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

kids who were able to overcome their desire for short-term reward in favor of a better outcome later weren’t smarter than the other kids, nor were they less gluttonous. They just had a better grasp of how to trick themselves into doing what was best for them. They watched the wall instead of looking at the food. They tapped their feet instead of smelling the confection. The wait was torture for all, but some knew it was going to be impossible to just sit there and stare at the delicious, gigantic marshmallow without giving in. The ones who were better at holding off their desire to snatch the marshmallow used that same power to squeeze more out of life. The ones who rang the bell quickly showed a higher incidence of behavioral problems. The ones who could hold out ended up with SAT scores that were on average more than two hundred points higher than scores for the ones who ate the marshmallow.

In the struggle between should versus want, some people have figured out something crucial: Want never goes away. Procrastination is all about choosing want over should because you don’t have a plan for those times when you can expect to be tempted. You are really bad at predicting your future mental states.

If I were to offer you $50 now or $100 in a year, which would you take? Clearly, you’ll take the $50 now. After all, who knows what could happen in a year, right? OK, so what if I instead offered you $50 in five years or $100 in six years? Nothing has changed other than adding a delay, but now it feels just as natural to wait for the $100. After all, you already have to wait a long time.

Procrastination is an impulse; it’s buying candy at the checkout. Procrastination is also hyperbolic discounting, taking the sure thing in the present over the caliginous prospect someday far away.

salad instead of the cupcake, writing the article instead of playing the video game. The trick is to accept that the now-you will not be the person facing those choices, it will be the future-you—a person who can’t be trusted. Future-you will give in, and then you’ll go back to being now-you and feel weak and ashamed. Now-you must trick future-you into doing what is right for both parties.

You often become abnormally calm and pretend everything is normal in a crisis.

No matter what you encounter in life, your first analysis of any situation is to see it in the context of what is normal for you and then compare and contrast the new information against what you know usually happens. Because of this, you have a tendency to interpret strange and alarming situations as if they were just part of business as usual.

Weather experts and emergency management workers know you can become enveloped in a blanket of calm when terror enters your heart. Psychologists refer to it as normalcy bias. First responders call it negative panic.

Normalcy bias flows into the brain no matter the scale of the problem. It will appear whether you have days and plenty of warning or are blindsided with only seconds between life and death.

In 1977, on an island in the Canaries called Tenerife, a series of mistakes led to two enormous 747 passenger planes colliding with each other as one attempted takeoff. A Pan Am aircraft with 496 people on board was taxiing along the runway in dense fog when a Dutch KLM flight with 248 inside asked to be cleared for takeoff on the same airstrip.

John Leach, a psychologist at the University of Lancaster, also studies freezing under stress. He says about 75 percent of people find it impossible to reason during a catastrophic event or impending doom.

the sort of people who survive are the sort of people who prepare for the worst and practice ahead of time. They’ve done the research, or built the shelter, or run the drills. They look for the exits and imagine what they will do.

Normalcy bias is stalling during a crisis and pretending everything will continue to be as fine and predictable as it was before. Those who defeat it act when others don’t. They move when others are considering whether or not they should. As Johnson points out, the brain must go through a procedure before the body acts—cognition, perception, comprehension, decision, implementation, and then movement.

Johnson likens it to playing an instrument. If you’ve never played a C chord on a guitar, you have to think your way through it and awkwardly press down on the strings until you make a clumsy twang. With a few minutes of practice, you can strum without as much deliberation and create a more pleasant sound.

tonic immobility.

thanatosis.

Survivors of 9/11 say they remember gathering belongings before leaving offices and cubicles. They put on coats and called loved ones. They shut down their computers and had conversations. Even in their descent, most moved at a leisurely pace—no screaming or running. There was no need for anyone to say “Remain calm everyone,” because they weren’t freaking out. They were begging the world to return to normal by engaging in acts of normalcy.

“reflexive incredulity.”

the steps you are likely to go through in a disaster.

tendency to first interpret the situation within the context of what you are familiar with and to greatly underestimate the severity. This is the moment, when seconds count, that normalcy bias costs lives. A predictable order of behaviors,

will then unfold. You will seek information from those you trust first and then move on to those nearby. Next, you’ll try to contact your family if possible, and then you’ll begin to prepare to evacuate or...

you are more likely to dawdle if you fail to understand the seriousness of the situation and have never been exposed to advice about what to do or been in a similar circumstance. Even worse, you stall longer if you fall back on the old compare-and-contrast tendencies where you try to convince yourself the...

prosaic

awry;

Normalcy bias can be scaled up to larger events

Global climate change, peak oil, obesity epidemics, and stock market crashes are good examples of larger, more complex events in which people fail to act because it is difficult to imagine just how abnormal life could become if the predictions are true.

The origin of certain emotional states is unavailable to you, and when pressed to explain them, you will just make something up.

when you are faced with a decision in which you are forced to think about your rationale, you start to turn the volume in your emotional brain down and the volume in your logical brain up. You start creating a mental list of pros and cons that would never have been conjured up if you had gone with your gut.

ruminations about your own depression tend to make you more depressed, but distraction leads to an improved mood. Sometimes, introspection is simply counterproductive.

When you ask people why they do or do not like things, they must then translate something from a deep, emotional, primal part of their psyche into the language of the higher, logical, rational world of words and sentences and paragraphs. The problem here is those deeper recesses of the mind are perhaps inaccessible and unconscious. The things that are available to consciousness might not have much to do with your preferences. Later, when you attempt to justify your decisions or emotional attachments, you start worrying about what your explanation says about you as a person, further tainting the validity of your inner narrative.

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

introspection is not the act of tapping into your innermost mental constructs but is instead a fabrication. You look at what you did, or how you felt, and you make up some sort of explanation that you can reasonably believe. If you have to tell others, you make up an explanation they can believe too. When it comes to explaining why you like the things you like, you are not so smart, and the very act of having to explain yourself can change your attitudes.

schmaltzy,

You are far more likely to believe something is commonplace if you can find just one example of it, and you are far less likely to believe in something you’ve never seen or heard of before.

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.

Amos Tverksy and Daniel Kahneman pinpointed the availability heuristic, in their 1973 research.

The word test about how often “r” is in the third position was Tversky and Kahneman’s idea too. 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.

You don’t think in statistics, you think in examples, in stories.

you use the availability heuristic first and the facts second. You decide the likelihood of a future event on how easily you can imagine it,

The more people who witness a person in distress, the less likely it is that any one person will help.

the bystander effect.

In a crowd, your inclination to rush to someone’s aid fades, as if diluted by the potential of the group. Everyone thinks someone is going to eventually do something, but with everyone waiting together, no one does.

The findings suggest the fear of embarrassment plays into group dynamics. You see the smoke, but you don’t want to look like a fool, so you glance over at the other person to see what they are doing. The other person is thinking the same thing. Neither of you react, so neither of you becomes alarmed. The third person sees two people acting like everything is OK, so that third person is even less likely to freak out. Everyone is influencing every other person’s perception of reality thanks to another behavior called the illusion of transparency. You tend to think other people can tell what you are thinking and feeling just by looking at you. You think the other people can tell you are really worried about the smoke, but they can’t. They think the same thing. No one freaks out. This leads to pluralistic ignorance—a situation where everyone is thinking the same thing but believes he or she is the only person who thinks it. After the smoke-filled room experiment, all the participants reported they were freaking out on the inside, but since no one else seemed alarmed, they assumed it must just be their own anxiety.

The bystander effect gets stronger when you think the person who needs help is being harmed by someone that person knows.

Many other studies have shown it takes only one person to help for others to join in.

you should always be the first person to break away from the pack and offer help—or attempt escape—because you can be certain no one else will.

You are generally pretty bad at estimating your competence and the difficulty of complex tasks.

they don’t imagine the worldwide audience as being more sophisticated than the small audience of friends, family, and peers they usually stand before.

Bertrand Russell once said, “In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”