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

The Just-World Fallacy

The beneficiaries of good fortune often do nothing to earn it, and bad people often get away with their actions without consequences.

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.

The rapist is always to blame, but most awareness campaigns are targeted at women, not men. The message boils downs to “Don’t do something that might get you raped.”

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.

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. You want to feel in control, so you assume as long as you avoid bad behavior, you won’t be harmed. You ...

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.

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 rich, they think, must deserve what they have. One day all the good karma they are generating will lift them even higher up in the social hierarchy to join the others who have what they deserve. The just-world fallacy tells them fairness is built into the system, and so they rage when the system artificially unbalances karmic justice.

One of the basis for the big American Dream.

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.

THE MISCONCEPTION: We could create a system with no regulations where everyone would contribute to the good of society, everyone would benefit, and everyone would be happy. THE TRUTH: Without some form of regulation, slackers and cheaters will crash economic systems because people don’t want to feel like suckers.

public goods game,

the tragedy of the commons.

In situations like the imaginary lake above, in an effort not to fall behind, everyone loses.

The tragedy of taking from a common good is over time the common good will be depleted out of just a tiny amount of greed. One misguided exploiter can crash the system. Greed is contagious.

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 someo...

It isn’t you don’t want to help; you just don’t want to help a cheater or do more work than a slacker—even if your not helping leads to ruining the game for you and everyone else.

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.

In the lottery situation, the 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, he or she will feel inferior and disrespected. The person will lose status in the eyes of others.

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. That person’s default settings give him or her a sense of lower status, and thus the person is unwilling to lower it even further by accepting an unfair offer.

This situation comes up in life all the time. You decide when to ask for a raise, or make a move in the bar, or get up on stage and sing, based on your perceived status within a group. If it is low, you won’t risk further damage. If it is high, you expect better treatment.

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.

Subjective Validation

THE MISCONCEPTION: You are skeptical of generalities. THE TRUTH: You are prone to believing vague statements and predictions are true, especially if they are positive and address you personally.

You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worried and insecure on the inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself on being an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic.

All the above statements came from a 1948 experiment by Bertram R. Forer. He gave his students a personality test and told them each one had been personally assessed, but then gave everyone the same analysis.

He asked his students to look over the statements and rate them for accuracy. On average, they rated the bogus analysis as 85 percent correct—as if it had been personally prepared to describe each one of them. The block of text above was actually a mishmash of lines from horoscopes collected by Forer for the experiment. 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.

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

You see faces in clouds and demons in bonfires. 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 was using a technique called cold reading, where you start with the wide-angle lens of generalities and watch the other person for cues so you can constrict the focus down to what seems like a powerful insight into the other person’s soul. It works because people tend to ignore the little misses and focus on the hits. As he worked his way through college, another mentalist, Stanley Jaks, took Hyman aside and saved him from delusion by asking him to try something new—tell people the opposite of what he believed their palms revealed. The result? They were just as flabbergasted by his abilities, if not more so. Cold reading was powerful, but tossing it aside, he was still able to amaze. 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.

your capacity to fool yourself is greater than the abilities of any conjurer, and conjurers come in many guises. You are a creature impelled to hope. As you attempt to make sense of the world, you focus on what falls into place and neglect that which doesn’t fit, and there is so much in life that does not fit.

Cult Indoctrination

THE MISCONCEPTION: You are too smart to join a cult. THE TRUTH: Cults are populated by people just like you.

you don’t usually join for any particular reason; you just sort of fall into them the way you fall into any social group.

You are hardwired to want to hang out with people and associate yourself with groups.

cults start with a charismatic individual. Maybe this person believes he is special in some way, or maybe he is just naturally interesting. People start hanging out with him, and a spontaneous group forms with the charismatic person becoming an authority figure. If this person has an agenda, or a goal, or enemies he wants eliminated, he will cultivate the goodwill of his fans into action. If he has difficult goals to reach, he will try to expand his group with recruitment or proselytizing, often hiding his true intentions so as not to scare away potential members. Some leaders know what they are doing, but some just serve their instincts and accidentally form cults around themselves before they realize what they’ve done.

Any group with a charismatic leader has the potential to break away and form a subculture. Some make the world a better place. Others convince people to kill themselves.

Cults aren’t designed. They form as a result of normal human tendencies going awry.

Groupthink THE MISCONCEPTION: Problems are easier to solve when a group of people get together to discuss solutions. THE TRUTH: The desire to reach consensus and avoid confrontation hinders progress.

Groups survive by maintaining harmony. When everyone is happy and all egos are free from harm it tends to increase productivity. This is true whether you are hunting buffalo or selling televisions. Team spirit, morale, group cohesion—these are golden principles long held high by managers, commanders, chieftains, and kings. You know instinctively that dissent leads to chaos, so you avoid it.

With a boss hanging around, you get nervous. You start observing the other members of the group in an attempt to figure out what the consensus opinion is. Meanwhile, you are simultaneously weighing the consequences of disagreeing. The problem is, every other person in the group is doing the same thing, and if everyone decides it would be a bad idea to risk losing friends or a job, a false consensus will be reached and no one will do anything about it. Often, after these sorts of meetings, two people will talk in private and agree they think a mistake is being made. Why didn’t they just say so in the meeting?

groupthink,

for any plan to work, every team needs at least one asshole who doesn’t give a shit if he or she gets fired or exiled or excommunicated. For a group to make good decisions, they must allow dissent and convince everyone they are free to speak their mind without risk of punishment.

True groupthink depends on three conditions—a group of people who like one another, isolation, and a deadline for a crucial decision.

the situation can be avoided if the boss is not allowed to express his or her expectations, thus preventing the boss’s opinion from automatically becoming the opinion of others.

if the group breaks into pairs every once in a while to discuss the issue at hand, a manageable level of dissent can be fostered. Even better, allow outsiders to offer their opinions periodically during the process, to keep people’s objectivity afloat. Finally, assign one person the role of asshole and charge that person with the responsibility of finding fault in the plan. Before you come to a consensus, allow a cooling off period so emotions can return to normal.

groups of friends who allow members to disagree and still be friends are more likely to...

Supernormal Releasers

The male Australian jewel beetle is hardwired to like certain aspects about the female jewel beetle. They like females to be big, brown, and shiny. The bottles they make love to are bigger, browner, and shinier than any female could ever hope to be. In Australia, a certain type of bottle called stubbies overstimulates male jewel beetles. In a trash heap filled with bottles, you will often see every single stubby covered in male jewel beetles trying to get it on. The stubbies are what evolutionary psychologists call supernormal releasers. They are superstimuli, better than the real thing. The beetles will mate with these bottles even while being devoured by ants.

Anything that directly affects your survival can become a superstimulus if exaggerated enough. Birds can become confused by eggs from other, parasitic birds who hijack their nests. The eggs look like theirs, but are much bigger, so they sit atop them even though they belong to another. There are orchids that have powerful scents like a female wasp’s or a bee queen’s, and males mate with the flower, getting covered in pollen in the process.