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

belief in catharsis makes you more likely to seek it out.

If you think catharsis is good, you are more likely to seek it out when you get pissed. When you vent, you stay angry and are more likely to keep doing aggressive things so you can keep venting. It’s druglike, because there are brain chemicals and other behavioral reinforcements at work. If you get accustomed to blowing off steam, you become dependent on it. The more effective approach is to just stop. Take your anger off of the stove.

delay your response, relax or distract yourself with an activity totally incompatible with aggression.

If you get into an argument, or someone cuts you off in traffic, or you get called an awful name, venting will not dissipate the negative energy. It will, however, feel great. That’s the thing. Catharsis will make you feel good, but it’s an emotional hamster wheel. The emotion that led you to catharsis will still be there afterward, and if the catharsis made you feel good, you’ll seek that emotion out again in the future.

The Misinformation Effect

THE MISCONCEPTION: Memories are played back like recordings. THE TRUTH: Memories are constructed anew each time from whatever information is currently available, which makes them highly permeable to influences from the present.

normally you are oblivious to your faulty reconstruction of memory. 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. You tend to see your memories as a continuous, consistent movie,

Elizabeth Loftus

people watched films of car crashes. She then asked the participants to estimate how fast the cars were going, but she divided the people into groups and asked the question differently for each.

by changing the wording, the memories of the subjects were altered. The car crashes were replayed in the participants’ minds, but this time the word “smashed” necessitated the new version of the memory include cars that were going fast enough to validate the adjective. Loftus raised the ante by asking the same people if they remembered broken glass in the film. There was no broken glass, but sure enough the people who were given the word “smashed” in their question were twice as likely to remember seeing it.

Loftus convinced people they were once lost in a shopping mall as a child. She had subjects read four essays provided by family members, but the one about getting lost as a kid was fake. A quarter of the subjects incorporated the fake story into their memory and even provided details about the fictional event that were not included in the narrative.

in one of her experiments she had subjects watch a pretend crime and then select the culprit out of a lineup. The police told the subjects the perpetrator was one of the people standing before them, but it was a trick. None of them were the real suspect, yet 78 percent of the people still identified one of the innocent people as the person who they saw committing the crime.

Each time you build a memory, you make it from scratch, and if much time has passed you stand a good chance of getting the details wrong.

Schemas function as heuristics; the less you have to think about these concepts the faster you can process thoughts that involve them. When a schema leads to a stereotype, a prejudice, or a cognitive bias, you trade an acceptable level of inaccuracy for more speed.

the subjects were easily implanted with false memories for items they expected to be in the scenes. They listed items that were never shown but had been suggested by their partners. Their schemas for kitchens already included toasters and oven mitts, so when the actors said they saw those things, it was no problem for their minds to go ahead and add them to the memory. If their partners had instead said they remembered seeing a toilet bowl in the kitchen, it would have been harder to accept.

In 1932, psychologist Charles Bartlett presented a folktale from American Indian culture to subjects and then asked them to retell the story back to him every few months for a year. Over time, the story become less like the original and more like a story that sounded as though it came from the culture of the person recalling it.

The story is not only strange, but written in an unusual way that makes it difficult to understand. Over time, the subjects reshaped it to make sense to them. Their versions became shorter, more linear, and many details were left out that didn’t make sense in the first place.

After a year or so, the stories started to include new characters, totems, and ideas never present in the original, like the journey as a pilgrimage, or the death as a sacrifice.

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. You incorporate the memories of others into your own head all the time. Studies suggest your memory is permeable, malleable, and evolving. It isn’t fixed and permanent, but more like a dream that pulls in information about what you are thinking about during the day and adds new details to the narrative. If you suppose it could have happened, you are far less likely to question yourself as to whether it did.

how easily memory gets tainted, how only a few iterations of an idea can rewr...

how as memories change, your confidence in them...

Conformity THE MISCONCEPTION: You are a strong individual who doesn’t conform unless forced to. THE TRUTH: It takes little more than an authority figure or social pressure to get you to obey, because conformity is a survival instinct.

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

you conform because social acceptance is built into your brain. 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.

Your desire to conform is strong and unconscious. Sometimes, like at a family dinner, the desire to keep everyone happy and to adhere to social conventions is a good thing. It keeps you close and connected to the norms that make it easier to work together in the modern world. But also beware of the other side—the dark places that conformity can lead to. Never be afraid to question authority when your actions could harm yourself or others.

THE MISCONCEPTION: If you stop engaging in a bad habit, the habit will gradually diminish until it disappears from your life. THE TRUTH: Any time you quit something cold turkey, your brain will make a last-ditch effort to return you to your habit.

extinction burst.

the operant conditioning chamber—the Skinner Box.

behavior. Skinner became convinced conditioning was the root of all behavior, and he didn’t believe rational thinking had anything to do with your personal life. He considered introspection to be a “collateral product” of conditioning.

There are two kinds of conditioning—classical and operant. In classical conditioning, something that normally doesn’t have any influence becomes a trigger for a response. If you are taking a shower and someone flushes the toilet, which then causes the water to become a scalding torrent, you become conditioned to recoil in terror the next time you hear the toilet flush while lathering up. That’s classical conditioning. Something neutral—the toilet flushing—becomes charged with meaning and expectation.

Operant conditioning changes your desires. Your inclinations become greater through reinforcement, or diminish through punishment. You go to work, you get paid. You turn on the air-conditioning and stop sweating. You don’t run the red light, you don’t get a ticket. You pay the rent, you don’t get evicted. It’s all operant conditioning, punishment and reward.

extinction. When you expect a reward or a punishment and nothing happens, your conditioned response starts to fade away.

extinction bursts—a temporary increase in an old behavior, a plea from the recesses of your psyche.

conniption

Compulsive overeating is a frenzied state of mind, food addiction under pressure until it bursts.

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.

THE MISCONCEPTION: When you are joined by others in a task, you work harder and become more accomplished. THE TRUTH: Once part of a group, you tend to put in less effort because you know your work will be pooled together with others’.

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

psychologist Alan Ingham ruined tug-of-war forever. In 1974, he had people put on a blindfold and grab a rope. The rope was attached to a rather medieval-looking contraption that simulated the resistance of an opposing team. The subjects were told many other people were also holding the rope on their side, and he measured their effort. Then, he told them they would be pulling alone, and again he measured. They were alone both times, but when they thought they were in a group, they pulled 18 percent less strenuously on average. This version of social loafing is sometimes called the Ringelmann effect after French engineer Maximilien Ringelmann,