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

Not only is your memory easily altered by the influence of others, you also smooth over the incongruences, rearrange time lines, and invent scenarios, but rarely notice you’re doing this until you see yourself in a video, or hear another person’s version of the events.

Scientists generally agree memories aren’t recorded like videos or stored like data on a hard drive. They are constructed and assembled on the spot as if with Legos from a bucket in your brain.

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.

“We are often not even aware when we are conforming. It is our home base, our default mode.”

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.

Conformity, therefore, can be manufactured when the person looking for compliance convinces others they are tools instead of human beings.

Officer Scott’s demands started small and bumped up incrementally, just like Milgram’s shocks.

By the time it was uncomfortable, the situation had grown in power. They feared retribution if they didn’t follow new orders, and once they had crossed the line into territory their morality couldn’t condone, they phased out of their own personality and into the role of an instrument of the law.

Be aware: Your desire to conform is strong a...

Extinction bursts are a component of extinction, one of the principles of conditioning. Conditioning is among the most basic factors shaping the way any organism—including you—reacts to the world. If you get rewarded by your actions, you are more likely to continue them. If punished, you are more likely to stop.

That’s classical conditioning. Something neutral—the toilet flushing—becomes charged with meaning and expectation.

The sort of complex behavior Skinner produced in animals was the result of operant conditioning. Operant conditioning changes your desires. Your inclinations become greater through reinforcement, or diminish through punishment.

This finally brings us back to the third factor—extinction. When you expect a reward

or a punishment and nothing happens, your

conditioned response starts t...

Just before you give up on a long-practiced routine, you freak out. It’s a final desperate attempt by the oldest parts of your brain to keep getting rewarded. You lock your keys in your apartment, but your roommate is asleep. You ring the doorbell and knock, but your roommate doesn’t come. You ring the doorbell over and over and over. You start pounding on the door.

So back to that diet. 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. Habits form because you are not so smart, and they cease under the same conditions.

If you know you aren’t being judged as an individual, your instinct is to fade into the background.

When the lead singer at the concert asks you to scream as loud as you can, and then he asks again, going, “I can’t hear you! You can do better than that!” have you ever noticed that the second time is always louder? Why wasn’t everyone yelling at the top of their lungs the first time?

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.

When battered women, or hostages, or abused children, or longtime prisoners refuse to escape, they don’t because they have accepted the futility of trying.

Those who do get out of bad situations often have a hard time committing to anything that may lead to failure.

in nursing homes where conformity and passivity are encouraged and every whim is attended to, the health and well-being of the patients declines rapidly. If, instead, the people in

these homes are given responsibilities and choices, they remain healthy and active. This research was

When you are able to succeed at easy tasks, hard tasks feel possible to accomplish. When you are unable to succeed at small tasks, everything seems harder.

“If this is so easy, what is wrong with me?”

Even though it shouldn’t be too tough, learned helplessness tells you to give up. In Nixon’s classes, this is what usually happens. The half with the impossible words gives in by the third word.

The leading theory as to how such a strange behavior would evolve is that it springs from all organisms’ desire to conserve resources. If you can’t escape a source of stress, it leads to more stress, and this positive feedback loop eventually triggers an automatic shutdown. At its most extreme, you think if you keep struggling you might die. If you stop, there is a chance the bad thing will go away.

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.

You see people with bright clothes as being friendly and smart—bright. You see people who speak slowly as being less intelligent—slow. Whatever metaphors your culture uses will change the way you feel about the world around you, should it match up

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.

When you have nothing else to go on, you fixate on the information at hand.

If you move up to a nice car or a big house, a nice computer or an expensive smartphone, you become anchored and find it difficult to move back down later, even if you should.

Remember this study when you are in a negotiation—make your initial request far too high. You have to start somewhere, and your initial decision or calculation greatly influences all the choices that follow, cascading out, each tethered to the anchors set before.

External anchors, like prices before a sale or ridiculous requests, are obvious and can be avoided. Internal, self-generated anchors, are not so easy to bypass.

Simons and Chabris showed tunnel vision is a fact of life—it is your default setting. In

Your perception is built out of what you attend to. In the gorilla experiment, people are more likely to see the bizarre intruder if they are just allowed to watch the video without expectations, but it doesn’t guarantee they will see it.

Your vision narrows to a keyhole view of the world when you are focused, but it doesn’t widen to take in everything when you are relaxed.

The problem with inattentional blindness is not that it happens so often, it’s that you don’t believe it happens. Instead believe you see the whole world in front of you. In any event where eyewitnesses or close inspection are key, your tendency to believe you have perfect perception and recall leads to mistakes in judgment of your own mind and the minds of others.

The fraternal twin of inattentional blindness is change blindness.

The more your attention is engaged, the less you expect something out of the ordinary and the less prone you are to see it even when lives could be at stake.

A true hypochondriac absorbs empathy like a flower does sunshine, but the real reward comes when life gets too hard. When a project or an obligation seems like too much to handle, a hypochondriac can conveniently become sick and avoid the risk of failing.

Like its cousins sour grapes, in which you pretend you don’t want what you can’t have, and sweet lemons, in which you convince yourself something unpleasant is actually not so bad, self-handicapping is what psychologists call an anticipatory rationalization.

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. Sad people, it seems, are more honest with themselves.

‘if you criticize anything I do, you criticize me.’

Whenever you venture into uncharted waters with failure as a distinct possibility, your anxiety will be lowered every time you see a new way to blame possible failure on forces beyond your control. The next time you face a challenge, remember you are not so smart, and start preparing for it now.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies THE MISCONCEPTION: Predictions about your future are subject to forces beyond your control. THE TRUTH: Just believing a future event will happen can cause it to happen if the event depends on human behavior.

“If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” Thomas noticed when people are trying to predict future events, they make a lot of assumptions about the present. If those assumptions are powerful enough, the resulting actions will lead to the predicted future. The easiest example of this is the rumor of a shortage. If you believe there will be a shortage of toothpaste, you will go and try to buy some before the stores run out—just like everyone else. Sure enough, the shortage occurs.