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
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Here’s a short little book, divided into 48 bite-sized chapters. Each chapter details a different heuristic, fallacy or effect we keep in our brains, in order to deal with a great big complicated chaotic indifferent world, filled with illogical creatures. Those illogical creatures are, of course, other human beings.
This is pop science at its best, given you tastes of intriguing ideas and understandings, with lots of examples and descriptions of experiments. If you want to read more, a healthy bibliography at the back will guide you to the quoted journals, studies, and books themselves.
The whole thing reads sort of like a collection of blog entries, which is not a complaint, It has the heft and pace of a bathroom book—something to a read a few chapters from a bit at a time. Some of the chapters overlap, and there are points where I wasn’t sure what the distinction between two similar aspects where—a heuristic was simply repackaged as an effect here and there. But hey, ya gotta fill pages. Reddit liked the book, and so did Lifehacker.
There’s website you can go to that has excerpts and podcasts linked to the book, and McRaney has a sequel out, called You Are Now Less Dumb. So if you liked The Culture of Fear by Barry Glassner, Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronso, or Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, or even the Freakonomics books, add You Are Not So Smart to your to-read list.