You are Not so Smart

The Comforting Lie at the Center of Your Mind

Here is the misconception you carry around all day: you are a rational, logical person who sees the world as it really is. You weigh evidence. You reach conclusions. You know why you do what you do.

Here is the truth David McRaney spends an entire book proving. You are about as deluded as everyone else, and the only good news is that the delusion is what keeps you sane.

That is the whole argument in two sentences, and McRaney repeats the shape of it forty-eight times, once for every bias, shortcut, and broken piece of reasoning he examines. Each chapter opens with a misconception, the flattering thing you believe about yourself, and then knocks it over with the truth, the unflattering thing the research keeps finding. The book grew out of a blog, and it reads like one in the best way: forty-eight short, sharp essays, each one a small mugging of your self-image.

Start with a card trick that isn't a trick. Psychologist Peter Wason laid out four cards. Each has a number on one face and a color on the other. You see a three, an eight, a red card, and a brown card. The rule to test is simple: if a card shows an even number, the opposite side must be red. Which cards do you have to flip? Most people say the eight, and maybe the red one. Fewer than one in ten get it right. You need to flip the eight and the brown card, because a brown card hiding an even number would break the rule, while the red card can't break anything no matter what it hides.

Now change the story without changing the logic. You're a bartender. The rule is that you have to be twenty-one to drink alcohol. Four customers: one is drinking beer, one is drinking Coke, one is twenty-three, one is seventeen. Who do you check? Instantly, effortlessly, you know: the beer drinker and the seventeen-year-old. Same puzzle. Same structure. But this version you solve without breaking a sweat.