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

Much of your behavior is an attempt to lower anxiety. You know you aren’t in any danger when everything is safe and expected. Normalcy bias is self-soothing through believing everything is just fine.

The solution, according to Mikami, Ikeda, and other experts, is repetition on the part of those who can help, those who can see the danger better than you. If enough warnings are given and enough instructions are broadcast, then those things become the new normal, and you will spring into action.

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Believing you understand your motivations and desires, your likes and dislikes, is called the introspection illusion.

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The tendency to react more rapidly and to a greater degree when considering information you are familiar with is called the availability heuristic.

The old adage “I’ll believe it when I see it” is the availability heuristic at work.

It’s simply easier to believe something if you are presented with examples than it is to accept something presented in numbers or abstract facts.

In both studies they showed the more available a bit of information is, the faster you process it. The faster you process it, the more you believe it and the less likely you become to consider other bits of info.

When you buy a lottery ticket, you imagine yourself winning like those people on television who get suddenly famous when their numbers are chosen, because people who don’t win don’t get interviewed. You are far more likely to die in a car crash on the way to buy the ticket than you are to win, but this information isn’t as available. You don’t think in statistics, you think in examples, in stories.

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.

Everyone is influencing every other person’s perception of reality thanks to another behavior called the illusion of transparency.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is what makes America’s Got Talent and American Idol possible. At the local karaoke bar you might be the best singer in the room. Up against the entire country? Not so much.

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. Only once you have some experience do you start to recognize the breadth and depth you have yet to plunder.

So the Dunning-Kruger effect isn’t always influencing you to think that you are awesome when you are actually mediocre. 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.

Charles Darwin said it best: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

The recent explosion of reality programming is a great example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. A whole industry of assholes is making a living off of making attractive yet untalented people believe they are actually genius auteurs. The bubble around reality stars is so thick, they may never escape it.

Everyone experiences the Dunning-Kruger effect from time to time. Being honest with yourself and recognizing all your faults and weaknesses is not a pleasant way to live. Feeling inadequate or incompetent is paralyzing—you have to plow through those emotions to get out of bed. Seen along a spectrum, Dunning-Kruger is on the opposite end from depression with its crippling insecurity. Don’t let the Dunning-Kruger effect cast its shadow over you. If you want to be great at something, you have to practice, and then you have to sample the work of people who have been doing it for their whole lives. Compare and contrast and eat some humble pie.

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.

In a mystery like The Da Vinci Code, or in a television series like Lost, where mysterious happenings are at the center of the plot, clues pop up that turn out to be connected in some strange way. You can’t help but be intrigued by the patterns slowly coalescing. It drives you crazy. You find yourself compelled to keep turning the page or popping in the next disc to see what happens, to see how everything connects in the end. When you do this in the real world, it is called apophenia.

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.

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

Maybe you gamble all night, convinced you are seeing patterns in the cards or meaning in the wheels of the slot machine, yet the odds never change.

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.

Your mind is preorganized to notice order, even when the order is defined by your culture and not your synapses. The ancient Greeks and Babylonians believed numbers held special sacred meanings, and they attached numerical values to all aspects of humanity. The early Christians were fond of doing the same, especially (cf. the number three and the Trinity). In all religions and cultures, certain numbers are occasionally promoted above the others as having special significance. Once this happens, apophenia causes people to notice them more than usual.

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. On a planet with close to 7 billion people, there is a lot of opportunity for flukes. When people notice coincidences, they remember them and tell others. Sometimes they make their way into the news. When coincidences don’t happen, no one cares. You end up with an echo chamber of tales where stories of coincidence have no competition.

J. E. Littlewood, a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote about the law of truly large numbers in his 1986 book, Littlewood’s Miscellany. He said the average person is alert for about eight hours every day, and something happens to the average person about once a second. At this rate, you will experience 1 million events every thirty-five days. This means when you say the chances of something happening are one in a million, it also means about once a month. The monthly miracle is called Littlewood’s Law.

More often than not, apophenia is the result of the most dependable of all delusio...

Apophenia isn’t just seeing order in chaos, it is believing you were destined to see it. It is believing miracles are so rare you should stand up and take notice when they occur, so you can decode their meaning.

On the other hand, if the product is unnecessary, like an iPad, there is a great chance the customer will become a fanboy because he had to choose to spend a big chunk of money on it. It’s the choosing of one thing over another that leads to narratives about why you did it, which usually tie in to your self-image. Branding builds on this by giving you the option to create the person you think you are through choosing to align yourself with the mystique of certain products.

Psychologists demonstrate this by asking a group of people how much they think a water bottle is worth. The group will agree to an amount around $5, and then someone in the group will be given the bottle for free. Then, after an hour, they ask the person how much they would be willing to sell the bottle back to the experimenter for. They usually ask for more money, like $8. Ownership adds special emotional value to things, even if those things were free.

Another bias is the sunk cost fallacy. This is when you’ve spent money on something you don’t want to own or don’t want to do and can’t get it back. For instance, you might pay too much for some take-out food that really sucks, but you eat it anyway, or you sit through a movie even after you realize it’s terrible.

It’s purely emotional, the moment you pick. People with brain damage to their emotional centers who have been rendered into Spock-like beings of pure logic find it impossible to decide things as simple as which brand of cereal to buy. They stand transfixed in the aisle, contemplating every element of their potential decision—the calories, the shapes, the net weight—everything. They can’t pick because they have no emotional connection to anything.

This book often brings up the consensus of scientists on certain behaviors as a way to prove how deluded you are. It is not a fallacy to trust the consensus of thousands of researchers on how to interpret the evidence provided by decades of studies. Science focuses on the facts, not the people who unearth them, but that doesn’t mean large groups of people can’t agree on something that is totally wrong. Neurologist Walter Freeman won the 1949 Nobel Prize for Medicine in honor of his work—lobotomizing mentally ill people by jabbing a spike behind their eyeballs. Some reports say he performed this technique around 2,500 times, often without anesthesia. He took a practice that had previously required drilling into the skull and turned it into an outpatient procedure. At first, he used an ice pick, but eventually he developed short, thin metal spears he drove through the back of the eye socket with a mallet. The technique made formerly unruly mental patients calmer, as you might imagine severe brain damage would. It became a popular way to treat patients in mental facilities, and Freeman drove a van he called the lobotomobile around the country to teach the technique wherever he could. Somewhere close to twenty thousand people were lobotomized in this way before science corrected itself.

Outside of science, mystical New Age props like crystals and dowsing rods play on your tendency toward pattern recognition. You look for cause and effect, but when the cause is unclear you commit a logical fallacy by thinking all the possible causes are equal.

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 not being able to disprove this book secretly hungers for flesh does not improve the odds it does. The same holds true for leprechauns and unicorns, chupacabra and the Loch Ness Monster. These things aren’t more likely just because you can’t prove they don’t exist.

When you are losing an argument, you often use a variety of deceptive techniques to bolster your opinion. You aren’t trying to be sneaky, but the human mind tends to follow predictable patterns when you get angry with other people and do battle with words.

It works like this: When you get into an argument about either something personal or something more public and abstract, you sometimes resort to constructing a character who you find easier to refute, argue, and disagree

with, or you create a position the other person isn’t even suggesting or defending. This is a straw man.

others. The straw man fallacy takes the facts and assertions of your opponent and replaces them with an artificial argument you feel more comfortable dealing with. The straw man fallacy follows a familiar pattern. You first build the straw man, then you attack it, then you point out how easy it was to defeat it, and then you come to a conclusion.

Sometimes people morph the straw man into a warning about a slippery slope where allowing one side to win would put humanity on a course of destruction. Any time someone begins an attack with “So you’re saying we should all just . . .” or “Everyone knows . . . ,” you can bet a straw man is coming. When you start or someone else starts to imagine a future hellscape thanks to the ideas of the opposition becoming reality, there is a straw man in the room.

When you assume someone is incorrect based on who that person is or what group he or she belongs to, you have committed the ad hominem fallacy. Ad hominem is Latin for “to the person,” which is where you sometimes take the argument when things get out of hand.

Imagine you are part of jury in the case of a man who is accused of stealing a car. The prosecutor might bring up the past of the defendant to show he’s committed crimes before, or have people from his past claim he is a liar. Once the seed is planted—this guy is a liar and a thief—it might sway your opinion of the argument at hand. No matter what the man says, somewhere in your head you will doubt it because you don’t trust liars. If the guy on trial told you the sky was blue and bread was edible, you would have no problem believing it. The fallacy disappears. Only his argument about something you are still unsure of is affected. If he tells you he didn’t steal the car, the lawyer’s ad hominem attack may cause you to ignore the evidence and commit a logical fallacy.

You would be right to feel skeptical, but jumping to a conclusion based on how you feel about the journalist as an individual would be a mistake.

Perhaps someone criticizes your driving and you respond with “You have no room to talk. You are the worst driver in the world.” There it is again. You are dismissing the other person’s argument by attacking the person instead of the claim. Just calling someone a name is not a fallacy. You must discount the person’s position based on your impression of his or her character before you get into trouble.

Guilt by association is often the ad hominem fallacy at work. If someone hangs out with crooks or crazies, maybe that person is a criminal or a lunatic. A politician’s policies and the people he or she barbecues with are separate issues.

The ad hominem fallacy can also work in reverse. You might assume someone is trustworthy because they speak well, or have a respectable job. It is hard to believe an astronaut would put on a diaper and drive across the country to kill the wife of her lover, but it did happen once. The inverse ad hominem fallacy would steer you into delusion if you were on the jury in the astronaut’s trial and refused to believe the evidence because of your respect for space explorers.

You tend to see people as characters and look for consistency in their behavior. This is usually a good thing, as it helps you sort out whom you can trust. Wondering whether or not someone can be trusted and wondering whether or not someone is telling the truth are two different things.