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
Date read: 2018-10-29How strongly I recommend it: 9/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
Great book on philosohpy and human behavior. Great for any manager or leader to read to better understand themeselves and human behavior in general.
Contents:
- PRIMING
- CONFABULATION
- CONFIRMATION BIAS
- HINDSIGHT BIAS
- THE TEXAS SHARPSHOOTER FALLACY
- PROCRASTINATION
- NORMALCY BIAS
- INTROSPECTION
- THE AVAILABILITY HEURISTIC
- THE BYSTANDER EFFECT
- THE DUNNING-KRUGER EFFECT
- APOPHENIA
- BRAND LOYALTY
- THE ARGUMENT FROM AUTHORITY
- THE ARGUMENT FROM IGNORANCE
- THE STRAW MAN FALLACY
- THE AD HOMINEM FALLACY
- THE JUST-WORLD FALLACY
- THE PUBLIC GOODS GAME
- THE ULTIMATUM GAME
- SUBJECTIVE VALIDATION
- CULT INDOCTRINATION
- GROUPTHINK
- SUPERNORMAL RELEASERS
- THE AFFECT HEURISTIC
- DUNBAR'S NUMBER
- SELLING OUT
- SELF-SERVING BIAS
- THE SPOTLIGHT EFFECT
- THE THIRD PERSON EFFECT
- CATHARSIS
- THE MISINFORMATION EFFECT
- CONFORMITY
- EXTINCTION BURST
- SOCIAL LOAFING
- THE ILLUSION OF TRANSPARENCY
- LEARNED HELPLESSNESS
- EMBODIED COGNITION
- THE ANCHORING EFFECT
- ATTENTION
- SELF-HANDICAPPING
- SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECIES
- THE MOMENT
- CONSISTENCY BIAS
- THE REPRESENTATIVES HEURISTIC
- EXPECTATION
- THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL
- THE FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR
My Notes
The Misconception: You know when you are being influenced and how it is affecting your behavior.
The Truth: You are unaware of the constant nudging you receive from ideas formed in your unconscious mind.
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.
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.
You can’t prime yourself directly, but you can create environments conducive to the mental states you wish to achieve.
The Misconception: You know when you are lying to yourself.
The Truth: You are often ignorant of your motivations and create fictional narratives to explain your decisions, emotions, and history without realizing it.
The Misconception: Your opinions are the result of years of rational, objective analysis.
The Truth: Your opinions are the result of years of paying attention to information that confirmed what you believed, while ignoring information that challenged your preconceived notions.
Be careful. People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. they get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things...well, new things aren’t what they expect. they like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. they don’t want to know that man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. 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.
In science, you move closer to The Truth by seeking evidence to the contrary. Perhaps the same method should inform your opinions as well.
The Misconception: After you learn something new, you remember how you were once ignorant or wrong.
The Truth: You often look back on the things you’ve just learned and assume you knew them or believed them all along.
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.
The Misconception: You take randomness into account when determining cause and effect.
The Truth: You tend to ignore random chance when the results seem meaningful or when you want a random event to have a meaningful cause.
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 math 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.
The Misconception: You procrastinate because you are lazy and can’t manage your time well.
The Truth: Procrastination is fueled by weakness in the face of impulse and a failure to think about thinking.
If you fail to believe you will procrastinate or become idealistic about how awesome you are at working hard and managing your time, you never develop a strategy for outmaneuvering your own weakness.
The Misconception: Your fight-or-flight instincts kick in and you panic when disaster strikes.
The Truth: You often become abnormally calm and pretend everything is normal in a crisis.
Normalcy bias is stalling during a crisis and pretending everything will continue to be as fine and predictable as it was before. Those who defeat it act when others don’t. they move when others are considering whether or not they should.
The Misconception: You know why you like the things you like and feel the way you feel.
The Truth: the origin of certain emotional states is unavailable to you, and when pressed to explain them, you will just make something up.
Forming preferences is akin to riding a bicycle; we can do it easily but cannot easily explain how.
Believing you understand your motivations and desires, your likes and dislikes, is called the introspection illusion.
The Misconception: With the advent of mass media, you understand how the world works based on statistics and facts culled from many examples.
The Truth: You are far more likely to believe something is commonplace if you can find just one example of it, and you are far less likely to believe in something you’ve never seen or heard of before.
the tendency to react more rapidly and to a greater degree when considering information you are familiar with is called the availability heuristic.
You don’t think in statistics, you think in examples, in stories.
You decide the likelihood of a future event on how easily you can imagine it, and if you’ve been bombarded by reports or have filled your head with fears, those images will overshadow new information that might contradict your beliefs.
The Misconception: When someone is hurt, people rush to their aid.
The Truth: the more people who witness a person in distress, the less likely it is that any one person will help.
You are not so smart when it comes to helping people. In a crowded room, or a public street, you can expect people to freeze up and look around at one another. Knowing that, you should always be the first person to break away from the pack and offer help — or attempt escape — because you can be certain no one else will.
The Misconception: You can predict how well you would perform in any situation.
The Truth: You are generally pretty bad at estimating your competence and the difficulty of complex tasks.
“In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
the more skilled you are, the more practice you’ve put in, the more experience you have, the better you can compare yourself to others. As you strive to improve, you begin to better understand where you need work.
the less skilled you are, the less practice you’ve put in, and the fewer experiences you have, the worse you are at comparing yourself to others on certain tasks.
If you want to be great at something, you have to practice, and then you have to sample the work of people who have been doing it for their whole lives. Compare and contrast and eat some humble pie.
The Misconception: Some coincidences are so miraculous, they must have meaning.
The Truth: Coincidences are a routine part of life, even the seemingly miraculous ones. Any meaning applied to them comes from your mind.
When you connect the dots in your life in a way that tells a story, and then you interpret the story to have a special meaning, this is true apophenia.
The Misconception: You prefer the things you own over the things you don’t because you made rational choices when you bought them.
The Truth: You prefer the things you own because you rationalize your past choices to protect your sense of self.
So the next time you get ready to launch into one hundred reasons why your cell phone or TV or car is better than someone else’s, hesitate. Because you’re not trying to change the other person’s mind — you’re trying to prop up your own.
The Misconception: You are more concerned with the validity of information than the person delivering it.
The Truth: the status and credentials of an individual greatly influence your perception of that individual’s message.
You would be wise to come to your own conclusions based on the evidence, not the people delivering it.
The Misconception: When you can’t explain something, you focus on what you can prove.
The Truth: When you are unsure of something, you are more likely to accept strange explanations.
The Misconception: When you argue, you try to stick to the facts.
The Truth: In any argument, anger will tempt you to reframe your opponent’s position.
When you get into an argument about either something personal or something more public and abstract, you sometimes resort to constructing a character who you find easier to refute, argue, and disagree with, or you create a position the other person isn’t even suggesting or defending. This is a straw man.
Any time someone begins an attack with “So you’re saying we should all just...” or “Everyone knows...,” you can bet a straw man is coming.
The Misconception: If you can’t trust someone, you should ignore that person’s claims.
The Truth: What someone says and why they say it should be judged separately.
Wondering whether or not someone can be trusted and wondering whether or not someone is telling the truth are two different things.
The Misconception: People who are losing at the game of life must have done something to deserve it.
The Truth: The beneficiaries of good fortune often do nothing to earn it, and bad people often get away with their actions without consequences.
You want the world to be fair, so you pretend it is.
You aren’t in total control of your life, but there is a nice big chunk of your life over which you have complete authority — beat that part to a pulp.
Even though we are all responsible for our actions, the blame for evil acts rests on the perpetrator and never the victim.
The Misconception: We could create a system with no regulations where everyone would contribute to the good of society, everyone would benefit, and everyone would be happy.
The Truth: Without some form of regulation, slackers and cheaters will crash economic systems because people don’t want to feel like suckers.
The Misconception: You choose to accept or refuse an offer based on logic.
The Truth: When it comes to making a deal, you base your decision on your status.
Your perceived status is part of the unconscious equation you work out when accepting, refusing, and making offers with other people. You are not so smart, so you are willing to get nothing if it ensures fair treatment in the future and a more secure place on the social ladder.
The Misconception: You are skeptical of generalities.
The Truth: You are prone to believing vague statements and predictions are true, especially if they are positive and address you personally.
The tendency to believe vague statements designed to appeal to just about anyone is called the Forer effect.
Subjective validation, which is a fancy way of saying you are far more vulnerable to suggestion when the subject of the conversation is you.
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.
When you see a set of horoscopes, read all of them. When someone claims he or she can see into your heart, realize that all of our hearts are much the same.
The Misconception: You are too smart to join a cult.
The Truth: Cults are populated by people just like you.
Cults aren’t designed. they form as a result of normal human tendencies going awry.
The Misconception: Problems are easier to solve when a group of people get together to discuss solutions.
The Truth: The desire to reach consensus and avoid confrontation hinders progress.
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.
Research says the situation can be avoided if the boss is not allowed to express his or her expectations, thus preventing the boss’s opinion from automatically becoming the opinion of others. In addition, if the group breaks into pairs every once in a while to discuss the issue at hand, a manageable level of dissent can be fostered. Even better, allow outsiders to offer their opinions periodically during the process, to keep people’s objectivity afloat. Finally, assign one person the role of asshole and charge that person with the responsibility of finding fault in the plan. Before you come to a consensus, allow a cooling off period so emotions can return to normal.
The Misconception: Men who have sex with RealDolls are insane, and women who marry eighty-year-old billionaires are gold diggers.
The Truth: the RealDoll and rich old sugar daddies are both supernormal releasers.
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.
You take mental shortcuts whenever possible to determine when something is awesome. When a stimulus goes from good to great, it does not mean it truly is better than the normal version. If the normal version is something that had to be created, had to be fabricated into something illusory, there is a good chance you’ll have to fight your natural tendencies to be overwhelmed by superstimuli.
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.
The Misconception: There is a Rolodex in your mind with the names and faces of everyone you’ve ever known.
The Truth: You can maintain relationships and keep up with only around 150 people at once.
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.
The Misconception: Both consumerism and capitalism are sustained by corporations and advertising.
The Truth: Both consumerism and capitalism are driven by competition among consumers for status.
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.
The Misconception: You evaluate yourself based on past successes and defeats.
The Truth: You excuse your failures and see yourself as more successful, more intelligent, and more skilled than you are.
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.
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. When it comes to being honest with yourself and those you love, you are not so smart.
The Misconception: When you are around others, you feel as if everyone is noticing every aspect of your appearance and behavior.
The Truth: People devote little attention to you unless prompted to.
Research shows people believe others see their contributions to conversation as being memorable, but they aren’t. You think everyone noticed when you stumbled in your speech, but they didn’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.
The Misconception: You believe your opinions and decisions are based on experience and facts, while those who disagree with you are falling for the lies and propaganda of sources you don’t trust.
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.
You tend to think you are not like the people who live in your town, go to your school, work at your business, and so on. You are unique. You dance to the beat of a different drummer. You fail to realize just by living in your town, attending your school, and working at your job, you are the kind of person who would do those things. If you weren’t, you would be doing something else.
When the third person effect leads you to condone censorship, take a step back and imagine the sort of messages people on the other side might think are brainwashing you, and then ask yourself if those messages should be censored too.
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.
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.
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.
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. With a little influence, you might get big ones wrong.
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.
Never be afraid to question authority when your actions could harm yourself or others. Even in simple situations, like the next time you see a line of people waiting to get into a classroom or a movie or a restaurant, feel free to break norms — go check the door and look inside.
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.
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’.
This behavior is more likely to show up when the task at hand is simple. With complex tasks, it is usually easy to tell who isn’t pulling their weight. Once you know your laziness can be seen, you try harder.
Your anxiety levels decrease when you know your effort will be pooled with others’. You relax. You coast.
The Misconception: When your emotions run high, people can look at you and tell what you are thinking and feeling.
The Truth: Your subjective experience is not observable, and you overestimate how much you telegraph your inner thoughts and emotions.
You overestimate how obvious what you truly think must be and fail to recognize that other people are in their own little bubble, thinking the same thing about their inner worlds.
The Misconception: If you are in a bad situation, you will do whatever you can do to escape it.
The Truth: If you feel like you aren’t in control of your destiny, you will give up and accept whatever situation you are in.
When you are able to succeed at easy tasks, hard tasks feel possible to accomplish. When you are unable to succeed at small tasks, everything seems harder.
Choices, even small ones, can hold back the crushing weight of helplessness, but you can’t stop there. You must fight back your behavior and learn to fail with pride. Failing often is the only way to ever get the things you want out of life. Besides death, your destiny is not inescapable.
The Misconception: Your opinions of people and events are based on objective evaluation.
The Truth: You translate your physical world into words, and then believe those words.
Settings prime you to see the world a certain way, and all it takes to see things differently is a change of temperature, or the sturdiness of a surface.
The Misconception: You rationally analyze all factors before making a choice or determining value.
The Truth: Your first perception lingers in your mind, affecting later perceptions and decisions.
The Misconception: You see everything going on before your eyes, taking in all the information like a camera.
The Truth: You are aware only of a small amount of the total information your eyes take in, and even less is processed by your conscious mind and remembered.
The Misconception: In all you do, you strive for success.
The Truth: You often create conditions for failure ahead of time to protect your ego.
When you are successful but don’t know why, you wonder inside if you are truly capable of success. the stakes on future tests of ability are raised, but so are the fears of failure. Instead of making excuses after the fact that feel like lies, you create conditions ahead of time so the excuses can be real.
The happier you are, the more likely you will be to seek out ways to delude yourself into maintaining your rosy outlook on life and your own abilities. Sad people, it seems, are more honest with themselves.
Men use self-handicapping more than women to assuage their fears of failure.
The Misconception: Predictions about your future are subject to forces beyond your control.
The Truth: Just believing a future event will happen can cause it to happen if the event depends on human behavior.
A negative outlook will lead to negative predictions, and you will start to unconsciously manipulate your environment to deliver those predictions.
The Misconception: You are one person, and your happiness is based on being content with your life.
The Truth: You are multiple selves, and happiness is based on satisfying all of them.
To be happy now and content later, you can’t be focused only on reaching goals, because once you reach them, the experience ends. To truly be happy, you must satisfy both of your selves. Go get the ice cream, but do so in a meaningful way that creates a long-term memory. Grind away to have money for later, but do so in a way that generates happiness as you work.
The Misconception: You know how your opinions have changed over time.
The Truth: Unless you consciously keep tabs on your progress, you assume the way you feel now is the way you have always felt.
Believing if you knew then what you know now, things would be different. But people naturally change over time. Consistency bias is the failure to admit it.
The Misconception: Knowing a person’s history makes it easier to determine what sort of person they are.
The Truth: You jump to conclusions based on how representative a person seems to be of a preconceived character type.
When it comes to strangers, your first instinct is to fit them into archetypes to quickly determine their value or threat.
You don’t naturally think in statistical, logical, rational terms. You first go to your emotional core and think of people in terms of narratives and characters that match your preconceived notions of the sort of people you have been exposed to in the past or have imagined thanks to cultural osmosis.
Representativeness heuristics are useful, but also dangerous. they can help you avoid danger and seek help, but they can also lead to generalizations and prejudices. When you expect people to be a certain way because they seem to represent your notions of the sort of people in that category, you are not so smart.
The Misconception: Wine is a complicated elixir, full of subtle flavors only an expert can truly distinguish, and experienced tasters are impervious to deception.
The Truth: Wine experts and consumers can be fooled by altering their expectations.
Expensive wine is like anything else that is expensive: the expectation it will taste better actually makes it taste better.
Your expectations are the horse, and your experience is the cart. You get this backward all the time because you are not so smart.
The Misconception: You know how much control you have over your surroundings.
The Truth: You often believe you have control over outcomes that are either random or are too complex to predict.
Learn to coexist with chaos. Factor it into your plans. Accept that failure is always a possibility, even if you are one of the good guys; those who believe failure is not an option never plan for it.
You can no more predict the course of your life than you could the shape of a cloud. So seek to control the small things, the things that matter, and let them pile up into a heap of happiness. In the bigger picture, control is an illusion anyway.
The Misconception: Other people’s behavior is the reflection of their personality.
The Truth: Other people’s behavior is more the result of the situation than their disposition.
You are a different person with your friends than you are with your family or your boss. Somehow, you forget that your friends, family, and boss are doing the same.
Rarely, though, do you first consider how powerful the situation is. You blame the person, not the environment and the influence of the person’s peers. You do this because you would like to believe your own behavior comes strictly from within. You know this isn’t true though. You shift from introvert to extrovert, from brainiac to simpleton, from charismatic to impish—depending on where you find yourself and who is watching.
The fundamental attribution error leads to labels and assumptions about who people are, but remember first impressions are mostly incorrect. Those impressions will linger until you get to know people and understand their situation and the circumstances in which their behavior is generated.