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 truth is, there is a growing body of work coming out of psychology and cognitive science that says you have no clue why you act the way you do, choose the things you choose, or think the thoughts you think.

Your brain is better at seeing the world in some ways, like social situations, and not so good in others, like logic puzzles with numbered cards.

Cognitive biases are predicable patterns of thought and behavior that lead you to draw incorrect conclusions. You and everyone else come into the world preloaded with these pesky and completely wrong ways of seeing things, and you rarely notice them. Many of them serve to keep you confident in your own perceptions or to inhibit you from seeing yourself as a buffoon. The maintenance of a positive self-image seems to be so important to the human mind you have evolved mental mechanisms designed to make you feel awesome about yourself.

Heuristics are mental shortcuts you use to solve common problems. They speed up processing in the brain, but sometimes make you think so fast you miss what is important.

They are arguments in your mind where you reach a conclusion without all the facts because you don’t care to hear them or have no idea how limited your information is.

logical fallacies

Logical fallacies can also be the result of wishful thinking. Sometimes you apply good logic to false premises; at other times you apply bad logic to the truth.

A great example of how potent a force your unconscious can be was detailed by researchers Chen-Bo Zhong at the University of Toronto and Katie Liljenquist at Northwestern University in a 2006 paper published in the journal Science. They conducted a study in which people were asked to remember a terrible sin from their past, something they had done which was unethical. The researchers asked them to describe how the memory made them feel. They then offered half of the participants the opportunity to wash their hands. At the end of the study, they asked subjects if they would be willing to take part in later research for no pay as a favor to a desperate graduate student. Those who did not wash their hands agreed to help 74 percent of the time, but those who did wash agreed only 41

percent of the time. According to the researchers, one group had unconsciously washed away their guilt and felt less of a need to pay penance.

You construct reality from minute to minute with memories and emotions orbiting your sensations and cognition; together they form a collage of consciousness that exists only in your skull.

When you are unsure how best to proceed, suggestions bubble up from the deep that are highly tainted by subconscious primes. In addition, your brain hates ambiguity and is willing to take shortcuts to remove it from any situation. If there is nothing else to go on, you will use what is available. When pattern recognition fails, you create patterns of your own.

You are always of two minds at any one moment—the higher-level rational self and the lower-level emotional self.

You reduce the complex rush of inputs into shorthand versions of reality. This is why the invention of written language was such an important step in your history—it allowed you to take notes and preserve data outside the limited capacity of the rational mind.

The emotional brain, the unconscious mind, is old, powerful, and no less a part of who you are than the rational brain is, but its function can’t be directly observed or communicated to consciousness. Instead, the output is mostly intuition and feeling. It is always there in the background co-processing your mental life.

your unconscious mind—your experience is always being crunched so suggestions can be handed up to your conscious mind. Thanks to this, if a situation is familiar you can fall back on intuition.

However, if the situation is novel, you will have to boot up your conscious mind.

If your behavior is the result of priming, the result of suggestions as to how to behave handed up from the adaptive unconscious, you often invent narratives to explain your feelings and decisions and musings because you aren’t aware of the advice you’ve been given by the mind behind the curtain in your head.

Priming works only if you aren’t aware of it, and those who depend on priming to put food on the table work very hard to keep their influence hidden.

today it isn’t clear how much of your behavior is under your conscious control.

Studies of priming suggest when you engage in deep introspection over the causes of your own behavior you miss many, perhaps most, of the influences accumulating on your persona like barnacles along the sides of a ship.

Much of what you think, feel, do, and believe is, and will continue to be, nudged one way or the other by unconscious primes from words, colors, objects, personalities, and other miscellany infused with meaning either from your personal life or the culture you identify with.

Just remember, you are most open to suggestion when your mental cruise control is on or when you find yourself in unfamiliar circumstances.

You can’t prime yourself directly, but you can create environments conducive to the mental states you wish to achieve.

Just as the brain fills in your blind spot every moment of the day without your consciously noticing, so do you fill in the blind spots in your memory and your reasoning.

But you still have a sense of a continuous memory and experience. The details are missing, but the big picture of your own life persists. But the big picture is a lie, nurtured by your constant and unconscious confabulation, adding up to a story of who you are, what you have done, and why.

This split-brain confabulation has been demonstrated many times over the years. When the left hemisphere is forced to explain why the right hemisphere is doing something, it often creates a fiction that both sides then accept.

You are a confabulatory creature by nature. You are always explaining to yourself the motivations for your actions and the causes to the effects in your life, and you make them up without realizing it when you don’t know the answers. Over time, these explanations become your idea of who you are and your place in the world. They are your self.

When you recall your past, you create it on the spot—a daydream part true and part fantasy that you believe down to the last detail.

How your mind works is something you can never access, and although you often believe you understand your thoughts and actions, your emotions and motivations, much of the time you do not.

Confirmation bias is seeing the world through a filter, thinking selectively. The real trouble begins when confirmation bias distorts your active pursuit of facts.

If their filter is like your filter, you love them. If it isn’t, you hate them. You read them not for information, but for confirmation.

In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds . . . Not news but olds, telling people that what they think they already know is true.

you want to be right about how you see the world, so you seek out information that confirms your beliefs and avoid contradictory evidence and opinions.

The study suggests even in your memories you fall prey to confirmation bias, recalling those things that support even recently-arrived-at beliefs and forgetting those things that contradict them.

Often, when students and journalists and laypeople hear about the results of a scientific study, they agree with the findings and say, “Yeah, no shit.” Teigen showed this is just hindsight bias at work.

If you see lots of shark attacks in the news, you think, “Gosh, sharks are out of control.” What you should think is “Gosh, the news loves to cover shark attacks.”

The availability heuristic shows you make decisions and think thoughts based on the information you have at hand, while ignoring all the other information that might be out there. You do the same thing with Hindsight Bias, by thinking thoughts and making decisions based on what you know now, not what you used to know.

Anywhere people are searching for meaning, you will see the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

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.

To admit the messy slog of chaos, disorder, and random chance rules your life, rules the universe itself, is a painful conceit.

Whenever possible, you oppose the forces of entropy and thwart their relentless derangement. Your drive to do this is primal. You need order. Order makes it easier to be a person, to navigate this sloppy world. For ancient man, pattern recognition led to food and protected people from harm.

Many studies over the years have shown you tend to have time-inconsistent preferences. When asked if you would rather have fruit or cake one week from now, you will usually say fruit. A week later, when the slice of German chocolate and the apple are offered, you are statistically more likely to go for the cake.

This is sometimes called present bias—being unable to grasp that what you want will change over time, and what you want now isn’t the same thing you will want later.

You can become a productivity junkie surrounded by instruments to make life more efficient, but these tools alone will not help, because the problem isn’t you are a bad manager of your time—you are a bad tactician in the war inside your brain.

Thinking about thinking—this is the key. 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.

The tendency to get more rational when you are forced to wait is called hyperbolic discounting, because your dismissal of the better payoff later diminishes over time and makes a nice slope on a graph.

Your brain evolved in a world where you probably wouldn’t live to meet your grandchildren. The stupid monkey part of your brain wants to gobble up chocolate and go deeply into debt.

Procrastination is an impulse;

Procrastination is also hyperbolic discounting, taking the sure thing in the present over the caliginous prospect someday far away.

You must realize there is the you who sits there now reading this, and there is the you some time in the future who will be influenced by...