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Product Description
Review
"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
Book Description
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.
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Most helpful customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
About time...,
By George Daly (Calgary, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: 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 (Hardcover)
Thank you David McRaney. It's about time some people snapped out of their comfortable, coffee-fueled delusions of control and mastery. But it's understandable how this situation came to be. It's the state of mind that keeps us all in our place, as trouble-free consumers of those things we are meant to consume; contributing to the greater good of ever-larger GDP's. Unfortunately, the people who really ought to read this book will pass it up because it would be "uncomfortable". The title brings to mind another author, Larry Winget, who also specializes in bursting peoples' bubbles. My initial reaction to the title was negative I admit. After all, the strongest messages we receive every single day are intended to remind us that our human qualities, other than cold reason, are unwelcome, not valued, even untrustworthy in our profoundly corporatist society. A good treatise on the subject is contained in John Ralston Saul's book "On Equilibrium". Saul's tone is encouraging, that our human qualities, such as common sense, ethics, imagination, memory, intuition, and reason used in proper balance are entirely trustwothy. The corollary to Saul's argument is that a society based on a single human quality, reason, to the exclusion of all others, is a tragic deformation of our qualities, and serves only the aims of those really in control, large corporations.
4.0 out of 5 stars
More Bookish Thoughts...,
By
This review is from: 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 (Hardcover)
Journalist and social media director David McRaney has bad news for those of us who think we're smart: we confirm our own biases by reading copacetic newspapers and websites, we believe phony, horoscope-style niceties about ourselves and, even though we think ourselves moral, we stray just as often as the guy next to us."You Are Not So Smart" provides a tour of some of the major findings in the field of psychology aimed at pointing out the self-delusions most of us harbour but don't notice. McRaney divides the book into 47 short, easy-to-read and engaging chapters in which he proves that, even in a state of deep introspection, humans "miss many influences, accumulating on [our] persona[e], like barnacles on the side of a ship.' Despite a couple of duds, McRaney succeeds at keeping his reader's attention throughout a book that could easily have become boring half way through. He adopts a friendly, casual style, much like Neil Pasricha in "The Book of Awesome" but provides well-researched, intelligent evidence to support his claims. But one question remains unanswered: how do we combat natural human tendency and actually become "smarter"?
4.0 out of 5 stars
good read,
This review is from: 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 (Hardcover)
This book is fun to read. One of the reasons I like it is that it has short chapters that you can pick up, read and then ponder about the concepts presented. I think that it would be fun to read in a book club or group of friends as each chapter presents itself as discussion fodder.
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