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

David McRaney

Penguin Publishing Group, Nov 6, 2012 - Humor - 320 pages

An entertaining illumination of the stupid beliefs that make us feel wise, based on the popular blog of the same name. 

Whether you’re deciding which smartphone to purchase or which politician to believe, you think you are a rational being whose every decision is based on cool, detached logic. But here’s the truth: You are not so smart. You’re just as deluded as the rest of us—but that’s okay, because being deluded is part of being human.

Growing out of David McRaney’s popular blog, You Are Not So Smart reveals that every decision we make, every thought we contemplate, and every emotion we feel comes with a story we tell ourselves to explain them. But often these stories aren’t true. Each short chapter—covering topics such as Learned Helplessness, Selling Out, and the Illusion of Transparency—is like a psychology course with all the boring parts taken out.

Bringing together popular science and psychology with humor and wit, You Are Not So Smart is a celebration of our irrational, thoroughly human behavior.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - steve02476 - LibraryThing

Forty-eight little essays about faults in perception and biases that make us misapprehend ourselves and the world around us. Nothing super deep, but a good round up. As you might expect from the title, there's a bit of attitude involved.

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - Sarah220 - LibraryThing

A survey of all the ways your brain doesn't work as well as you think it does/ should. I found the book quite interesting although at times the details of the studies got a little dry and the snarky ...

Contents

• The Straw Man Fallacy: 101
• The JustWorld Fallacy: 108
• The Ultimatum Game: 118
• Cult Indoctrination: 126
• Supernormal Releasers: 131
• The Affect Heuristic: 137
• Dunbars Number: 149
• Selling Out 28 SelfServing Bias: 159
• The Spotlight Effect: 163
• The Third Person Effect: 167
• Catharsis: 171
• The Misinformation Effect: 176
• Conformity: 183
• Extinction Burst: 194
• Social Loafing: 197
• The Illusion of Transparency: 200
• Learned Helplessness: 206
• Embodied Cognition: 212
• The Anchoring Effect: 215
• Attention: 220
• SelfHandicapping: 228
• SelfFulfilling Prophecies 43 The Moment: 232
• Consistency Bias: 241
• The Representativeness Heuristic: 247
• Expectation: 253
• The Illusion of Control: 261
• The Fundamental Attribution Error: 265
• Acknowledgments: 276
• Bibliography: 280

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.

Bibliographic information

• Title: 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
• Author: David McRaney
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, 2012
• ISBN: 1592407366, 9781592407361
• Length: 320 pages
• Subjects: Humor / Form / Essays; Philosophy / Movements / Humanism; Psychology / Cognitive Psychology & Cognition; Self-Help / Personal Growth / General