so ripped you can deflect arrows. You weigh yourself. You buy a workout DVD. You order a set of weights. One day you have the choice between going for a run or watching a movie, and you choose the movie. Another day you are out with friends and can choose a cheeseburger or a salad. You choose the cheeseburger. The slips become more frequent, but you keep saying you’ll get around to it. You’ll start again on Monday, which becomes a week from Monday. Your will succumbs to a death by a thousand cuts. By the time winter comes, it looks like you already know what your resolution will be the next year. Procrastination manifests itself within every aspect of your life.

In the struggle between should versus want, some people have figured out something crucial: Want never goes away. Procrastination is all about choosing want over should because you don’t have a plan for those times when you can expect to be tempted. You are really bad at predicting your future mental states. In addition, you are terrible at choosing between now and later. Later is a murky place where anything could go wrong.

Faced with two possible rewards, you are more likely to take the one that you can enjoy now over one you will enjoy later—even if the later reward is far greater.

Procrastination is an impulse; it’s buying candy at the checkout.

The trick is to accept that the now-you will not be the person facing those choices, it will be the future-you—a person who can’t be trusted. Future-you will give in, and then you’ll go back to being now-you and feel weak and ashamed. Now-you must trick future-you into doing what is right for both parties.

Your effort is better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises through plugging dates into a calendar or setting deadlines for push-ups.

Weather experts and emergency management workers know you can become enveloped in a blanket of calm when terror enters your heart. Psychologists refer to it as normalcy bias. First responders call it negative panic. This strange counterproductive tendency to forget self-preservation in the event of an emergency is often factored into fatality predictions in everything from ship sinkings to stadium evacuations. Disaster movies get it all wrong. When you and others are warned of danger, you don’t evacuate immediately while screaming and flailing your arms.

John Leach, a psychologist at the University of Lancaster, also studies freezing under stress. He says about 75 percent of people find it impossible to reason during a catastrophic event or impending doom.

According to Johnson and Leach, the sort of people who survive are the

sort of people who prepare for the worst and practice ahead of time. They’ve done the research, or built the shelter, or run the drills. They look for the exits and imagine what they will do. They were in a fire as a child or survived a typhoon. These people don’t deliberate during calamity because they’ve already done the deliberation the other people around them are just now going through.

As Johnson points out, the brain must go through a procedure before the body acts—cognition, perception, comprehension, decision, implementation, and then movement.

To be clear, normalcy bias isn’t freezing at the first signs of danger like a rabbit who confronts a snake, which is a real behavior humans can succumb to. To suddenly stop moving and hope for the best is called fear bradycardia, and it is an automatic and involuntarily instinct. This is sometimes referred to as tonic immobility. Animals like gazelles will become motionless if they sense a predator is nearby in the hopes of tricking its motion-tracking abilities by blending into the background.

They said you have a tendency to first interpret the situation within the context of what you are familiar with and to greatly underestimate the severity. This is the moment, when seconds count, that normalcy bias costs lives.

Global climate change, peak oil, obesity epidemics, and stock market crashes are good examples of larger, more complex events in which people fail to act because it is difficult to imagine just how abnormal life could become if the predictions are true. Regular media over-hyping and panic-building over issues like Y2K, swine flu, SARS, and the like help fuel normalcy bias on a global scale.

With so much crying wolf, it can be difficult to determine in the frenzied information landscape when to be alarmed, when it really is not a drill. The first instinct is to gauge how out of the norm the situation truly is and act only when the problem crosses a threshold past which it becomes impossible to ignore. Of course, this is often after it is too late to act.

When it comes to buying lottery tickets, fearing the West Nile virus, looking for child molesters, and so on, you use the availability heuristic first and the facts second. You decide the likelihood of a future event on how easily you can imagine it, and if you’ve been bombarded by reports or have filled your head with fears, those images will overshadow new information that might contradict your beliefs.

As the philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, “In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

Have you ever wondered why people with advanced degrees in climate science or biology don’t get online and debate global warming or evolution? The less you know about a subject, the less you believe there is to know in total.

It breaks down like this: The more skilled you are, the more practice you’ve put in, the more experience you have, the better you can compare yourself to others. As you strive to improve, you begin to better understand where you need work. You start to see the complexity and nuance; you discover masters of your craft and compare yourself to them and see where you are lacking. On the other hand, the less skilled you are, the less practice you’ve put in, and the fewer experiences you have, the worse you are at comparing yourself to others on certain tasks.

Charles Darwin said it best: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” Whether it’s playing guitar or writing short stories or telling jokes or taking photos—whatever—amateurs are far more likely to think they are experts than actual experts are.

Yet the time it takes to go from novice to amateur feels rapid, and that’s where the Dunning-Kruger effect strikes. You think the same amount of practice will move you from amateur to expert, but it won’t.

Coincidences are a routine part of life, even the seemingly miraculous ones. Any meaning applied to them comes from your mind.

Joseph Campbell made it his life’s work to identify the common mythology in all humans, the stories you and everyone else know in your hearts. He called the outline above the hero’s journey, and if you think about all the movies and books you’ve digested over the years, you will recognize almost every story is some variation of this tale. From folklore and theater, to modern cinema and video games, the hero’s journey is a monomyth that plugs into your mind like a key into a lock.

Apophenia becomes an issue only when you decide coincidences and random sorting are more than the occasional signal rising from the noise.

When you connect the dots in your life in a way that tells a story, and then you interpret the story to have a special meaning, this is true apophenia.

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.

When you are unsure of something, you are more likely to accept strange explanations.

Most of what gets filed under the realm of the paranormal is the result of people committing the argument-from-ignorance fallacy, or argumentum ad ignorantiam if you prefer the Latin logic terminology. Put simply, this is when you decide something is true or false because you can’t find evidence to the contrary.

You can’t disprove something you don’t know anything about, and the argument-from-ignorance fallacy can make you feel as though something is possible because you can’t prove otherwise.

If you look to the downtrodden and wonder why they can’t pull themselves out of poverty and get a nice job like you, you are committing the just-world fallacy. You are ignoring the unearned blessings of your station.

It is infuriating when cheats and con artists get ahead in the world while firemen and policemen put in long hours for little pay. Deep down, you want to believe hard work and virtue will lead to success, and evil and manipulation will lead to ruin, so you go ahead and edit the world to match those expectations. Yet, in reality, evil often prospers and never pays the price.