You are Not So Smart
Why Your Memory is Mostly Fiction, Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself
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- 9,49 €
Descrizione dell’editore
Think you’re rational? Think again...
‘Want to get smarter quickly? Read this book.’ David Eagleman, author of The Brain: The Story of You
How many of your Facebook friends do you think you know? Would you help a stranger in need? Do you know why you’re so in love with your new smartphone? The truth is: you’re probably wrong. You are not so smart.
In this international bestseller, award-winning journalist David McRaney examines the assorted ways we mislead ourselves every single day. A psychology course with all the boring bits taken out, prepare for a whirlwind tour of the latest research in the subject, fused with a healthy dose of humour and wit. You’ll discover just how irrational you really are, which delusions keep you sane, how to boost your productivity, and why you’ve never kept a New Year’s resolution.
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‘A much-needed field guide to the limits of our so-called consciousness. McRaney presents a witty case for just how witless we all are.’ William Poundstone, author of How to Predict the Unpredictable
‘Simply wonderful. An engaging and useful guide to how our brilliant brains can go badly wrong.' Richard Wiseman, author of 59 Seconds
‘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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McRaney, a Hattiesburg, Miss., resident and two-time winner of the William Randolph Hearst Award, writes simplified descriptions of psychology experiments on his blog youarenotsosmart.com. He soon found success, receiving between 17,000 to 25,000 hits a day with 6,000 subscribers to the site's RSS feed. Now McRaney's past blog posts resurface in this collection, which he describes as "a compendium of information about self-delusion and the wonderful ways we succumb to it." The format first presents "The Misconception" ("You are a strong individual who doesn't conform unless forced to") and "The Truth" ("It takes little more than an authority figure or social pressure to get you to obey, because conformity is a survival instinct"). The "Conformity" chapter describes how hoax phone calls convinced fast-food managers to strip-search employees, followed by the famous Stanley Milgram obedience experiment in which unsuspecting subjects delivered electric shocks to a screaming actor. Other brief essays cover quitting an addiction cold turkey, first impressions, behavior as a reflection of personality, blind taste tests, and self-fulfilling prophecies. In popularizing these experiments, extracted from psychology books and journals, McRaney is poised to follow in the footsteps of folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand, who also mined academic publications when he popularized urban legends in a series of books.
