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

Wilson knew previous research at Kent State had shown that ruminations about your own depression tend to make you more depressed, but distraction leads to an improved mood. Sometimes, introspection is simply counterproductive.

You want the world to be fair, so you pretend it is. The just-world fallacy is probably built into the human mind. No matter how liberal or conservative you are, some notion of it pulls on your emotional reaction to hearing about the suffering of others.

The findings of these studies showed you tend to accept credit when you succeed, but blame bad luck, unfair rules, difficult instructors, bad bosses, cheaters, and so on when you fail. When you are doing well, you think you are to blame. When you are doing badly, you think the world is to blame. This behavior can be observed in board games and senate races, group projects and final exams. When things are going your way, you attribute everything to your amazing skills, but once the tide turns, you look for external factors that prevented your genius from shining through.

You spend so much time thinking about your own body, your own thoughts and behaviors, you begin to think other people must be noticing too. The research says they aren’t, at least not nearly as much as you are.

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. Studies suggest your memory is permeable, malleable, and evolving. It isn’t fixed and permanent, but more like a dream that pulls in information about what you are thinking about during the day and adds new details to the narrative.

As psychologist Noam Shpancer explains on his blog, “We are often not even aware when we are conforming. It is our home base, our default mode.” Shpancer says you conform because social acceptance is built into your brain. To thrive, you know you need allies. You get a better picture of the world when you can receive information from multiple sources. You need friends because outcasts are cut off from valuable resources. So when you are around others, you look for cues as to how to behave, and you use the information offered by your peers to make better decisions. When everyone you know tells you about an awesome app for your phone or a book you should read, it sways you. If all of your friends tell you to avoid a certain part of town or a brand of cheese, you take their advice. Conformity is a survival mechanism.