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You are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself Paperback – August 5, 2014
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A mix of popular psychology and trivia, You Are Now Less Dumb is grounded in the idea that we all believe ourselves to be objective observers of reality--except we’re not. But that’s okay, because our delusions keep us sane.
Expanding on this premise, McRaney provides eye-opening analyses of seventeen ways we fool ourselves every day, including:
- Enclothed Cognition (the clothes you wear change your behavior and influence your mental abilities)
- The Benjamin Franklin Effect (how you grow to like people for whom you do nice things and hate the people you harm).
- Deindividuation (Despite our best intentions, we practically disappear when subsumed by a mob mentality)
- The Misattribution of Arousal (Environmental factors have a greater effect on our emotional arousal than the person right in front of us)
- Sunk Cost Fallacy (We will engage in something we don’t enjoy just to make the time or money already invested “worth it”)
- Print length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAvery
- Publication dateAugust 5, 2014
- Dimensions5.01 x 0.74 x 7.43 inches
- ISBN-109781592408795
- ISBN-13978-1592408795
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Every chapter is a welcome reminder that you are not so smart — yet you’re never made to feel dumb. 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. You’ll find new perspectives on your relationships with people you know, people you don’t, and even brands. 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.com
“You Are Not So Smart is positively one of the smartest books to come by this year — no illusion there.”
— Maria Popova of Brain Pickings
“Simply wonderful. An engaging and useful guide to how our brilliant brains can go badly wrong.”
— Richard Wiseman, bestselling author of 59 Seconds and Quirkology
“McRaney’s sweeping overview is like taking a Psych 101 class with a witty professor and zero homework.”
— Psychology Today
“You Are Not So Smart [is] the go-to blog for understanding why we all do silly things.”
— Lifehacker.com
“You’d think from the title that it might be curmudgeonly; in fact, You Are Not So Smart is quite big-hearted.”
— Jason Kottke, Kottke.org
“Want to get smarter quickly? Read this book”
— David Eagleman — neuroscientist and author of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the
“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 — bestselling author of Are you Smart Enough to Work at Googl
“Fascinating… After reading this book, you’ll never trust your brain again.”
— Alex Boese — bestselling author of Elephants on Acid and Electric Sheep
“Deflating to a certain audience that wants to believe in exceptions, You Are Not So Smart is a tonic to the noxious sweetness of overachievement, an acknowledgment of ordinariness that glories in the quirks of being human without forcing them into a triumphant pyramid. That which cannot be overcome is a part as vital to the human experience as that impulse to try even harder to overcome nature. And if that fails, the flip side to a population crediting itself with falsely inflated powers of observation is that no one might notice if you, too, are not so smart.”
— The Onion A.V. Club
“In an Idiocracy dominated by cable TV bobbleheads, government propagandists, and corporate spinmeisters, many of us know that mass ignorance is a huge problem. Now, thanks to David McRaney’s mind-blowing book, we can finally see the scientific roots of that problem. Anybody still self-aware enough to wonder why society now worships willful stupidity should read this book.”
— David Sirota, syndicated columnist, radio host and author of “Back to Our Future
“[The] fusion of wry prose and enlightening minilessons is what makes this book so special- page after page, readers will be laughing, learning, and looking at themselves in new ways. McRaney is a fine stylist, easily balancing anecdote, analysis, and witty asides… this book is seriously informative.”
—Publisher’s Weekly, Starred Review
“A lively look at our myriad self-delusions and how we can beat or exploit them.”
—Parade — Praise for You are Now Less Dumb
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : 1592408796
- Publisher : Avery; Reprint edition (August 5, 2014)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9781592408795
- ISBN-13 : 978-1592408795
- Item Weight : 7.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.01 x 0.74 x 7.43 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #124,068 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #181 in Self-Help & Psychology Humor
- #349 in Humor Essays (Books)
- #416 in Cognitive Psychology (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

David McRaney is a science journalist fascinated with brains, minds, and culture.
He created the podcast You Are Not So Smart based on his 2009 internationally bestselling book of the same name and its followup, You Are Now Less Dumb.
Before that, he cut his teeth as a newspaper reporter covering Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast and in the Pine Belt region of the Deep South. Later, he covered things like who tests rockets for NASA, what it is like to run a halfway home for homeless people who are HIV-positive, and how a family sent their kids to college by making and selling knives.
Since then, he has been an editor, photographer, voiceover artist, television host, journalism teacher, lecturer, and tornado survivor.
Most recently, after finishing his latest book, How Minds Change, he wrote, produced, and recorded a six-hour audio documentary exploring the history of the idea and the word: genius.
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Just like his first book, David explains how we trick ourselves into thinking we are smarter than we are, in control, rational and reasonable. Of course, the twist with this book is he lets us in on how to overcome our human frailty by using our self-delusions to improve ourselves.
I really love the way the book is laid out with the Misconception and then The Truth -- just like the first one. The book is well research (but not too stuffy or heady) with great stories, trivia and some pop culture thrown in to make it relatable and a joy to read.
The examples and studies are what really drive home the points in the book. My favorite is The Post Hoc Fallacy, which deals with why we find it so difficult to believe that a sequence of events means nothing. This is the behavior behind lucky shirts, favorite meals, rituals and Power Balance bracelets. This section really illustrates the tendency of our minds to find patterns where none exist. That insight along is worth its weight in gold.
You don't need to read his first book, You Are Not So Smart, to enjoy this book. Both books do stand-a-lone but are good complements to each other.
Lets hope all of us become less dump so we can get on with living instead of worrying about how many acres we need to plant and tend to in FarmVille.
Actually some of the more negative ratings on Amazon before I read the book actually helped me a lot reading in this book, as with any field the jargon can make word meanings be a little different, and the claim that the book is poorly edited made me look up a few words when I ran across them. On that comes to mind was affective/effective. Looking it up, the editing happens to be correct, but I was have assumed it was an error had I not read that review. I might have learned more diving into that than the material itself in the book.
In general, if you're looking for a menu of topics to read up on over the internet (not something I recommend if say, you're training to be in this field, but for entertainment purposes only) this is actually a fantastic read. I'm looking forward to pulling the book out again to find a new topic that interests me and diving in.
David McRaney seems determined to continually validate the writing by referring to study after study with lots of author attribution and the like. That's probably how it should be if he were writing an academic paper. This book is ostensibly for a mass audience and the constant references to source material gets a tad tiresome. It may have made the book flow better if there were endnotes acknowledging the studies. Although the book might have been quite a bit shorter had he gone that route.
It's also a slower read than the first book. The author's occasional stab at humor and use of contemporary examples of each chapter's explanation of a cognitive bias are too far and few between.
It's a good book, though, especially if you like the exploration into why we do the things we do.
Otherwise, it's an awesome book. Quite revealing about us humans. The only suggestion I would give the author is this. Many of the conclusions of modern science and psychology coincide with those of brilliant philosophers of the past such as Arthur Schopenhauer. The idea that we are aware of our actions only "in the past" is one of Schopenhauer's ideas as well as many others in the book. So, I think some credit should be given to these great minds somewhere in the book. Maybe a quick primer on Kant, Schopenhauer, Hume somewhere in the introduction or epilogue?










