You Are Now Less Dumb

A memory is least accurate when most reflected upon, and most accurate when least pondered.   Together, those two facts make eyewitness testimony basically worthless.  -6

Psychologists Dan Somons and Christopher Chabris published a study in 2011 revealing that 63 percent of those surveyed in the United States believe memory works like a video camera, and another 48 percent believe memories are permanent.  An additional 37 percent said that eyewitness testimony was reliable enough to be the only evidence necessary to convict someone accused of a crime.  Those are seriously shocking facts to a psychologist or a neuroscientist, because none of those things is true.   -7


This is not a book about abnormal psychology.  It is about normal psychology, the common, default, baked-into-every brain sort of thinking you can expect to find in rocket scientists, heads of state, and the lady at the office who has a kitten calendar for personal use and a fireman calendar for business meetings.  You think seeing is believing, that your thoughts are always based on reasonable intuitions and rational analysis, and that though you may falter and err from time to time, for the most part you stand as a focused, intelligent operator of the most complicated nervous system on earth.  You believe that your abilities are sound, your memories perfect, your thoughts rational and wholly conscious, the story of your life true and accurate, and your personality stable and stellar.  The truth is that your brain lies to you.  Inside your skull is a vast and far reaching personal conspiracy to keep you from uncovering the facts about who you actually are, how capable you tend to be, and how confident you deserve to feel.  That undeserved confidence alters your behavior and creates a giant, easily opened back door through which waltz con artists, magicians, public relations employees, advertising executives, pseudoscientists, peddlers of magical charms, and others.  You can learn about yourself when you take on the perspective of those who see through your act and know how to manipulate your gullibility.  A great deal can be learned and gained by focusing on your failings.   24-25




When you gather with others, they tell you about their reality in the same story format, and the better the story, the more likely you are to accept their explanation.  -23

Books, movies, games, lectures--every form of information transfer seems better when couched in the language of storytelling.  -24

The central argument of narrative psychology is that you do not use the logic and careful analysis to unravel the mysteries of who you are and what you want.  You do not hypothesize and test.   You don't study, record, and contemplate the variables of life and the people you meet along the way.  Objectivity and rationality find it difficult to thrive in your intellectual ecosystem.  -37

The people who came before you invented science because your natural way of understanding and explaining what you experience is terrible.  When you have zero evidence, every assumption is basically equal.  You prefer to see causes rather than effects, signals in the noise, patterns in the randomness.  You prefer easy to understand stories, and then turn everything in life into a narrative so that complicated problems become easy.   -55

As a professional do you feel compelled to wear a suit, or after donning a suit do you conduct yourself in a professional manner?  Do you vote Democratic because you champion social programs, or do you champion social  programs because you vote Democratic?  The research says the latter in both cases.  -61

This is why volunteering feels good and unpaid interns work so hard.  Without an obvious outside rewards you create an internal one.  -66

[About Power Balance wristbands, a worthless band which promised increased balance]
Former U.S. president Bill Clinton was photographed wearing one, as was Robert DeNiro, and Gerard Butler, and probably all the uncles in your famnily who spend more time talking about golf than playing it.  The Associated Press reported in 2011 the trainers for the Phoenix Suns basketball team swore by the trinkets, and that a spokesperson for St. Vincent Sports Performance in Indianapolis, where hundreds of professional athletes go to train.  -72

You are actually more likely in your lifetime to win an Academy Award than get mauled by a shark.  -87

In 1974, psychologistsDavid Landy and Harold Sigall published a study in which they handed out essays to subjects, each with one of two photos of different women attached.  Some subjects received an essay with a photo included of a woman deemed by the scientists to be attractive, and others got a photo of a woman deemed unattractive.  They asked the participants to rate the quality of the writing in the essays but made no mention of the photo.  The more attractive the woman in the picture, the better the score, and when asked about the overall creativity and the depth of the ideas in the essay, the papers attached to the beautiful photograph were rated as being of higher quality in both areas. The essays, of course, were identical.   The only difference was the photo attached.  When the scientists ran the study with essays purposely written to be awful, the disparity between the ratings was magnified.  As Landy and Sigall wrote, you expect better performances from attractive people, but when they fail, you are also more likely to forgive them.  -91

  
The current understanding of this is that all brain functions require fuel, but the executive functions seem to require the most.   Or, if you prefer, the executive branch of the mind has the most expensive operating costs.   -115

Over the course of Graham's experiments, he found that partners tended to feel closer, more attracted to, and more in love with each other when their skills were routinely challenged.  He reasoned the buzz you get when you break through a frustrating trial and succeed was directly tied to bonding.   -122

The research into arousal says you are bad at explaining yourself to yourself, but it sheds light on why so many successful dates include roller coasters, horror films, and conversations over coffee.  There is a reason that playful westling can lead to passionate kissing, that a great friend can turn a heaving cry into a belly laugh.   Theres a reason great struggle bring s you closer to friends, family, and lovers.  There is a reason Rice Krispies commercials show moms teaching children how to make treats in crisp black-and-white while Israel Kamakawiwo'ole sings "Over The Rainbow."


Subjective optimization complements sour grapes, the inclination to see that which you can't have as taht which you didn't want in the first place.  Subjective optimization makes whatever you get stuck with seem better than that which you can no longer obtain.   Metaphorically, it is the process that makes lemons into lemonaide.   -131


In 1976, when Ronald Reagan was running for president of the United States, he often told a story about a Chicago woman who was scamming the welfare system to earn her income.  Regain said the woman had eighty names, thirty addresses, and twelve Social Security cards she used to get food stamps, along with more that her fair share of money from Medicaid and other welfare entitlements.  He said she drove a Cadillac, didn't work, and didn't pay taxes.  He talked about this woman, whom he never named, in just about every small town he visited, and it tended to infuriate his audiences.  The story solidified the term welfare queen in American political discourse and influence not only the national conversation for the next thirty years, but public policy as well.  It also wasn't true.  -145


In experiments where two facts were placed side by side, subjects tended to rate statements as more likely to be true when those statements were presented in simple, legible type than when printed in a weird font with a difficult-to-read color pattern.  -149


Social Norms and Pluralistic Ignorance
In every new situation, you innately seek out and follow norms like spilled water seeking its level, because doing so is an adaptive response built into the primate brain.  -160

The norms that hold a culture together escalate by an arrangement of concentric circles of tradition.  Your family has its ways of doing things; then your friends, your employer or school, your community, your ethnic subculture, your socioeconomic peer group, your town, state, nation, and so on.   Since norms alter your behavior from one setting to the next, they can build upon one another until they dictate voting, policy making, governance, and giant social movements.   Still, in many situations, people stick to norms only when everyone is watching.  -161

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.   -165

the people on the fence went with what they assumed the majority wanted.   They didn't know, however, that most people didn't actually feel that way, and the presumed majority was just a figment of their imaginations.   -167

Thinking through that bias, most people falsely assume their culture is less progressively tilted than it truly is, and thus the institutions and media of culture will present themselves as more conversative than necessary.   In addition, its programming will consist of content designed to appeal to a public far more prudish than the actual audience consuming it.  -174

Public discourse is the path to being less dumb.  The only way out of the loop is to speak up, ask questions, and get a conversation going about what people truly think.   -175    [Awareness campaigns to change attitudes are less effective than getting people to share.]


Norms spontaneously generated.  For instance, when one boy hurt his foot but didn't tell anyone until bedtime, it became expected among the group that Rattlers didn't complain.  From then on, members waited until the day's work was finished to reveal injuries.  When a boy cried, the others ignored him until he got over it.  Regulations and rituals sprouted just as quickly.   188-189

The idea is this: You put on a mask and a uniform before leaving for work.  You put on another set for school.  You have a costume for friends of different persuasions and one just for family.  Who you are alone is not who you are with a lover or a friend.   -192h

The idea is old enough that the word person derives from persona, a Latin word for the mask a Greek actor sometimes wore so people in the back rows of a performance could see who he was onstage.   -192

Political parties establish platforms, companies give employee handbooks, countries write out constitutions, tree houses post club rules-- every human gathering and institution, from a fashion show to the NRA, works to remain connected by developing a set of norms and values that signals when they are dealing with members of the in-group and identifies others as part of the out-group.   -194

...the motivation to create and wear clothing rests somewhere in that 4 percent difference between your DNA and a chimpanzee's.  -202


The research suggests simply working to better explain your own opinion saps your fervor.  -200

In studies in which people unscramble sentences about rudeness, those people will later be much more likely to interrupt experimenters after being placed in frustrating situations.   People primed by solving puzzles that include words associated with the elderly will temporarily walk more slowly after the task.  In one study, subjects asked to imagine how cool it would be to become college professors outperformed others who were not primed in that way in a game of Trivial Pursuit.  Priming is one of the fundamental drivers of your behavior, and it isn't limited to simple symbols and images.  Studies in which people are asked to hold eitehr a cold or a warm beverage show that those same people will react differently to strangers.  Subjects in that same study who held a warm coffee said the people they met seemed sociable and outgoing.   Everything else was made identical to both groups, including the strangers.  The only difference was the temperature of the cup the subjects were asked to hold.  -206


Chap16
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 that task to wane because you attribute your motivation as coming from the reward, not your internal feeling.   -235