You Are Not So Smart summary

Do you have a favorite song or movie? Think about it for a moment and try to explain why you like it so much.

Even though it’s difficult to do, odds are you still came up with some kind of explanation.

There’s a good chance that most of us think our opinions have developed over years of rational analysis.

But, in fact, our opinions are not objective or rational at all, because we only pay attention to information that confirms what we already believe. In short, we’re confirmation biased.

Without our self-esteem, having confidence in ourselves and getting through the day would be extremely difficult. For that reason, we tend to nurture it every chance we get.

One strategy we employ to maintain the resilience of our self-esteem is to accept sole credit for our successes and blame external factors for our failures. Research has shown that this is the case in a variety of situations, ranging from board games to final exams.

For most of us, the unconscious mind is a strange and primal aspect of the human experience, essential to things like breathing, swallowing and blinking. But there’s actually a lot more to it.

Indeed, our unconscious mind affects us constantly: it receives input from our surroundings all the time and causes us to think and behave in certain ways.

At some point, most of us have thought of ourselves as especially skilled at something, or as particularly special people. In fact, we tend to see ourselves as more special and more skilled than we actually are.

As research has repeatedly shown, if we succeed in achieving something, we’ll tell everyone, but if we fail, we do our best to forget it. And when we compare our accomplishments and skills with those of others, we have a tendency to highlight the positive and downplay the negative.

Imagine you see a car broken down at the side of the road. Would you pull over and lend a hand or keep on driving, telling yourself that someone else will be along soon enough?

If you’re like everyone else, the more cars or people passing by, the less likely you’ll be to stop and help out. This is called the bystander effect, and it refers to the fact that our inclination to help others diminishes if there are witnesses around.

Most of us like to believe that we’re strong, independent individuals who don’t bow down to authority or cave in to social pressure.

But our desire to conform is actually very strong, particularly in those cases where we act on the orders of an established authority figure.