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

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published a paper in 1973 that ferreted out the representative heuristic from the cluster of cognitive biases squirming in your mind. The following example is a mishmash of their research and others into the behavior: Donald is a very intelligent student and does well in all his classes, but he lacks creativity. He is extraordinarily tidy and feels compelled to bring order to every aspect of his life. When he writes, it lacks emotion and is filled with science fiction references. He doesn’t like people but has high moral standards. In their study, subjects read a paragraph like the one above and were told the description came from one of a set of interviews with thirty engineers and seventy lawyers.