You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, an d 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself

by David McRaney

Overview

An entertaining illumination of the stupid beliefs that make us feel wise.

You believe you are a rational, logical being who sees the world as it really is, but journalist David McRaney is here to tell you that you're as deluded as the rest of us. But that's OK- delusions keep us sane. You Are Not So Smart is a celebration of self-delusion. It's like a psychology class, with all the boring parts taken out, and with no homework.

Based on the popular blog of the same name, You Are Not So Smart collects more than 46 of the lies we tell ourselves everyday, including:

• Dunbar's Number - Humans evolved to live in bands of roughly 150 individuals, the brain cannot handle more than that number. If you have more than 150 Facebook friends, they are surely not all real friends.
• Hindsight bias - When we learn something new, we reassure ourselves that we knew it all along.
• Confirmation bias - Our brains resist new ideas, instead paying attention only to findings that reinforce our preconceived notions.
• Brand loyalty - We reach for the same brand not because we trust its quality but because we want to reassure ourselves that we made a smart choice the last time we bought it.

  Packed with interesting sidebars and quick guides on cognition and common fallacies, You Are Not So Smart is a fascinating synthesis of cutting-edge psychology research to turn our minds inside out.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101545355
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/27/2011
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	133,044
File size:	479 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

A two-time winner of the William Randolph Hearst Award, journalist David McRaney writes the blog youarenotsosmart.com. A self-described psychology nerd, he lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"In an Idiocracy dominated by cable TV bobbleheads, government propagandists, and corporate spinmeisters, many of us know that mass ignorance is a huge problem. Now, thanks to David McRaney's mind-blowing book, we can finally see the scientific roots of that problem. Anybody still self-aware enough to wonder why society now worships willful stupidity should read this book." -David Sirota, author of Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now

Editorial Reviews

This book's subtitle assertions mark just the beginning of its counterintuitive lessons. David McRaney's You Are Not So Smart is a savvy pop psychology tutorial on little-known concepts such as the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, the Backfire Effect, the Theory of Learned Helplessness, and the Just World Fallacy. A winning guide to common fallacies for the libraries of authors like Malcolm Gladwell.

McRaney, a Hattiesburg, Miss., resident and two-time winner of the William Randolph Hearst Award, writes simplified descriptions of psychology experiments on his blog youarenotsosmart.com. He soon found success, receiving between 17,000 to 25,000 hits a day with 6,000 subscribers to the site’s RSS feed. Now McRaney’s past blog posts resurface in this collection, which he describes as “a compendium of information about self-delusion and the wonderful ways we succumb to it.” The format first presents “The Misconception” (“You are a strong individual who doesn’t conform unless forced to”) and “The Truth” (“It takes little more than an authority figure or social pressure to get you to obey, because conformity is a survival instinct”). The “Conformity” chapter describes how hoax phone calls convinced fast-food managers to strip-search employees, followed by the famous Stanley Milgram obedience experiment in which unsuspecting subjects delivered electric shocks to a screaming actor. Other brief essays cover quitting an addiction cold turkey, first impressions, behavior as a reflection of personality, blind taste tests, and self-fulfilling prophecies. In popularizing these experiments, extracted from psychology books and journals, McRaney is poised to follow in the footsteps of folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand, who also mined academic publications when he popularized urban legends in a series of books. (Nov. 1)

Publishers Weekly

"Every chapter is a welcome reminder that you are not so smart-yet you're never made to feel dumb. You Are Not So Smart is a dose of psychology research served in tasty anecdotes that will make you better understand both yourself and the rest of us. It turns out we're much more irrational than most of us think, so give yourself every advantage you can and read this book." — Alexis Ohanian, Co-Founder of Reddit.com

"You Are Not So Smart is the go-to blog for understanding why we all do silly things." — Lifehacker.com

"You'd think from the title that it might be curmudgeonly; in fact, You Are Not So Smart is quite big-hearted." — Jason Kottke, Kottke.org

"In an Idiocracy dominated by cable TV bobbleheads, government propagandists, and corporate spinmeisters, many of us know that mass ignorance is a huge problem. Now, thanks to David McRaney's mind-blowing book, we can finally see the scientific roots of that problem. Anybody still self-aware enough to wonder why society now worships willful stupidity should read this book." -David Sirota, author of Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now

From the Publisher

"You'd think from the title that it might be curmudgeonly; in fact, You Are Not So Smart is quite big-hearted."

-Jason Kottke

"You Are Not So Smart is the go-to blog for understanding why we all do silly things."

-Lifehacker.com

"Every chapter is a welcome reminder that you are not so smart-yet you're never made to feel dumb. You Are Not So Smart is a dose of psychology research served in tasty anecdotes that will make you better understand both yourself and the rest of us. It turns out we're much more irrational than most of us think, so give yourself every advantage you can and read this book."

-Alexis Ohanian

You Are Not So Smart is the go-to blog for understanding why we all do silly things.

Lifehacker.com