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

Narrated by: Don Hagen

Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2011 David McRaney (P)2011 Gildan Media Corp

Critic reviews

"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)

Highly informative, well writand very entertaining

I loved this book. McRaney has covered some very useful areas of recent research on the brain and how it can make "us" feel like we are in control, when in fact we are highly pre-disposed to certain kinds of behavior and thought processes. It is often very amusing and certainly never dull. I find myself often referring to it in conversations because it provides so many good illustrations of the way in which our perception/thinking is flawed and/or foretold by our evolutionary development. I can't wait for his next book.

A must read!

I have always been a big fan of a popular psych book -- and this is one of the best I have read so far: Clear, witty, and informative!

Good run down of a wide range of classic studies

I really enjoyed this audio program. The narrator has a great voice for presenting this sort of material. The studies presented are from a wide range of areas in psychology but are all classics in their fields. While I was familiar with much of this material, I still found it a useful refresher with interesting angles.

Excellent!

It is a personal paradigm shifter if you contemplate enough in the consequences of its content especially in your daily experiences, judgments and fights :)

Great information - not always cohesively told

I enjoyed this book tremendously. My only critique is that some chapters were what seemed to be just sentences long, while others were hours. Each chapter seemed to be written mostly independent of the others, which led to some awkward repetition at times.
Still, I highly recommend it.

Fantastic, insightful and entertaining

Should be required reading for anyone with a brain as badly built as the human one

Didn't know what to expect ....

when I bought it I thought it " looked interesting and it's on sale, so what the heck", turned out to be one of the most interesting books I've listened to in the last last few years.

Pop psychology is seldom this good.

Lots of good information, and plenty of delusions that we can see in others all the time and in ourselves when we really try to look. I would buy other work by this author.

How the human brain really works!

If you could sum up You Are Not So Smart in three words, what would they be?

Makes you think!

What did you like best about this story?

It's not actually a story, but a series of explanations on common misconceptions and fallacies we experience unconsciously every day. They are written (or told, in this case) with welcome bits of humor and irony, that help you realize that, well, you are not so smart! Recommended!

Which character – as performed by Don Hagen – was your favorite?

No characters here!

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Not really.

Interesting

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

Yes, although I felt like he repeated himself a little. Some of it was already common knowledge and some of it was eye opening. Overall, pretty good. I did feel like the author is not a spiritual man at all. Although he doesn't come out and say it outright, some of his chapters poo-poo seeing things with a spiritual lens. For some reason, this bothered me as a Christian.