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

Don’t let this discourage you, though. You can accept that life is unfair and still relish it. You aren’t in total control of your life, but there is a nice big chunk of your life over which you have complete authority—beat that part to a pulp.

If you think the world is just and fair, people who need help may never get it.

Without some form of regulation, slackers and cheaters will crash economic systems because people don’t want to feel like suckers.

The tragedy of taking from a common good is over time the common good will be depleted out of just a tiny amount of greed. One misguided exploiter can crash the system. Greed is contagious.

In the wild, we lived in small groups—usually fewer than 150 people. It was vitally important to understand where you ranked in such a group. Survival depended on your relationships and your standing. Reputation and status are more important than money to primates. People with lots of money gain high status, but if you were in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, the money would suddenly become paper again. Your status would quickly be determined by other factors.

This situation comes up in life all the time. You decide when to ask for a raise, or make a move in the bar, or get up on stage and sing, based on your perceived status within a group. If it is low, you won’t risk further damage. If it is high, you expect better treatment.

If you believe you live under a sign, and the movement of the planets can divine your future, a general statement becomes specific.

The problem is, every other person in the group is doing the same thing, and if everyone decides it would be a bad idea to risk losing friends or a job, a false consensus will be reached and no one will do anything about it.

The recent housing market collapse, the failure to prevent the attack at Pearl Harbor, the sinking of the Titanic, the invasion of Iraq—all of these can be attributed to situations in which groupthink led to awful decisions. True groupthink depends on three conditions—a group of people who like one another, isolation, and a deadline for a crucial decision.

The research shows that groups of friends who allow members to disagree and still be friends are more likely to come to better decisions. So the next time you are in a group of people trying to reach consensus, be the asshole. Every group needs one, and it might as well be you.

Elliot could no longer make simple choices because he had no emotions. If he had to pick something to eat from a menu, he would endlessly pore over all the variables as if the secrets of the universe were unfolding before him. Texture, size, shape, calories, flavor, the history of his diet, the price—all of these variables and hundreds more would be subdivided into more variables and then weighed against one another in an endless cycle of computation. Without emotion, it became incredibly difficult to settle on any one option. He became a robot without hate, love, or yearning. He eventually divorced, lost his job, money, house, and everything else from his former life except the love of his parents, who took him in.

When you see something as good, the bad qualities are played down. When you see something as risky, the harder it becomes to notice the benefits. The affect heuristic is stronger still when something is familiar or speaks to the primal brain.

You can maintain relationships and keep up with only around 150 people at once.

can reliably manage to keep up with only around 150 people. More specifically, it’s between 150 and 230.

The neocortex of primates is the part of the brain responsible for keeping up with others. We can’t be certain of what forces shaped the size of this part of the brain, but for each primate the size of the cortex correlates with the size of the average social group.

With better tools—like telephones, Facebook, e-mail, World of Warcraft guilds, and so on—you become slightly more efficient at maintaining relationships, so the number can be larger, but not much larger. Dunbar’s most recent research suggests even power-users of Facebook with 1,000 or more friends still communicate regularly with only around 150 people, and of that 150 they strongly communicate with a group of less than 20.

Let it out. Left inside you, the anger will fester and spread, grow like a tumor, boil up until you punch holes in the wall or slam your car door so hard the windows shatter. Those dark thoughts shouldn’t be tamped down inside your heart where they can condense and strengthen, where they form a concentrated stockpile of negativity that could reach critical mass at any moment.

Feel better? Sure you do. Venting feels great. The problem is, it accomplishes little else. Actually, it makes matters worse and primes your future behavior by fogging your mind.

Thanks to Freud, catharsis theory and psychotherapy became part of psychology. Mental wellness, he reasoned, could be achieved by filtering away impurities in your mind through the siphon of a therapist. He believed your psyche was poisoned by repressed fears and desires, unresolved arguments, and unhealed wounds. The mind formed phobias and obsessions around these bits of mental detritus. You needed to rummage around in there, open up some windows, and let some fresh air and sunlight in.

The people who got angry didn’t release their anger on the punching bag—their anger was sustained by it. The group that cooled off lost their desire for vengeance. In subsequent studies where the subjects chose how much hot sauce the other person had to eat, the punching bag group piled it on. The cooled off group did not. When the punching bag group later did word puzzles where they had to fill in the blanks to words like ch_ _e, they were more likely to pick

choke instead of chase.

If you think catharsis is good, you are more likely to seek it out when you get pissed. When you vent, you stay angry and are more likely to keep doing aggressive things so you can keep venting. It’s druglike, because there are brain chemicals and other behavioral reinforcements at work. If you get accustomed to blowing off steam, you become dependent on it. The more effective approach is to just stop. Take your anger off of the stove.

Bushman’s work also debunks the idea of redirecting your anger into exercise or something similar. He says it will only maintain your state or increase your arousal level, and afterward you may be even more aggressive than if you had cooled off.

Still, cooling off is not the...

as not dealing with your anger at all. Bushman suggests you delay your response, relax or distract yourself with an activity t...

If you get into an argument, or someone cuts you off in traffic, or you get called an awful name, venting will not dissipate the negative energy. It will, however, feel great. That’s the thing. Catharsis will make you feel good, but it’s an emotional hamster wheel. The emotion that led you to catharsis will still be there afterward, an...

THE MISCONCEPTION: Memories are played back like recordings. THE TRUTH: Memories are constructed anew each time from whatever information is currently available, which makes them highly permeable to influences from the present.

Memory is imperfect, but also constantly changing. Not only do you filter your past through your present, but your memory is easily infected by social contagion. You incorporate the memories of others into your own head all the time.

Considering the misinformation effect not only requires you to be skeptical of eyewitness testimony and your own history, but it also means you can be more forgiving when someone is certain of something that is later revealed to be embellished or even complete fiction.

unconscious. Sometimes, like at a family dinner, the desire to keep everyone happy and to adhere to social conventions is a good thing. It keeps you close and connected to the norms that make it easier to work together in the modern world. But also beware of the other side—the dark places that conformity can lead to. Never be afraid to question authority when your actions could harm yourself or others.

Once you become accustomed to reward, you get really upset when you can’t have

If you get rewarded by your actions, you are more likely to continue them. If punished, you are more likely to stop. Over time, you begin to predict reward and punishment by linking longer and longer series of events to their eventual outcomes.

When you expect a reward or a punishment and nothing happens, your conditioned response starts to fade away. If you stop feeding your cat, he will stop hanging around the food bowl and meowing. His behavior will go extinct. If you were to keep going to work and not get paid, eventually you would stop.

You eliminate a reward from your life: awesome and delicious high-calorie foods. Right as you are ready to give the reward up forever, an extinction burst threatens to demolish your willpower. You become like a two-year-old in a conniption fit, and like the child, if you give in to the demands, the behavior will be strengthened. Compulsive overeating is a frenzied state of mind, food addiction under pressure until it bursts.

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. Become your own Supernanny, your own Dog Whisperer. Look for alternative rewards and positive reinforcement. Set goals, and when you achieve them, shower yourself with garlands of your choosing. Don’t freak out when it turns out to be difficult.

Studies in the 1980s showed you are confident in your ability to see through liars, yet you are actually terrible at it. On the other side, you think your own lies will be easy to detect.

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.

When you get near the person you have a crush on and feel the war drums in your gut, don’t freak out. You don’t look as nervous as you feel. When you stand in front of an audience or get interviewed on camera, there might be a thunderstorm of anxiety in your brain, but it can’t get out; you look far more composed than you believe. Smile. When your mother-in-law cooks a meal better fit for a dog bowl, she can’t hear your brain stem begging you to spit it out.

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.

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, but you can’t stop there. You must fight back your behavior and learn to fail with pride. Failing often is the only way to ever get the things you want out of life. Besides death, your destiny is not inescapable.

One group held a cup of warm coffee, and the other group held iced coffee. Later, when asked to rate the stranger’s personality, the people who held the warm coffee said they found the stranger to be nice, generous, and caring.

There’s a lot of research showcasing this phenomenon. You see people with bright clothes as being friendly and smart—bright.

Whatever metaphors your culture uses will change the way you feel about the world around you, should it match up with those words.

Settings prime you to see the world a certain way, and all it takes to see things differently is a change of temperature, or the sturdiness of a surface. Texture matters. The way something feels to your touch begins a series of associations in your brain. Your thoughts change based on the words you conjure.

Remember this study when you are in a negotiation—make your initial request far too high.

Psychologists call missing information in plain sight inattentional blindness. You believe with confidence your eyes capture everything before them and your memories are recorded versions of those captured images. The truth, though, is you see only a small portion of your environment at any one moment.

Your perception is built out of what you attend to.

The brain can’t keep up with the total amount of information coming in from your eyes, and so your experience from moment to moment is edited for simplicity.

In the end, Alter and Forgas 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 and your own abilities.

The sociologist Robert K. Merton coined the term “self-fulfilling prophecy” in 1968.