'YOU ARE NOW LESS DUMB" by David McRaney

• You are a being capable of logic and reason who falls short of that ideal in predictable ways.
• Each creature’s version of reality is unique to its nervous system.
• What you see, recall, and feel emotionally is 100 percent created by chemical reactions in your braincase, and that means those things are susceptible to influence, editing, redacting, and all sorts of other ingredients that get added to consciousness when you construct reality out of inputs both external and internal.
• You don’t record everything you see, nor do you notice everything that comes into your mind. The only things that make it past the ears and eyes are those things to which you attend. Memories are not recordings.
• Everything that’s ever happened to you has happened inside your skull.
• Heuristics make big, complex, daunting ideas tiny and easier to manage.
• Another giant stumbling block in your mental life is a collection of predictable patterns of thought called cognitive biases.
• Most cognitive biases are completely natural and unlearned.
• Heuristics allow you to think and act faster, and biases influence you to behave in ways that typically keep primates alive and active.
• The truth is that your brain lies to you.
• THE TRUTH: You make sense of life through narrative.
• This is your narrative bias—a bias in that when given the option, you prefer to give and receive information in narrative format.
• every form of information transfer seems better when couched in the language of storytelling.
• The more info you get about a statement, the more likely you are to believe that statement.
• the near-death and out-of-body phenomena are both actually the subjective experience of a brain owner watching as his brain tries desperately to figure out what is happening and to orient itself amid its systems going haywire due to oxygen deprivation.
• Whether or not your brain is damaged, your mind is always trying to explain itself to itself, and the degree of accuracy varies from moment to moment.
• Objectivity and rationality find it difficult to thrive in your intellectual ecosystem.
• In truth, nothing has a beginning and an end.
• Once you gain the ability to assume others have their own thoughts, the concept of other minds is so powerful that you project it into everything:
• you have a proclivity for believing and accepting things more readily when they are delivered to you in story form.
• You, too, are unaware of how unaware you are.
• THE MISCONCEPTION: The larger the consensus, the more likely it is correct. THE TRUTH: A belief is not more likely to be accurate just because many people share it.
• Your natural tendency is to start from a conclusion and work backward to confirm your assumptions, but the scientific method drives down the wrong side of the road and tries to disconfirm your assumptions.
• Science continuously tears apart its models of reality looking for weakness.
• when you believe in something, you rarely seek out evidence to the contrary to see how it matches up with your assumptions.
• Skepticism is not your strong suit.
• When you have zero evidence, every assumption is basically equal.
• THE MISCONCEPTION: You do nice things for the people you like and bad things to the people you hate. THE TRUTH: You grow to like people for whom you do nice things and hate people you harm.
• Attitude is the psychological term for the bundle of beliefs and feelings you experience toward a person, topic, idea, etc., without having to form concrete thoughts.
• As a primate, you are keen to social cues that portend your possible ostracism from an in-group. In the wild, banishment equals death.
• You tend to like the people to whom you are kind and to dislike the people to whom you are rude.
• THE MISCONCEPTION: You notice when effect doesn’t follow cause. THE TRUTH: You find it especially difficult to believe a sequence of events means nothing.
• Everything that comes before a positive outcome is lumped into the mixture of rituals and behaviors worth repeating. This is the post hoc fallacy.
• Post hoc thinking, unlike other fallacies, gets a special biological boost from a weird physiological quirk called the placebo effect.
• The placebo effect is disturbingly easy to produce, and chances are you experience it every day.
• The post hoc fallacy and the placebo effect often turn up together. In combination, they create all sorts of interesting phenomena.
• THE MISCONCEPTION: You objectively appraise the individual attributes of other people. THE TRUTH: You judge specific qualities of others based on your global evaluation of their character and appearance.
• To speed up processing, your brain tends first to apply very simple labels to the things you encounter minute by minute.
• You have a height bias that tells you taller is better because it was adaptive to think such things for some unknown reason over the last few million years.
• The halo effect causes one trait about a person to color your attitude and perceptions of all her other traits.
• In the last one hundred years of research, beauty seems to be the one thing that most reliably produces the halo effect.
• Once you think someone is a genius, you see everything she makes as the work of a genius.
• THE MISCONCEPTION: Willpower is just a metaphor. THE TRUTH: Willpower is a finite resource.
• Self-regulation is an important part of being a person.
• The results suggested that focused concentration made people less eager to make active choices later.
• A great deal of your thoughts and behaviors are automatic and unconscious.
• All Baumeister’s research suggests that self-control is a strenuous act. As your ego depletes, your automatic processes get louder, and each successive attempt to take control of your impulses is less successful than the last.
• Inhibiting and redirecting your own behavior in any way makes it more difficult to delay gratification and persevere in the face of adversity or boredom in the future.
• Once you’ve completed a task requiring significant self-control, your motivation and attention are manipulated by internal forces to seek rewards for a while. But if an even better prospect emerges or a serious threat looms, your motivation will be freed up again so you can press on.
• Remember, no matter what the self-help books say, the research suggests that willpower isn’t a skill.
• THE MISCONCEPTION: You always know why you feel the way you feel. THE TRUTH: You can experience emotional states without knowing why, even if you believe you can pinpoint the source.
• you sometimes make up a reason for why you feel the way you do, and then you believe your own narrative and move on.
• People are your favorite explanations, as studies show that when given the option, you prefer to see other human beings as the source of your heightened state of arousal.
• The source of your emotional state is often difficult or impossible to detect.
• THE MISCONCEPTION: You always know when you are making the best of things. THE TRUTH: You often incorrectly give credit to outside forces for providing your optimism.
• When you are happy, you rarely take the metacognitive step backward required to realize that your brain is responsible for that emotion.
• That’s what you always think you want, more choice, more outs, more options, but the results suggest that sort of situation saps the power of your psychological immune system.
• it is well known in psychology that you find it difficult to change your mind about a person after your first impression.
• When you subjectively optimize an inescapably bad situation, you focus on the positive elements alone and see them as far more desirable and awesome than you would if you were standing on the outside.
• So much of life is impossible to do over, so many situations are impossible to change without harming people important to you, that you learn to change the way you see the world because it is easier than changing the world itself.
• THE MISCONCEPTION: You alter your opinions and incorporate the new information into your thinking after your beliefs are challenged with facts. THE TRUTH: When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger.
• Once something is added to your collection of beliefs, you protect it from harm. You do this instinctively and unconsciously when confronted with attitude-inconsistent information.
• Coming or going, you stick to your beliefs instead of questioning them.
• When you start to pull out facts and figures, hyperlinks and quotes, you are actually making the opponent feel even surer of his position than before you started the debate.
• The Debunking Handbook,
• The more difficult it becomes to process a series of statements, the less credit you give them overall.
• As social media and advertising progress, confirmation bias and the backfire effect will become more and more difficult to overcome.
• In a world where everything comes to you on demand, your beliefs may never be challenged, and when they are, you can retreat into a bubble of confirmation and denial more easily than ever before.
• According to Dunbar, you shouldn’t expect people to change their minds just because you present them with facts that contradict their misconceptions. If you do, those brains will actively prevent learning from taking place.
• THE MISCONCEPTION: Many of your private beliefs are in disagreement with what most people think. THE TRUTH: On certain issues, the majority of the people believe that the majority of the people in a group believe what, in truth, the minority of the members believe.
• As the philosopher Terence McKenna liked to say, cultures are operating systems for brains.
• Norms are the rules of behavior within a culture that determine what is and is not acceptable from one circumstance to the next.
• Fears of embarrassment and ostracism, and the pleasure of belonging and feeling acceptance, are always pushing and pulling on your behavior.
• Prentice and Miller concluded that their research provided plenty of evidence that you have no idea whether the norms in your culture, subculture, era, or group of friends are real or imagined.
• The landscape of any social situation is so treacherous that, as they put it, “estimates of the norm are often seriously in error.”
• One of the common strategies to avoid embarrassment and punishment for disagreeing with a norm is actively to enforce it. People often become norm enforcers to prove their loyalty and head off any suspicion.
• You are very bad at judging other people’s inhibitions from one situation to the next.
• So, pluralistic ignorance is your crappy ability to predict the inhibition of others combined with your deep, innate drive to seek out the rewards of conformity and to avoid punishment for breaching social norms.
• THE MISCONCEPTION: You honestly define that which you hold dear. THE TRUTH: You will shift your definitions to protect your ideologies.
• When a member of a group to which you belong, or a champion of an ideology you admire, commits an act you consider unacceptable, you revoke her membership on the spot. Not officially, of course, just mentally and on principle. This way you can avoid guilt by association.
• The truth is, most things aren’t clearly defined, no matter what the dictionary says.
• Most things exist along a gradient of degrees.
• When you beg the question, you assume you already know the truth.
• THE MISCONCEPTION: You celebrate diversity and respect others’ points of view. THE TRUTH: You are driven to create and form groups and then believe others are wrong just because they are others.
• People in new situations instinctively form groups. Those groups develop their own language quirks, in-jokes, norms, values, and so on.
• The illusion of asymmetric insight makes it seem that you know everyone else far better than they know you, and not only that, you know them better than they know themselves.
• Justification strengthens a worldview, but exploration weakens it.
• THE MISCONCEPTION: Clothes as everyday objects are just fabrics for protection and decoration of the body. THE TRUTH: The clothes you wear change your behavior and can either add or subtract from your mental abilities.
• their long history, suits are now particularly adept at influencing others.
• If you want to present yourself as a responsible and dependable member of society who gets things done in a professional manner so that you nab that job, you’d damn well better show up to the interview in a suit.
• You can’t help it. Wherever you go, you amass objects.
• are a big part of your life thanks to the associative architecture of your brain.
• The syrupy muck beneath your scalp works best with associations, synthesis, and pattern recognition, and works worst with numbers, lists, measurements, statistics, and similarly hard-edged logic tasks.
• Because your semantic memory is more like a network of nodes than a cabinet of files, you are highly susceptible to a psychological phenomenon called priming. Every idea you experience now unconsciously influences all the ideas you experience later. Those ideas then influence your behavior without your realizing it.
• Priming is one of the fundamental drivers of your behavior, and it isn’t limited to simple symbols and images.
• THE MISCONCEPTION: People who riot and loot are scum who were just looking for an excuse to steal and be violent. THE TRUTH: Under the right conditions, you are prone to losing your individuality and becoming absorbed into a hive mind.
• Police and firefighters are well aware of this tendency for crowds to gather and taunt.
• It takes only one person to get a crowd going.
• Every time you wade into a crowd or don a concealing garment, you risk deindividuation, and it often brings out the worst in you.
• Chanting, singing, dancing, and other ritualistic, repetitive group activities are particularly effective at focusing your attention and distracting you from the boundaries of your head and body.
• Deindividuation is usually promoted in any organization where it is important to reduce inhibition and get you to do things you might not do alone.
• THE MISCONCEPTION: You make rational decisions based on the future value of objects, investments, and experiences. THE TRUTH: Your decisions are tainted by the emotional investments you accumulate, and the more you invest in something, the harder it becomes to abandon it.
• When offered a chance to accept or reject a gamble, most people refuse to make a bet unless the possible payoff is around double the potential loss.
• Your loss aversion system is always vigilant, waiting on standby to keep you from giving up more than you can afford to spare, so you calculate the balance between cost and reward whenever possible.
• You see something as a good value when you predict the pain of loss will be offset by your joy of gain.
• Sunk costs are payments or investments that can never be recovered.
• THE MISCONCEPTION: There is nothing better in the world than getting paid to do what you love. THE TRUTH: Getting paid for doing what you already enjoy will sometimes cause your love for the task to wane because you attribute your motivation as coming from the reward, not your internal feelings.
• The happiness that money offers doesn’t keep getting more and more potent—it plateaus. The research showed that a lack of money brings unhappiness, but an overabundance does not have the opposite effect.
• According to the research, in modern America the average income required to be happy day to day, to experience “emotional well-being” is about $75,000 a year. According to the researchers, past that point, adding more to your income “does nothing for happiness, enjoyment, sadness, or stress.”
• Self-perception theory says you observe your own behavior and then, after the fact, make up a story to explain it.
• Payments in terms of social norms are intrinsic, and thus your narrative remains impervious to the overjustification effect. Those sorts of payments come as praise and respect, a feeling of mastery or camaraderie or love. Payments in terms of market norms are extrinsic, and your story becomes vulnerable to overjustification. Marketplace payments come as something measurable, and in turn, they make your motivation measurable when before it was nebulous, up for interpretation and easy to rationalize.
• Thinking about thinking changes things.
• You will work only as hard as is necessary to keep getting paychecks.
• THE MISCONCEPTION: You set attainable goals based on a realistic evaluation of your strengths and weaknesses. THE TRUTH: You protect unrealistic attitudes about your abilities in order to stay sane and avoid despair.
• Your wildly inaccurate self-evaluations get you through rough times and help motivate you when times are good.
• People who take credit for the times when things go their way but who put the blame on others when they stumble or fall are generally happier people.
• To be a person is to be irrationally positive about your ability to understand and affect the world around you.
• you maintain happiness under the spell of three broad positive illusions: illusory superiority bias, an unrealistically positive view of yourself; the illusion of control, the belief that you have command over the chaos that awaits you every day; and optimism bias, the belief in a future that can’t possibly be as great as you expect it to be.
• Chances are you see yourself as slightly above average in most categories, and way above average in a few.
• The research suggests that the average person thinks she is not the average person.
• If you never look for disconfirmation of your beliefs, especially the ones that make you feel special and above average, you can proceed unchallenged and deluded.
• Every person’s assumptions about being above average can’t be true.
• Statistically speaking, if you had a perfect measure of your abilities you would see that you fall into the average category for most things, but you have a very hard time believing this is true.
• Not only do you see yourself as above average, but you also see the ways in which you exceed the average person as being the best attributes of humanity.
• Luckily for you, most of the time you have no idea what you are getting into, and you greatly overestimate your chances for success.