YOU ARE NOT SO SMART

Who would really obtain and read a book with such a title? Some may buy this book out of curiosity, and to check the content. A person may open this book to learn about the author, one who dares to insult his readers in such a direct way. Some may be interested to find out if the author thinks he is more intelligent than others. Whoever reads this book, would probably think of himself or herself as a smart person, since someone who does not think much of himself would not bother with a book carrying such title. The book, in fact, challenges the common ideas and common beliefs which we consider to be a natural way of thinking. Each chapter of the book is a challenge to oneself in a different behavioral and psychological concept. Subjects described in the book are certified with descriptions of one or more experiments conducted by experimenters of specialized fields. Chapters begin with “The Misconception” and “The Truth”, which examines what people believe and what the truth about that belief is. As the author explains, materials specified in the book were originally published in his blog, and in different times, which he decided to compile them into a book.

Chapter five is titled “The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy”. It is the story of this person whose fun in his free time is to aim at the wall of his barn. After a long period of shooting at the barn, he checks the wall and finds a place where most of the bullets have hit. He draws several circles inside each other where the concentration of the bullets is, in a way that it would represent a target circles. Anyone who looks at the wall assumes that the target was drawn on the wall prior to the bullet holes, and assumes that to be the work of a sharp shooter. This is an example of creating a pattern out of a coincidence; after all, what some call coincidence, others coll fate. David McRaney, the author gives an interesting example: “Say you go on a date, and the other person reveals he or she drives the same kind of car you do… later you learn your date’s mom’s name is the same as your mom’s, and your mothers have the same birthday… you find out you both own the box set of ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’, and you both grew up loving ‘Rescue Rangers’. You both love pizza, but hate rutabagas. This is meant to be, you think. You are made for each other;” (P.38). This illustration is what fate is all about. How else could two people match so well? In fact, is it wise for two people who would like to share the rest of their lives with each other to also share so much similarities, or it is better to be different and learn from each other? From the time we are born, our parents teach us how to talk, walk, eat, speak, and many other fundamental and essential life lessons. Then, we go to school and learn how to read and write and how the world around us operates. In college we learn a specific trade or career path we would like to take. At work, we learn how to undertake tasks which would, in collaboration with other tasks, improve the organization we are employed with, in order for it to accomplish its mission. In our non-working time, we enjoy socializing; and socializing means give and take of ideas and what we have learned. Who is better and closer than a spouse to learn from? However, it is a popular belief that the more similarities a couple have, the better they can get along with each other, which is true as long as one prefers teaching than learning. But, this is somehow a different subject from what the author discussing here. When you are in a similar situation as the above, and “the hand of fate is pushing you towards the other person,” it is easy to forget the details and fall into a series of coincidences, although the explanation is very logical: “How many people in the world own that model of car? You are both about the same age, so your mothers are too, and their names were probably common in their time. Since you and your date have similar backgrounds and grew up in the same decade, you probably share the same childhood TV shows. Everyone loves Monty Python. Everyone loves pizza. Many people hate rutabagas;” (P.38,39).

You are not so smart means that all of us are lulled by what we perceive to be the fact from outside, using our five senses. That is truly natural considering that for millions of years we had to rely on those senses and make decisions merely based on them and in a blink of an eye, in order to survive. Now that we don’t have to worry about our safety every minute, or we can lose the chance of catching a prey to feed ourselves, we should be able to analyze all instances in a broader picture and use our wisdom more than our feelings. We are not aware of most of our subconscious, and we normally rely on our first observation which stays in mind for a long time. The ability to think twice is always a smart move.

Chapter nine is titled “The Availability Heuristic”, that discusses how our mind processes available information much easier than the information which is not present or fresh in mind. The phrase that; if you want people to believe it, keep repeating it as a fact, no matter how outlandish the claim, is a product of this function of our minds. The book talks about Columbine school shooting and how it became a major undertaking in the final year of last century: “hundreds of books, seminars, and films have been produced in an attempt to understand the sudden epidemic. The truth, however, was that there hadn’t been an increase in school shootings… During the time when Columbine and other school shootings got major media attention, violence in schools was down over 30 percent. Kids were more likely to get shot in school before Columbine, but the media during the time hadn’t given you many examples;” (P.70,71). Then, the book discusses an experiment and concludes: “more available a bit of information is, the faster you process it. The faster you process it, the more you believe it and the less likely you become to consider other bits of info;” (P.71). This also proves the role of the media, as it has increasingly been the mouthpiece of the rich and powerful, and all facets of media have successfully dumbed down recipients’ intelligence through sports and entertainment.

One of the ways that the media can influence us is to produce a false picture of the world we are living in. In spite of all atrocities that various governments and non-governments inflict on people, living in a “just world” is what we believe in; which is the subject of chapter 18 under the heading “The Just-World Fallacy”, that examines this phenomenon: “A world with righteous on one side of the scale and evil on the other- that seems to make sense. You want to believe those who work hard and sacrifice get ahead and those who are lazy and cheat do not…Success is often greatly influenced by when you were born, where you grew up, the socioeconomic status of your family, and random chance. All the hard work in the world can’t change those initial factors…The psychologist Jonathan Haidt says many people who don’t consciously believe in karma will believe deep down in some versions of it, calling it whatever seems appropriate in their own culture. They see systems like welfare and affirmative action as disrupting the balance of the natural world;” (P.110). This way of thinking is also promoted by the wealthy class, who survives on the majority’s toil, and the only way they can receive service is to keep people poor and needy. The marginalized majority is always fed superstition by religion authorities who are in the service of the rich. The underprivileged is always pushed to believe that without the prosperous bosses or owners or government high officials, they cannot survive, the fact of which is the opposite.

“You have a need for other people to like you and admire you,” is the beginning of a general statement made to describe every reader, which is the subject of chapter 21 titled: “Subjective Validation”. The statement is in fact a mismatch of phrases adopted from a horoscope by a Bertram R. Forer, in an experiment in 1948: “He gave his students a personality test and told them each one had personally been assessed, but then gave everyone the same analysis. He asked his students to look over the statements and rate them for accuracy. On average, they rated the bogus analysis as 85 percent correct- as if it had been personally prepared to describe each one of them;” (P.120). When we are the subject of a study and the focus is on us, because of subjective validation we are vulnerable to suggestion, and we can easily become the target for use: “psychologists point to this phenomenon to explain why people fall for pseudoscience like biorhythms, iridology, and phrenology, or mysticism like astrology, numerology, and tarot cards;” (P.120).

We make many decisions every day, sometimes without even being conscious of them. Our logic and our emotions work together to make a decision affected by our senses, and at the same time practical. The balance in using wisdom or sense, is what makes the difference between differing decisions made by two different people on the same subject. We have the tendency however, to make a snap decision based on our “gut feelings” than a more investigated and balanced decision. Chapter 25 discusses this phenomenon called “The Affect Heuristic”: “Stories make sense on an emotional level, so anything that conjures fear, empathy, or pride will trump confusing statistics. It causes you to buy a security system for your home but neglect to purchase radon detectors. It makes you carry pepper spray while you clog your arteries with burritos. It installs metal detectors in schools but leaves French fries on the menus. It creates vegetarian smokers. Well known primal dangers are easy to see, easy to guard against, even when greater danger looms. The affect heuristic speaks to your basic sensibilities about risk and reward while neglecting the big picture and the dangers of complex systems that require study and deeper understanding;” (P.144).

“Self-Serving Bias” is the title of chapter 28. If you always think that you are not worthy of anything and everyone around you is better than you in every regard, how would you feel? You may not have survived to read these articles. One of the reasons for our evolution to present stage is our belief that we make right decisions and in comparison to others, we are above everyone else. We may think of a few exceptions, but in general we find ourselves better than those around us. We always have to keep a positive attitude towards ourselves in order to progress and expand our horizons: “In the 1990s, there was a lot of research aimed at discovering just how deluded people were when it came to failure and success. The findings of these studies showed you tend to accept credit when you succeed, but blame bad luck, unfair rules, difficult instructors, bad bosses, cheaters, and so on when you fail. When you are doing well, you think you are to blame, when you are doing badly, you think the world is to blame. This behavior can be observed in board games, and senate races, group projects and final exams;” (P.158).

We study history in order to predict future more accurately. The more we learn about events happening around us, without being subjected to propaganda, and read the history, the better we are equipped to predict the future. However, if we have a hand in making that future, our prediction will have a bigger chance to materialize. There are of course factors outside of our control that affect our future goals and aspirations, however when we are determined to achieve a goal, some of the outside factors may also be shaped by us. Chapter 42 is titled “Self-Fulfillment Prophecies”, and it discusses how our predictions are shaped: “Research shows you are highly susceptible to the phenomenon because you are always trying to predict the behavior of others. The future is the result of actions, and actions are the result of behavior, and behavior is the result of prediction. This is called the Thomas Theorem. The sociologist W.I Thomas presented in 1928, ‘if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.’ Thomas noticed when people are trying to predict future events, they make a lot of assumptions about the present. If those assumptions are powerful enough, the resulting actions will lead to the predicted future;” (P.231).

How much power one has, to control his or her destiny, is the subject of chapter 47 “The Illusion of Control”. If we think that we are in total control of our future, a failure could ruin us. If we think that we do not have any control and fate would take us wherever it desires, we are assured a failure. So, with most things, a middle ground may be the optimum solution. But the feeling of having, or not having power is not constant and changes depending on many factors. An interesting experiment in chapter 47 titled “The Illusion of Control” reflects this: “In 2008, Nathaneal Fast and Deborah Gruenfeld at Stanford University conducted experiments designed to reveal how the illusion of control is created… They divided subjects into three groups. One group wrote essay about a time in their life in which they remembered being a leader. Another group wrote about a time when they were a follower. The third group served as a control and wrote about going to the supermarket. After the essays were finished, the groups played a game where they had to guess the roll of a pair of dice. If they guessed correctly, they would get $5. The catch was this: Choose yourself or another person to roll… sure enough, the illusion of control had been properly primed in the group that wrote about being leaders. A full 100 percent of them asked to roll the dice. In the subordinate group, 58 percent asked for control of the roll. The control group fell in between, with 69 percent asking to try their luck instead of handing the dice over to someone else;” (P.262). Therefore, exercise of control is not necessarily the character of what we call a controlling person, but it could be ignited or extinguished depending on the situation. We know of many dictators who have become submissive and subordinated when fallen from power. For an individual, being in control and letting someone else control the situation is an important decision to make. The chapter ends with: “You can no more predict the course of your life than you could the shape of a cloud. So seek to control the small things, the things that mater and let them pile up into a heap of happiness. In the bigger picture, control is an illusion anyway;” (P.263).

Last chapter “The Fundamental Attribution Error” talks about cause and effect. When we are put into certain conditions, we react as we have been expected to. To prove this point, the author summarizes the famous Stanford Prison Experiment by Dr. Zimbardo, when he divided some students into two groups of prisoners and prison guards, and simulated a jail environment for them. From the first day, prison guards adopted that character and started abusing the jailers. The book continues in discussing why people can so easily be transformed into the characters they are subjected to. Understanding outside factors in someone’s behavior is the most important factor in a relationship: “When you interpret your loved one’s coldness as his or her indifference to your wants and needs instead of as a reaction to stress at work or problems ricocheting in your loved one’s own heart, you’ve committed the fundamental attribution error. When you vote for someone because that person seems likable and approachable, and ignore how much of their persona is contrived for the sake of votes, it’s the same error at work. You commit it again when you assay friendliness as sexual interest, or poverty as the result of laziness… You blame the person, not the environment and the influence of the person’s peers… The fundamental attribution error leads to labels and assumptions about who people are, but remember first impressions are mostly incorrect. Those impressions will linger until you get to know people and understand their situation and the circumstances in which their behavior is generated. Knowing this doesn’t mean you must forgive evil, but perhaps it can help prevent it;” (P.274).

Copyright @ 2011 by David McRaney; Published by Penguin Group