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

When a stimulus in the past affects the way you behave and think or the way you perceive another stimulus later on, it is called priming.

These are qualia, the deepest you can tunnel down into your experience before you hit rock. Almost everyone has seen red but can’t explain what it is like to do so. Your explanations of experience can build up from qualia but can’t go any lower. These are the ineffable building blocks of consciousness. You can explain them only in relation to other experiences, but you can never completely describe the experience of qualia to another person, or yourself.

Nisbett and Miller set up their own study in a department store where they arranged nylon stockings side by side. When people came by, they asked them to say which of four items in a set was the best quality. Four-to-one, people chose the stocking on the right-hand side even though they were all identical. When the researchers asked why, people would comment on the texture or the color, but never the position. When asked if the order of the presentation influenced their choice, they assured the scientists it had nothing to do with it.

In science, you move closer to the truth by seeking evidence to the contrary. Perhaps the same method should inform your opinions as well.

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. You have needed to keep a tidy mind to navigate the world ever since you lived in jungles and on savannas. Cluttered minds got bogged down, and the bodies they controlled got eaten. Once you learn from your mistakes, or replace bad info with good, there isn’t much use in retaining the rubbish, so you delete it. This deletion of your old, incorrect assumptions de-clutters your mind. Sure, you are lying to yourself, but it’s for a good cause. You take all you know about a topic, all you can conjure up on the spot, and construct a mental model.

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. Picking out clusters of coincidence is a predictable malfunction of normal human logic.

Look outside. See that tree? The chances of it growing there on that spot, on this planet, circling this star, in this galaxy, among the billions of galaxies in the known universe, are so incredibly small it seems to have meaning, but that meaning is only a figment of your imagination. You are drawing a bull’s-eye around a cluster on a vast barn. The odds of it being there are no less astronomical than the odds of it being in the patch of dirt beside it. The same is true if you looked out onto a desert and found a lizard, or into the sky and found a cloud, or into space and saw nothing but hydrogen atoms floating alone. 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.

Carl Sagan said in the vastness of space and the immensity of time it was a joy to share a planet and epoch with his wife. Even though he knew fate didn’t put them together, it didn’t take away the wonder he felt when he was with her.

You see patterns everywhere, but some of them are formed by chance and mean nothing. Against the noisy background of probability things are bound to line up from time to time for no reason at all. It’s just how the maths works out. Recognizing this is an important part of ignoring coincidences when they don’t matter and realizing what has real meaning for you on this planet, in this epoch.

Present bias is why you’ve made the same resolution for the tenth year in a row, but this time you mean it. You are going to lose weight and forge a six-pack of abs so ripped you can deflect arrows. You weigh yourself. You buy a workout DVD. You order a set of weights. One day you have the choice between going for a run or watching a movie, and you choose the movie. Another day you are out with friends and can choose a cheeseburger or a salad. You choose the cheeseburger. The slips become more frequent, but you keep saying you’ll get around to it. You’ll start again on Monday, which becomes a week from Monday. Your will succumbs to a death by a thousand cuts. By the time winter comes, it looks like you already know what your resolution will be the next year.

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

If someone you know gets sick from taking a flu shot, you will be less likely to get one even if it is statistically safe. In fact, if you see a story on the news about someone dying from the flu shot, that one isolated case could be enough to keep you away from the vaccine forever. On the other hand, if you hear a news story about how eating sausage leads to anal cancer, you will be skeptical, because it has never happened to anyone you know, and sausage, after all, is delicious. The tendency to react more rapidly and to a greater degree when considering information you are familiar with is called the availability heuristic.

He or she is betting that the availability heuristic will influence you to assume that this one example is indicative of a much larger group of people.

It’s simply easier to believe something if you are presented with examples than it is to accept something presented in numbers or abstract facts.

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.

J. E. Littlewood, a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote about the law of truly large numbers in his 1986 book, Littlewood’s Miscellany. He said the average person is alert for about eight hours every day, and something happens to the average person about once a second. At this rate, you will experience 1 million events every thirty-five days. This means when you say the chances of something happening are one in a million, it also means about once a month. The monthly miracle is called Littlewood’s Law.

It is hard to believe an astronaut would put on a diaper and drive across the country to kill the wife of her lover, but it did happen once.

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.

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.

It turns out, 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.

As a primate, you are quick to form groups and then feel as if you should defend those groups from the ill wishes of other groups. When groups get together to make a decision, an illusion of invulnerability can emerge in which everyone feels secure in the cohesion. You begin to rationalize other people’s ideas and don’t reconsider your own. You want to defend the group’s cohesion from all harm, so you suppress doubts, you don’t argue, you don’t offer alternatives—and since everyone is doing this, the leader of the group falsely assumes everyone is in agreement.

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. Sexy and sexist advertising can kill two birds with one stone. Advertisers use genetic freaks with abnormal symmetry, lit by professionals, altered by makeup artists, and finished off with Photoshop until they are nothing more than realistic cartoons—just like a RealDoll.

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. You might like someone early on but learn of severe faults over time. You wait for your first impression to be chiseled away instead of promptly changing your opinion of that person’s character.

This is why 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. It causes you to buy a security system for your house but neglect to purchase smoke alarms. It makes you carry a rape alarm while you clog your arteries with hamburgers. It installs metal detectors in schools but leaves french fries on the menu. It creates vegetarian smokers.

Sure enough, all the sciences that study tribes, bands, and villages have approximated ancient groups usually maxed out around 150 people. This is the approximate upper limit to how many people you can trust and count on for favors, whom you can call up and have a conversation with. Once you go over 150 people, Dunbar says about 42 percent of the group’s time would have to be spent worrying about one another’s relationships. It would take a lot of pressure from the environment for it to be worth growing a group to that level. Once people started coming up with ways to maintain larger groups, like armies, cities, and nations, humans started subdividing those groups. Dunbar’s number explains why big groups are made of smaller, more manageable groups like companies, platoons, and squads—or branches, divisions, departments, and committees. No human institution can efficiently function above 150 members without hierarchies, ranks, roles, and divisions.

Think about an archetypal punk rocker with chains and spikes, gaudy pants and a leather jacket. Yeah, he bought all of those clothes. Someone is making money off of his revolt. That’s the paradox of consumer rebellion—everything is part of the system. We all sell out, because we all buy things. Every niche opened by rebellion against the mainstream is immediately filled by entrepreneurs who figure out how to make a buck off those who are trying to avoid what the majority of people are buying.

For example, say there is this awesome band no one knows about except you and a few others. They don’t have a record contract or an album. They just go out there and play, and they are great. You tell everyone about them as they build a decent fan base. They make an album that sells enough copies to allow them to quit their day jobs. That album gets them more gigs and more fans. Soon they have a huge fan base and get a record contract and get on the radio and play on prime time. Now they’ve sold out. So you hate them. You abandon the band and go looking for someone more authentic, and it all starts over again. This is the pump by which artists rise from the depths into the mainstream. It never stops, and over time it gets faster and more efficient.

In the 1960s, it took months before someone figured out they could sell tie-dyed shirts and bell bottoms to anyone who wanted to rebel. In the 1990s, it took weeks to start selling flannel shirts and Doc Martens to anyone anywhere. Now people are hired by corporations to go to bars and clubs and observe what the counterculture is into and have it on the shelves in shopping centers right as it becomes popular.

This brings us to the point: Competition among consumers is the turbine of capitalism.

You attain status by having better taste in movies and music, by owning more authentic furniture and clothing. There are 100 million versions of every item or intellectual property you can own, so you reveal your unique character through your consumption habits.

Having a dissenting opinion on movies, music, or clothes, or owning clever or obscure possessions, is the way middle-class people fight one another for status. They can’t out-consume one another because they can’t afford it, but they can out-taste one another.

Hipsters, then, are the direct result of this cycle of indie, authentic, obscure, ironic, clever consumerism. Which, in itself, is ironic—but not like a trucker hat or Converse All-Stars. It is ironic in the sense the very act of trying to run counter to the culture is what creates the next wave of culture people will in turn attempt to counter.

All the dumb things you did when you were younger, all those poor decisions, you see them as being made by your former self. According to research conducted by Anne Wilson and Michael Ross in 2001, you see the person you used to be as a foolish bumbler with poor taste but your current self as a legend who is worthy of at least three times the praise.

In 1993, Ezra Zuckerman and John Jost at Stanford University asked undergraduates at the University of Chicago to assess their popularity relative to their peers. They took those estimates and compared them with what others reported. They were building on the work of Abraham Tesser, who created self-evaluation maintenance theory in 1988. According to his research, 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. In other words, you know Barack Obama and Johnny Depp are successful, but you don’t use them as a standard for your own life to the degree you do colleagues, fellow students, or friends you’ve known since school.

When you compare your skills, accomplishments, and friendships with those of others, you tend to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. You are a liar by default, and you lie most to yourself. If you fail, you forget it. If you win, you tell everyone.

You spend so much time thinking about your own body, your own thoughts and behaviors, you begin to think other people must be noticing too. The research says they aren’t, at least not nearly as much as you are.

A great many messages among the countless ones bombarding you every day are considered dangerous because they might sway other people or fester in their minds until they act out on the suggestions coming out of all manner of sources, from violent video games to late-night gambling shows. 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.

If, over the course of your life, you have experienced crushing defeat or pummeling abuse or loss of control, you convince yourself over time that there is no escape, and if escape is offered, you will not act—you become a nihilist who trusts futility above optimism.

The leading theory as to how such a strange behavior would evolve is that it springs from all organisms’ desire to conserve resources. If you can’t escape a source of stress, it leads to more stress, and this positive feedback loop eventually triggers an automatic shutdown. At its most extreme, you think if you keep struggling you might die. If you stop, there is a chance the bad thing will go away.

Psychologists call missing information in plain sight inattentional blindness. You believe with confidence your eyes capture everything before them and your memories are recorded versions of those captured images. The truth, though, is you see only a small portion of your environment at any one moment. Your attention is like a spotlight, and only the illuminated portions of the world appear in your perception.

You might wear inappropriate clothes to a job interview, or pick a terrible character in Mario Kart, or stay up all night drinking before work—you are very resourceful when it comes to setting yourself up to fail. If you succeed, you can say you did so despite terrible odds. If you fall short, you can blame the events leading up to the failure instead of your own incompetence or inadequacy.

The sociologist Robert K. Merton coined the term “self-fulfilling prophecy” in 1968. By his estimation, the initial phase is always a false interpretation of an ongoing situation. The behavior that follows assumes the situation is real, and when enough people act as if something is real it can sometimes make it so. What was once false becomes true, and in hindsight it seems as if it always was.

When you fear you will confirm a negative stereotype, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy not because the stereotype is true, but because you can’t stop worrying that you could become an example proving it.

Markus showed how when you are young you are more open to changing your opinions. Your partisanship has yet to solidify into a personal philosophy. After gaining enough life experience, you begin to settle into a view of the world and establish your moral outlook. It seems like common sense, but when he asked the people in the study what they used to believe, only about 30 percent could accurately recall their old answers. Instead, they tended to say they used to have the same political ideas they currently subscribed to. If, for instance, they believed the death penalty was a legitimate punishment, they thought they had always believed this, even when they had said the opposite as a teenager.

In blind taste tests, longtime smokers can’t tell their brand from any of the competitors and wine connoisseurs have a hard time telling £200 bottles from £10 ones. When presented with microwaved food from the frozen food section in the setting of a fine restaurant, most people never notice. Taste is subjective, which is another way of saying you are not so smart when it comes to choosing one product over another. All things being equal—you refer back to the advertising or the packaging or conformity with your friends and family. Presentation is everything.