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

enamored

smug

escapades,

every brain within every body is infested with preconceived notions and patterns of thought that lead it astray without the brain knowing it.

spurious

Suppose the psychologist says, “I have a deck full of these strange cards, and there is one rule at play. If a card has an even number on one side, then it must be red on the opposite side. Now, which card or cards must you flip to prove I’m telling the truth?” Remember—three, eight, red, brown—which do you flip?

the world around you is the product of dealing with these biases, not overcoming them.

Your brain is better at seeing the world in some ways, like social situations, and not so good in others, like logic puzzles with numbered cards.

you are also filled with beliefs that look good on paper but fall apart in practice. When those beliefs fall apart, you tend not to notice. You have a deep desire to be right all of the time and a deeper desire to see yourself in a positive light both morally and behaviorally. You can stretch your mind pretty far to achieve these goals.

Cognitive biases are predicable patterns of thought and behavior that lead you to draw incorrect conclusions.

you tend to look for information that confirms your beliefs and ignore information that challenges them. This is called confirmation bias.

Heuristics are mental shortcuts you use to solve common problems. They speed up processing in the brain, but sometimes make you think so fast you miss what is important.

Sometimes you apply good logic to false premises; at other times you apply bad logic to the truth.

excogitation

According to the researchers, one group had unconsciously washed away their guilt and felt less of a need to pay penance.

How can they be sure that this is the connection! This isn’t science.

in the past

Priming does not have to be in the past; it can be in the present exclamation mark

Pencils make you think of pens. Blackboards make you think of classrooms.

The real question is, ‘why does the mind link certain objects with some specific others’? Experience? Shape? Memory? Proximity? Color? Others?

Mere exposure to briefcases and fancy pens had altered the behavior of normal, rational people. They became more competitive, greedier, and had no idea why. Faced with having to explain themselves, they rationalized their behavior with erroneous tales they believed were true.

Priming works best when you are on autopilot, when you aren’t trying to consciously introspect before choosing how to behave. When you are unsure how best to proceed, suggestions bubble up from the deep that are highly tainted by subconscious primes. In addition, your brain hates ambiguity and is willing to take shortcuts to remove it from any situation. If there is nothing else to go on, you will use what is available. When pattern recognition fails, you create patterns of your own.

You are always of two minds at any one moment—the higher-level rational self and the lower-level emotional self.

moment. If your behavior is the result of priming, the result of suggestions as to how to behave handed up from the adaptive unconscious, you often invent narratives to explain your feelings and decisions and musings because you aren’t aware of the advice you’ve been given by the mind behind the curtain in your head.

Priming works only if you aren’t aware of it,

Grocery stores noticed an increase in sales when the smell of freshly baked bread primed people to buy more food. Adding the words “all natural” or including pictures of pastoral farms and crops primes you with thoughts of nature, dissuading thoughts of factories and chemical preservatives.

Businesses discovered priming before psychologists did,

Studies of priming suggest when you engage in deep introspection over the causes of your own behavior you miss many, perhaps most, of the influences accumulating on your persona like barnacles along the sides of a ship. Priming doesn’t work if you see it coming, but your attention can’t be focused in all directions at once. Much of what you think, feel, do, and believe is, and will continue to be, nudged one way or the other by unconscious primes from words, colors, objects, personalities, and other miscellany infused with meaning either from your personal life or the culture you identify with. Sometimes these primes are unintended; sometimes there is an agent on the other end who plotted against your judgment. Of course, you can choose to become an agent yourself.

You are often ignorant of your motivations and create fictional narratives to explain your decisions, emotions, and history without realizing it.

a split-brain patient whose left hemisphere believed in God, but whose right hemisphere was an atheist. Essentially, as he put it, there were two people in one body—two selves.

When you recall your past, you create it on the spot—a daydream part true and part fantasy that you believe down to the last detail.

Korsakoff’s syndrome

Anosognosia

Capgras delusion

Cotard’s syndrome

phenomenology.

qualia,

Most everyone has seen red but can’t explain what it is like to do so.

Your opinions are the result of years of paying attention to information that confirmed what you believed, while ignoring information that challenged your preconceived notions.

Punditry

People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things . . . well, new things aren’t what they expect.

confirmation bias predicts: you want to be right about how you see the world, so you seek out information that confirms your beliefs and avoid contradictory evidence and opinions.

people spend 36 percent more time reading an essay if that essay aligns with their opinions.

Hindsight Bias

You are always looking back at the person you used to be, always reconstructing the story of your life to better match the person you are today.

keep it in mind the next time you get into a debate online or an argument with a boyfriend or girlfriend, husband or wife—the other person really does think he or she was never wrong, and so do you.

The fallacy gets its name from imagining a cowboy shooting at a barn. Over time, the side of the barn becomes riddled with holes. In some places there are lots of them, in others there are few. If the cowboy later paints a bull’s-eye over a spot where his bullet holes clustered together, it looks like he is pretty good with a gun. By painting a bull’s-eye over a cluster of bullet holes, the cowboy places artificial order over natural random chance. If you have a human brain, you do this all of the time.

With all three examples there are thousands of differences, all of which you ignored, but when you draw the bull’s-eye around the clusters, the similarities—whoa. If hindsight bias and confirmation bias had a baby, it would be the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

Anywhere people are searching for meaning, you will see the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

The meaning is a human construct.

There is a 100 percent chance something will be there, be anywhere, when you look; only the need for meaning changes how you feel about what you see.

present bias—being unable to grasp that what you want will change over time, and what you want now isn’t the same thing you will want later. Present bias explains why you buy lettuce and bananas only to throw them out later when you forget to eat them.

Procrastination manifests itself within every aspect of your life. You wait until the last minute to buy Christmas presents. You put off seeing the dentist, or getting that thing checked out by the doctor, or filing your taxes. You forget to register to vote. You need to get an oil change. There is a pile of dishes getting higher in the kitchen. Shouldn’t you wash clothes now so you don’t have to waste a Sunday cleaning everything you own?