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

If you associate something with survival, but find an example of that thing that is more perfect than anything your ancestors could have ever dreamed of—it will overstimulate you.

For human ladies, a tux on a man who owns a private jet and three homes in Italy creates a powerful set of supernormal releasers.

For human guys, symmetry, big breasts, wide hips, narrow waists, lustrous hair, and voluptuous lips add up to a powerful supernormal releaser. Most

when men are making a snap judgment about physical attraction—the hip-to-waist ratio. In many studies around the world, no matter what cultural significance is placed on body type, a ratio in which the waist is about 70 percent the width of the hips is always preferred.

eye-tracking computer programs clearly showed both sexes first looked at the face and then moved around the hip area to see the telltale signs of gender. Her research also showed when men were asked to rate attractiveness they were drawn to a .70 waist. But they were drawn to waists of .60 and .50 even more.

the women unconsciously swooshed their hips from side to side, which made it appear to observers as if their hip-to-waist ratio had magically been reduced.

Men are easy to manipulate thanks to having fewer metrics by which they judge potential mates, and thus advertising has long been preying on their tendencies. Women will buy products in an attempt to become the impossible goal. Men will buy products in an attempt to mate with the impossible goal.

Women have more to lose when they make a bad decision, so they have evolved a more complex and particular set of metrics by which potential mates are judged. David Buss says those include, but are not limited to, economic capacity, social status, ambition, stability, intelligence, commitment, and height.

Even if you don’t act on your impulses, you still feel them.

Australian jewel beetles are doomed to lust for beer bottles in garbage heaps because they can’t overcome their desires. You can.

The Affect Heuristic THE MISCONCEPTION: You calculate what is risky or rewarding and always choose to maximize gains while minimizing losses. THE TRUTH: You depend on emotions to tell you if something is good or bad, greatly overestimate rewards, and tend to stick to your first impressions.

The tendency to make poor decisions and ignore odds in favor of your gut feelings is called the affect heuristic.

first impressions fade as you get to know someone, but first impressions matter

You boil down your initial judgment of just about everything in life to “this is good” or “this is bad” and then put the burden of proof on future experience to show you otherwise.

The affect heuristic is one way you rapidly come to a conclusion about new information. You use it to drop data into two broad categories—good and bad—and then you choose to avoid or seek out what you have judged. The affect heuristic is the Holy Grail of cognitive biases in advertising and politics. When you can associate your product or candidate with positive things or your competitors and opponents with negative things, you win.

identifying risk comes from the gut, or, more accurately, it comes from the emotion-generating structures in your brain.

you are problem-solving before you are aware of it.

Elliot could no longer make simple choices because he had no emotions.

Without emotion, it became incredibly difficult to settle on any one option. He became a robot without hate, love, or yearning. He eventually divorced, lost his job, money, house, and everything else from his former life except the love of his parents, who took him in.

politicians who bring out charts and graphs tend to fail, and those who use anecdotes tend to win. Stories make sense on an emotional level, so anything that conjures fear, empathy, or pride will trump confusing statistics.

The more something seems to benefit you, the less risky it seems overall. When you see something as good, the bad qualities are played down. When you see something as risky, the harder it becomes to notice the benefits. The affect heuristic is stronger still when something is familiar or speaks to the primal brain.

Dunbar’s Number

You can maintain relationships and keep up with only around 150 people at once.

for each primate the size of the cortex correlates with the size of the average social group.

Poor people compete with resources. The middle class competes with selection. The wealthy compete with possessions.

Self-Serving Bias

THE TRUTH: You excuse your failures and see yourself as more successful, more intelligent, and more skilled than you are.

Day to day, you think you are awesome, or at least far more awesome than you are.

you tend to accept credit when you succeed, but blame bad luck, unfair rules, difficult instructors, bad bosses, cheaters, and so on when you fail.

when you let some time pass. All the dumb things you did when you were younger, all those poor decisions, you see them as being made by your former self.

you see the person you used to be as a foolish bumbler with poor taste but your current self as a badass who is worthy of at least three times the praise.

No one, it seems, believes he or she is part of the population contributing to the statistics generating averages. You don’t believe you are an average person, but you do believe everyone else is. This tendency, which springs from self-serving bias, is called the

illusory superiority effect.

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.

you pay close attention to the successes and failures of friends more than you do to those of strangers. You compare yourself to those who are close to you in order to judge your own worth.

The birth of Facebook.

On average, everyone you know thinks they are more popular than you, and you think you are more popular than them.

The Spotlight Effect

THE TRUTH: People devote little attention to you unless prompted to.

When in a group or public setting, you think every little nuance of your behavior is under scrutiny by everyone else. The effect is even worse if you must stand on a stage or go out with someone for the first time. 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.

people believe others see their contributions to conversation as being memorable, but they aren’t.

The next time you get a pimple on your forehead, or buy a new pair of shoes, or Tweet about how boring your day is, don’t expect anyone to notice. You are not so smart or special.

The Third Person Effect

THE TRUTH: Everyone believes the people they disagree with are gullible, and everyone thinks they are far less susceptible to persuasion than they truly are.

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.

the third person effect is magnified when you already have a negative opinion of the source, or if you personally think the message is about something you aren’t interested in.

You don’t want to believe you can be persuaded, and one way of maintaining this belief is to assume that all the persuasion flying through the air must be landing on other targets. Otherwise how could it be successful?

The third person effect is a version of the self-serving bias. You excuse your failures and see yourself as more successful, more intelligent, and more skilled than you are.

Catharsis THE MISCONCEPTION: Venting your anger is an effective way to reduce stress and prevent lashing out at friends and family. THE TRUTH: Venting increases aggressive behavior over time.

The concept of catharsis goes back at least as far as Aristotle and Greek drama. The word itself comes from the Greek kathairein, “to purify” and “to clean.”