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 might be a great judge of character, but you need to be a great judge of evidence to avoid delusion.

When you hear about a situation you hope never happens to you, you tend to blame the victim, not because you are a terrible person but because you want to believe you are smart enough to avoid the same fate. You inflate whatever amount of responsibility the victim may bear into something bigger, something you would never do.

It is common in fiction for the bad guys to lose and the good guys to win. This is how you would like to see the world—just and fair. In psychology, the tendency to believe that this is how the real world works is called the just-world fallacy.

More specifically, this is the tendency to react to horrible misfortune, like homelessness or drug addiction, by believing the people stuck in these situations must have done something to deserve it. The key word there is “deserve.” This is not an observation that bad choices may lead to bad outcomes. The just-world fallacy helps you to build a false sense of security.

Lerner also taught a class on society and medicine, and he noticed many students thought the poor were just lazy people who wanted a handout. So he conducted another study where he had two men solve puzzles. At the end, one of them was randomly awarded a large sum of money. The observers were told the reward was completely random. Still, when asked later to evaluate the two men, people said the one who got the award was smarter, more talented, better at solving puzzles, and more productive. A giant amount of research has been done since Lerner’s studies, and most psychologists have come to the same conclusion: You want the world to be fair, so you pretend it is.

nerdishness? In movies about bullies, the main character always has to learn how to stand up and fight back. The bullies get theirs only when the victim takes responsibility. The research says that while you know bullies are the bad guys, you accept it as unchangeable. The world is full of bad guys. The victims, however, have the power to end their own torment.

You’ve heard that what goes around comes around, or maybe you’ve seen a person get what was coming to them and thought, “That’s karma for you.” These are shades of the just-world fallacy. It sucks to think the world isn’t fair.

You want to believe those who work hard and sacrifice get ahead and those who are lazy and cheat do not. This, of course, is not always true. Success is often greatly influenced by when you were born, where you grew up, the socioeconomic status of your family, and random chance. All the hard work in the world can’t change those initial factors. Accepting this does not mean those born poor should just give up. After all, not taking action guarantees not getting results. In a just world, this would be the only rule, no matter what the initial conditions of your struggle were. The real world is more complicated. People can and do escape, but this doesn’t mean those who haven’t aren’t trying their damnedest to claw out of bad situations.

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.

The psychologist Jonathan Haidt says many people who don’t consciously believe in karma still believe deep down in some version of it, calling it whatever seems appropriate in their own culture. They see systems like welfare or affirmative action as disrupting the balance of the natural world. Slackers, they think, would get what they deserve if the government kept their noses out of it.

Why do we think this way? Psychologists are unsure. Some say it is a need to be able to predict the outcome of your own behavior, or to feel secure in your past decisions. More research is needed. To be sure, you would like to live in a world where people in white hats bring people in black hats to justice, but you don’t.

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. Just remember the unfair nature of the world, the randomness of birthright, means people often suffer adversity and enjoy opulence through no effort of their own. If you think the world is just and fair, people who need help may never get it. Realize that even though we are all responsible for our actions, the blame for evil acts rests on the perpetrator and never the victim. No one deserves to be raped or bullied, robbed or murdered. To make the world more just and fair, you have to make it harder for evil to thrive, and you can’t do this just by reducing the number of its potential targets.

Before you hear about the public goods game, you need to understand the tragedy of the commons. The idea comes from a 1968 essay by geologist Garrett Hardin that suggested you aren’t very good at sharing. Imagine a giant lake filled with fish. You and three others are the only people who know about it. You all agree to take just as many fish from the lake as you need to eat. As long as everyone takes just what he or she needs, the lake will stay full of fish. One day, you happen to notice one of the others has started taking more than he or she needs and is selling the extra fish in a nearby town. Eventually that person has a better fishing rod than you. What do you do? If you start overfishing too, you will also be able to get a better rod, maybe even a boat. Maybe you could partner up against the cheater. Maybe everyone will just start taking as many fish as desired. Maybe you could just tell the world about the lake. All of these scenarios will probably lead to the ruin of the common good. If you do nothing, the lake will still be able to support you and the other two, but the cheater wins. Anger over unfair situations is something you can’t help but feel. In situations like the imaginary lake above, in an effort not to fall behind, everyone loses. A big holiday meal, for example, can become a zero-sum game if everyone piles a plate, but if everyone takes only what he or she needs, everyone wins. The tragedy of taking from a common good is over time the common good will...

The public goods game works like this: A group of people sits around a table, and each person is given a few dollars. The group is told they can put as much money as they want in the community pot. An experimenter then doubles the pot, and everyone then gets an equal portion back. If it’s ten people and everyone gets $2, and everyone puts in that money, the pot would be $20. It gets doubled to $40 and divided by ten. Everyone gets back $4. The game proceeds in rounds, and you would think everyone would just put the maximum amount in the pot each time—but they don’t. Someone usually gets the gist of the game and realizes that one can put in

very little, or nothing at all, and start making more money than everyone else. If everyone but you puts in $2, the pot would be $18. It gets doubled to $36 and everyone gets back $3.60—including you, the one who put nothing in at all. In experiments where this game is played so everyone can see who puts in a fair share, the pot tends to grow for a while and then it starts to shrink as people test the water by withholding funds. The behavior spreads, because no one wants to be a chump, and eventually the economy grinds to a halt. If people are allowed the option of punishing cheaters, the cheating stops, and everyone wins. If instead of punishment, people are given the choice to reward good players, the economy again crashes after a few rounds.

The crazy thing about this game is how illogical it is to stop contributing just because someone in the group is free riding. If everyone else is still being a good citizen of the game, everyone will still win. The old emotional brain kicks in, however, when you see cheating. It’s an innate response that served your ancestors well. You know deep down that cheaters must be punished because it takes only one chea...

The urge to help others and discourage cheating is something that helped primates like you survive in small groups for millions of years, but when the system becomes gigantic and abstract like the budget for a nation or the welfare system for an entire state, it becomes difficult to make sense of the world through those old evolutionary behaviors.

Give this problem to a computer, and it will take anything above zero. Something is better than nothing to a purely logical mind. Give this problem to a human, and you must deal with 3 million years of evolution.

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.

money you offer to the other person is interpreted as your estimation of his or her status in the social hierarchy. If the other person accepts less than 20 percent, ...

When you know the other party could exact revenge on you for being unfair, it encourages the sort of altruism that allowed your ancestors to escape into civilization.

This effect is even greater if the person making the final decision has low serotonin levels. If a person feels sad and unwanted, he or she will demand more money before accepting.

The promise of revenge is one way human beings ensure fairness, and you are precisely tuned to expect it. Your perceived status is part of the unconscious equation you work out when accepting, refusing, and making offers with other people. You are not so smart, so you are willing to get nothing if it ensures fair treatment in the future and a more secure place on the social ladder.

The tendency to believe vague statements designed to appeal to just about anyone is called the Forer effect, and psychologists point to this phenomenon to explain why people fall for pseudoscience like biorhythms, iridology, and phrenology, or mysticism like astrology, numerology, and tarot cards.

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.

Since you are always in your own head, thoughts about what it means to be you take up a lot of mental space. With some cultural variations, most people are keen on being individuals, unique and special persons whose hopes and dreams and fears and doubts are all their own. If you have the means, you personalize everything: your ...

Everything around you says something about your personality. Cultivating an incomparable self either through consumption or creation is not something you take lightly. Yet somewhere between nature and nurture, we are all far more similar than we think. Genetically, you and your friends are almost identical. Those genes create the brain that generates the mind from which your thoughts spring. Thus, genetically, your mental life is as similar to everyone else’s as the feet in your shoes. Culturally, we differ. Our varying...

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

It is this hope that gives subjective validation its power. If you want the psychic to be real, or the sacred stones to forecast the unknown, you will find a way to believe them even when they falter.

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 realized what he said didn’t matter as long as his presentation was good. The other person was doing all the work, tricking him- or herself, seeing the general as the specific just like in the Forer effect.

Since the 1940s, when capitalism and marketing married psychology and public relations, the Man has been getting much better and more efficient at offering you something to

purchase no matter your taste.

Think about an archetypal punk rocker with chains and spikes, gaudy pants and a leather jacket. Yeah, he bought all of those clothes. Someone is making money off of his revolt. That’s the paradox of consumer rebellion—everything is part of the system. We all sell out, because we all buy things. Every niche opened by rebellion against the mainstream is immediately filled by entrepreneurs who ...

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there were many stabs at trying to thwart this through artistic filmmaking—Fight Club, American Beauty, Fast Food Nation, The Corporation, etc. The creators of these works may have had the best intentions, but their work still became a pr...

Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Kurt Cobain, Andy Kaufman—they may have been solely concerned with creating art or illustrating academic principles, but once their output fell into the marketplace, it fo...

To escape consumerism and conformity, you must turn your back and ignore the mainstream culture. The shackles will then fall away, the machines will grind to a halt, the filters will dissolve, and you will see the world for what it really is. The illusory nature of existence will end and we will all, finally, be real.

Now people are hired by corporations to go to bars and clubs and observe what the counterculture is into and have it on the shelves in the mall stores right as it becomes popular. The counterculture, the indie fans, and the underground stars—they are the driving force behind capitalism. They are the engine. This brings us to the point: Competition among consumers is the turbine of capitalism.

Back before mass production, people were often defined by their work, by their output. The things they owned usually either were things they hand made or were things other people made by hand. There was a weight, an infusion of soul, in everything a person owned, used, and lived in. Today everyone is a consumer and has to pick from the same selection of goods as everyone else; and because of this people now define their personalities by how good their taste is, or how clever, or how obscure, or how ironic their choices are.

you compete with your peers by one-upping them. You attain status by having better taste in movies and music, by owning more authentic furniture and clothing.

Having a dissenting opinion on movies, music, or clothes, or owning clever or obscure possessions, is the way middle-class people fight one another for status. They can’t out-consume one another because they can’t afford it, but they can out-taste one another. Since everything is mass-produced, and often for a mass audience, finding and consuming things that appeal to your desire for authenticity is what moves these items and artists and services and goods up from the bottom to the top—where they can be mass-consumed.

You would compete like this no matter how society was constructed. 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.

Self-esteem is mostly self-delusion, but it serves a purpose. You are biologically driven to think highly of yourself in order to avoid stagnation.

unique. In 1999, Justin Kruger at the New York University Stern School of Business showed illusory superiority was more likely to manifest in the minds of subjects when they were told ahead of time a certain task was easy. When they rated their abilities after being primed to think the task was considered simple, people said they performed better than average. When he then told people they were about to perform a task that was difficult, they rated their performance as being below average even when it wasn’t. No matter the actual difficulty, just telling people ahead of time how hard the undertaking would be changed how they saw themselves in comparison to an imagined average. To defeat feelings of inadequacy, you first have to imagine a task as being simple and easy. If you can manage to do that, illusory superiority takes over.

self-evaluation maintenance theory

You can’t help but be the center of your universe, and you find it difficult to gauge just how much other people are paying attention since you are paying attention to you all the time.

For every outlet of information, there are some who see it as dangerous not because it affects them, but because it might affect the thoughts and opinions of an imaginary third party. This sense of alarm about the impact of speech not on yourself but on others is called the third person effect.

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.

Catharsis will make you feel good, but it’s an emotional hamster wheel.

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