David McRaney Quotes

When you need something to be true, you will look for patterns; you connect the dots like the stars of a constellation. Your brain abhors disorder. You see faces in clouds and demons in bonfires. Those who claim the powers of divination hijack these natural human tendencies. They know they can depend on you to use subjective validation in the moment and confirmation bias afterward.

It isn't you don't want to help; you just don't want to help a cheater or do more than a slacker - even if your not helping leads to ruining the game for you and everyone else

THE MISCONCEPTION: You calculate what is risky or rewarding and always choose to maximize gains while minimizing losses. THE TRUTH: You depend on emotions to tell you if something is good or bad, greatly overestimate rewards, and tend to stick to your first impressions.

THE MISCONCEPTION: You know when you are lying to yourself. THE TRUTH: You are often ignorant of your motivations and create fictional narratives to explain your decisions, emotions, and history without realizing it.

Don't put people, or anything else, on pedestals, not even your children. Avoid global labels such as genius or weirdo. Realize those closest get the benefit of the doubt and so do the most beautiful and radiant among us. Know the halo effect causes you to see a nice person as temporarily angry and an angry person as temporarily nice. Know that one good quality, or a memory of several, can keep in your life people who may be doing you more harm than good. Pay attention to the fact that when someone seems nice and upbeat, the words coming out of his or her mouth will change in meaning, and if that same person were depressive, arrogant, or foul in some other way, your perceptions of those same exact words would change along with the person's other features.

THE MISCONCEPTION: You choose to accept or refuse an offer based on logic. THE TRUTH: When it comes to making a deal, you base your decision on your status.

If your group includes a person who can hire or fire, groupthink comes into play.

Research shows people believe others see their contributions to conversation as being memorable, but they aren't. You think everyone noticed when you stumbled in your speech, but they didn't. Well, unless you drew attention to it by over-apologizing.

In 1965, a psychologist named Martin Seligman started shocking dogs.
He was trying to expand on the research of Pavlov--the guy who could make dogs salivate when they heard a bell ring. Seligman wanted to head in the other direction, and when he rang his bell, instead of providing food, he zapped the dogs with electricity. To keep them still, he restrained them in a harness during the experiment. After they were conditioned, he put these dogs in a big box with a little fence dividing it into two halves. He figured if the dog rang the bell, it would hop over the fence to escape, but it didn't. It just sat there and braced itself. They decided to try shocking the dog after the bell. The dog still just sat there and took it. When they put a dog in the box that had never been shocked before or had previously been allowed to escape and tried to zap it--it jumped the fence.
You are just like these dogs.
If, over the course of your life, you have experienced crushing defeat or pummeling abuse or loss of control, you convince yourself over time that there is no escape, and if escape is offered, you will not act--you become a nihilist who trusts futility above optimism.
Studies of the clinically depressed show that they often give in to defeat and stop trying. . .
Any extended period of negative emotions can lead to you giving in to despair and accepting your fate. If you remain alone for a long time, you will decide loneliness is a fact of life and pass up op

It turns out, for any plan to work, every team needs at least one asshole who doesn't give a shit if he or she gets fired or exiled or excommunicated.

The more info you get about a statement, the more likely you are to believe that statement.

If you see lots of shark attacks in the news, you think, 'Gosh, sharks are out of control.' What you should think is 'Gosh, the news loves to cover shark attacks.

The tendency to believe vague statements designed to appeal to just about anyone is called the Forer effect, and psychologists point to this phenomenon to explain why people fall for pseudoscience like biorhythms, iridology, and phrenology, or mysticism like astrology, numerology, and tarot cards.

THE MISCONCEPTION: Memories are played back like recordings. THE TRUTH: Memories are constructed anew each time from whatever information is currently available, which makes them highly permeable to influences from the present.

Expensive wine is like anything else that is expensive: The expectation it will taste better actually makes it taste better.

If you neglect your personal space and allow chaos and clutter to creep in, it will affect you, and perhaps encourage further neglect. Positive feedback loops should improve your life, not detract from it. You can't prime yourself directly, but you can create environments conducive to the mental states you wish to achieve.

When you are making plans, your better angels point to the nourishing choices, but in the moment you go for what tastes good.

When the third person effect leads you to condone censorship, take a step back and imagine the sort of messages people on the other side might think are brainwashing you, and then ask yourself if those messages should be censored too.

THE MISCONCEPTION: We could create a system with no regulations where everyone would contribute to the good of society, everyone would benefit, and everyone would be happy. THE TRUTH: Without some form of regulation, slackers and cheaters will crash economic systems because people don't want to feel like suckers.

Just spending time together is not enough, he said. The sorts of activities you engage in are vital. Graham concluded you are driven to grow, to expand, to add to your abilities and knowledge. When you satisfy this motivation for self-expansion by incorporating aspects of your romantic partner or friend into your own skills, philosophies and self, it does more to strengthen your bond than any other act of love. This opens the door to one of the best things about misattribution of emotion. If, like those in the study, you persevere through a challenge - be it remodeling a kitchen yourself or learning how to dance the Dougie - that glowing feeling of becoming wiser, that buoyant sense of self-expansion, will be partially misattributed to the presence of the other person.

You are aware only of a small amount of the total information your eyes take in, and even less is processed by your conscious mind and remembered.

You, too, are unaware of how unaware you are

You are a story you tell yourself.

The idea that people would be happier if they maintained a constant state of realism is a beautiful sentiment, but Taylor and Brown found just the opposite. They presented a new theory that suggested that well-being came from unrealistic views of reality. They said you reduce the stress of terminal illness or a high-pressure job or unexpected tragedy by resorting to optimism and delusion. Your wildly inaccurate self-evaluations get you through rough times and help motivate you when times are good. Indeed, later research backed up their claims, showing that people who are brutally honest with themselves are not as happy day to day as people with unrealistic assumptions about their abilities. People who take credit for the times when things go their way but who put the blame on others when they stumble or fall are generally happier people.

THE MISCONCEPTION: You rationally analyze all factors before making a choice or determining value. THE TRUTH: Your first perception lingers in your mind, affecting later perceptions and decisions.

THE MISCONCEPTION: In all you do, you strive for success. THE TRUTH: You often create conditions for failure ahead of time to protect your ego.

How do you separate fantasy from reality? How can you be sure the story of your life both from long ago and minute to minute is true? There is a pleasant vindication to be found when you accept that you can't. No one can, yet we persist and thrive. Who you think you are is sort of like a movie based on true events, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The details may be embellished, but the big picture, the general idea, is probably a good story worth hearing about.

Hundreds of experiments into the misinformation effect have been conducted, and people have been convinced of all sorts of things. Screwdrivers become wrenches, white men become black men, and experiences involving other people get traded back and forth. In one study, [Elizabeth] Loftus convinced people they were once lost in a shopping mall as a child. She had subjects read four essays provided by family members, but the one about getting lost as a kid was fake. A quarter of the subjects incorporated the fake story into their memory and even provided details about the fictional event that were not included in the narrative. Loftus even convinced people they shook hands with Bugs Bunny, who isn't a Disney character, when they visited Disney World as a kid, just by showing them a fake advertisement where a child was doing the same. She altered the food preferences of subjects in one experiment where she lied to people, telling them they had reported becoming sick from eating certain things as a child. A few weeks later, when offered those same foods, those people avoided them. In other experiments, she implanted memories of surviving drowning and fending off animal attacks - none of them real, all of them accepted into the autobiography of the subjects without resistance.

Failing often is the only way to ever get the things you want out of life.

Having a dissenting opinion on movies, music, or clothes, or owning clever or obscure possessions, is the way middle-class people fight one another for status ... Hipsters, then, are the direct result of this cycle of indie, authentic, obscure, ironic, clever consummerism ... It is ironic in the sense the very act of trying to run counter to the culture is what creates the next wave of culture people will in turn attempt to counter.

We reach for the same brand not because we trust its quality but because we want to reassure ourselves that we made a smart choice the last time we bought it.

You are as deluded as the rest of us, but that's OK, it keeps you sane.

You make plans and decisions assuming randomness and chaos are for chumps. The illusion of control is a peculiar thing because it often leads to high self-esteem and a belief your destiny is yours for the making more than it really is. This over-optimistic view can translate into actual action, rolling with the punches and moving ahead no matter what. Often, this attitude helps lead to success. Eventually, though, most people get punched in the stomach by life. Sometimes, the gut-punch doesn't come until after a long chain of wins, until you've accumulated enough power to do some serious damage. This is when wars go awry, stock markets crash, and political scandals spill out into the media. Power breeds certainty, and certainty has no clout against the unpredictable, whether you are playing poker or running a country. Psychologists point out these findings do not suggest you should throw up your hands and give up. Those who are not grounded in reality, oddly enough, often achieve a lot in life simply because they believe they can and try harder than others. If you focus too long on your lack of power, you can slip into a state of learned helplessness that will whirl you into a negative feedback loop of depression. Some control is necessary or else you give up altogether. Langer proved this when studying nursing homes where some patients were allowed to arrange their furniture and water plants - they lived longer than those who had had those tasks performed by others. Knowing

Priming works best when you are on autopilot, when you aren't trying to consciously introspect before choosing how to behave. When you are unsure how best to proceed, suggestions bubble up from the deep that are highly tainted by subconscious primes. In addition, your brain hates ambiguity and is willing to take shortcuts to remove it from any situation. If there is nothing else to go on, you will use what is available. When pattern recognition fails, you create patterns of your own. In the aforementioned experiments, there was nothing else for the brain to base its unconscious attitudes on, so it focused on the business items or the clean smells and ran with the ideas. The only problem was the conscious minds of the subjects didn't notice.

Wiseman speculated that what we call luck is actually a pattern of behaviors that coincide with a style of understanding and interacting with the events and people you encounter throughout life. Unlucky people are narrowly focused, he observed. They crave security and tend to be more anxious, and instead of wading into the sea of random chance open to what may come, they remain fixated on controlling the situation, on seeking a specific goal. As a result, they miss out on the thousands of opportunities that may float by. Lucky people tend to constantly change routines and seek out new experiences. Wiseman saw that the people who considered themselves lucky, and who then did actually demonstrate luck was on their side over the course of a decade, tended to place themselves into situations where anything could happen more often and thus exposed themselves to more random chance than did unlucky people. The lucky try more things, and fail more often, but when they fail they shrug it off and try something else. Occasionally, things work out.

If someone you know gets sick from taking a flu shot, you will be less likely to get one even if it is statistically safe. In fact, if you see a story on the news about someone dying from the flu shot, that one isolated case could me enough to keep you away from the vaccine forever. On the other hand, if you hear a news story about how eating sausage leads to anal cancer, you will be skeptical, because it has never happened to anyone you know, and sausage, after all, is delicious. The tendency to react more rapidly and to a greater degree when considering information you are familiar with is called the availability heuristic.

J. E. Littlewood, a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote about the law of truly large numbers in his 1986 book, "Littlewood's Miscellany." He said the average person is alert for about eight hours every day, and something happens to the average person about once a second. At this rate, you will experience 1 million events every thirty-five days. This means when you say the chances of something happening are one in a million, it also means about once a month. The monthly miracle is called Littlewood's Law.

THE MISCONCEPTION: You are more concerned with the validity of information than the person delivering it. THE TRUTH: The status and credentials of an individual greatly influence your perception of that individual's message.

Where people see themselves in a harsh yellow light of obectivity....about 20 percent of all people live in that spot and psychologists call the state of mind generated by those people depressive realism. ...you are cursed to see the world as a place worthy neither of great dread nor of bounding delight, but just a place.

If three men couldn't see eye to eye on who among them was and was not the real Jesus, your chances of swaying someone on the Internet to trade in his belief system concerning religion, art, wedge issues, politics, or literally anything else at all are pretty grim. Personal narratives and private mythologies don't flip in an instant; they don't trade places in a single argument. If minds change at all, they change slowly.

As psychologist Bruce Hood writes in his book The Self Illusion, you have an origin story and a sense that you've traveled from youth to now along a linear path, with ups and downs that ultimately made you who you are today. Babies don't have that. That sense is built around events that you can recall and place in time. Babies and small children have what Hood calls "unconscious knowledge," which is to say they simply recognize patterns and make associations with stimuli. Without episodic memories, there is no narrative; and without any narrative, there is no self. Somewhere between ages two and three, according to Hood, that sense of self begins to come online, and that awakening corresponds with the ability to tell a story about yourself based on memories. He points to a study by Alison Gopnik and Janet Astington in 1988 in which researchers presented to three-year-olds a box of candy, but the children were then surprised to find pencils inside instead of sweets. When they asked each child what the next kid would think was in the box when he or she went through the same experiment, the answer was usually pencils. The children didn't yet know that other people have minds, so they assumed everyone knew what they knew. Once you gain the ability to assume others have their own thoughts, the concept of other minds is so powerful that you project it into everything: plants, glitchy computers, boats with names, anything that makes more sense to you when you can assume, even joking

To be less dumb, remember your propensity for post hoc postulation and the power positive permutations of the placebo effect have to pollute your perspicacity.

THE MISCONCEPTION: Both consumerism and capitalism are sustained by corporations and advertising. THE TRUTH: Both consumerism and capitalism are driven by competition among consumers for status.

THE MISCONCEPTION: You believe your opinions and decisions are based on experience and facts, while those who disagree with you are falling for the lies and propaganda of sources you don't trust. THE TRUTH: Everyone believes the people they disagree with are gullible, and everyone thinks they are far less susceptible to persuasion than they truly are.

The more pessimistic your explanatory style, the easier it is to slip into learned helplessness.

Wait long enough, and what was once mainstream will fall into obscurity. When that happens, it will become valuable again to those looking for authenticity or irony or cleverness. The value, then, is not intrinsic. The thing itself doesn't have as much value as the perception of how it was obtained or why it is possessed. Once enough people join in, like with oversized glasses frames or slap bracelets, the status gained from owning the item or being a fan of the band is lost, and the search begins again.
You would compete like this no matter how society was constructed. Competition for status is built into the human experience at the biological level. Poor people compete with resources. The middle class competes with selection. The wealthy compete with possessions.
You sold out long ago in one way or another. The specifics of who you sell to and how much you make - those are only details.

In experiments at Baylor University where people were given Coke and Pepsi in unmarked cups and then hooked up to a brain scanner, the device clearly showed a certain number of them preferred Pepsi while tasting it. When those people were told they were drinking Pepsi, a fraction of them, the ones who had enjoyed Coke all their lives, did something unexpected. The scanner showed their brains scrambling the pleasure signals, dampening them. They then told the experimenter afterward they had preferred Coke in the taste tests.

In the end, Alter and Forgas concluded the happier you are, the more likely you will be to seek out ways to delude yourself into maintaining your rosy outlook on life and your own abilities. Sad people, it seems, are more honest with themselves.

You can see the proof in an MRI scan of someone presented with political opinions that conflict with her own. The brain scans of a person shown statements that oppose her political stance show that the highest areas of the cortex, the portions responsible for providing rational thought, get less blood until another statement is presented that confirms her beliefs. Your brain literally begins to shut down when you feel your ideology is threatened. Try it yourself. Watch a pundit you hate for fifteen minutes. Resist the urge to change the channel. Don't complain to the person next to you. Don't get online and rant. Try to let it go. You will find this is excruciatingly difficult.

A lot of what you presume to be evidence of your intelligence is just part of a vast cultural inheritance.

The future is the result of actions, and actions are the result of behavior, and behavior is the result of prediction.

The research shows that groups of friends who allow members to disagree and still be friends are more likely to come to better decisions. So the next time you are in a group of people trying to reach consensus, be the asshole. Every group needs one, and it might as well be you.

There is a growing body of work coming out of psychology and cognitive science that says you have no clue why you act the way you do, choose the things you choose, or think the thoughts you think. Instead, you create narratives, little stories to explain away why you gave up on that diet, why you prefer Apple over Microsoft, why you clearly remember it was Beth who told you the story about the clown with the peg leg made of soup cans when it was really Adam, and it wasn't a clown.

If you are thinking about buying a particular make of new car, you suddenly see people driving that car all over the roads. If you just ended a longtime relationship, every song you hear seems to be written about love. If you are having a baby, you start to see babies everywhere. Confirmation bias is seeing the world through a filter.

People who use the number of friends they have on Facebook as a metric of their social standing are fooling themselves. You can share videos of fainting goats with hundreds of acquaintances and thousands of followers, but you can trust a secret only with a handful of true friends.

THE MISCONCEPTION: Your opinions are the result of years of rational, objective analysis. THE TRUTH: Your opinions are the result of years of paying attention to information that confirmed what you believed, while ignoring information that challenged your preconceived notions.

You can't rage against the machine through rebllious consumption.

Power breeds certainty, and certainty has no clout against the unpredictable, whether you are playing poker or running a country.

THE MISCONCEPTION: You know why you like the things you like and feel the way you feel. THE TRUTH: The origin of certain emotional states is unavailable to you, and when pressed to explain them, you will just make something up.

THE MISCONCEPTION: When you can't explain something, you focus on what you can prove. THE TRUTH: When you are unsure of something, you are more likely to accept strange explanations.

Modern society is large and complex, with institutions wielding great power over the lives of many. This is why Johnson and Fowler added a dire parting shot in their predictions. Since you are programmed to become increasingly overconfident the less you understand about any given scenario, you can expect to find the most destructive overconfidence in places that are exceedingly complicated and unpredictable.

THE MISCONCEPTION: After you learn something new, you remember how you were once ignorant or wrong. THE TRUTH: You often look back on the things you've just learned and assume you knew them or believed them all along.

Thanks to a plethora of cognitive biases, faulty heuristics, and common fallacies of thought, you are probably deluding yourself minute by minute just to cope with reality.

To escape consumerism and conformity, you must turn your back and ignore the mainstream culture. The shackles when then fall away, the machines will grind to a halt, the filters will dissolve, and you will see the world for what it really is. The illusory nature of existence will end and we will all, finally, be real.

Education is as much about learning what you don't know as it is about adding to what you do.

In the background, while you crochet and golf and browse cat videos, science is fighting against your stupidity. No other human enterprise is fighting as hard, or at least not fighting and winning.

Take out a piece of paper and get ready to write. Really do it; it will be fun.

OK.

Now, read the following list of words out loud one time, and then try to write as many of them as you can remember on the paper without looking back. When you think you have them all down on paper, come back to the book.

Go:

door, glass, pane, shade, ledge, sill, house, open, curtain, frame, view, breeze, sash, screen, shutter

Now, take a look at the list. How did you do? Did you write down all the words? Did you write the word "window" down? If this test is presented properly, 85 percent of people taking it will remember seeing "window" in the list, but it isn't there. If you did, you just gave yourself a false memory thanks to the misinformation effect.

Every day you feel like you can't control the forces affecting your fate-your job,the government,your addiction,your depression,your money. So you stage micro-revolts. You customise your ringtone,you paint your room,you collect stamps. You choose.
Choices,even small ones,can hold back the crushing weight of helplessness,but you can't stop there. You must fight back your behavoir and learn to fail with pride. Failing often is the only way to ever get the things you want out of life. Besides death your destiny is not inescapable.
You are not so smart,but you are smarter than dogs and rats.
Don't give in yet.

THE MISCONCEPTION: Men who have sex with RealDolls are insane, and women who marry eighty-year-old billionaires are gold diggers. THE TRUTH: The RealDoll and rich old sugar daddies are both supernormal releasers.

Women will buy products in an attempt to become the impossible goal. Men will buy products in an attempt to mate with the impossible goal.

THE MISCONCEPTION: Your fight-or-flight instincts kick in and you panic when disaster strikes. THE TRUTH: You often become abnormally calm and pretend everything is normal in a crisis.

Capable psychonauts who think about thinking, about states of mind, about set and setting, can get things done not because they have more willpower or drive, but because they know productivity is a game played against a childish primal human predilection for pleasure and novelty that can never be excised from the soul. Your effort is better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises through plugging dates into a calendar or setting deadlines for push-ups.

[ ... ] if you notice a rise in reports about shark attacks on the news, you start to believe sharks are out of control, when the only thing you know for sure is the news is delivering more stories about sharks than usual.

If you look to the downtrodden and wonder why they can't pull themselves out of poverty and get a nice job like you, you are committing the just-world fallacy. You are ignoring the unearned blessings of your station.

Visiting friends just to shoot the shit is the human equivalent of picking ticks off of one another's backs.

If you fail to believe you will procrastinate or become idealustic about how awesome you are at working hard and managing your time, you never develop a strategy for outmaneuvering your own weakness.

It is the result of thinking, not the process if thinking, that occurs spontaneously in consciousness.

THE MISCONCEPTION: You procrastinate because you are lazy and can't manage your time well. THE TRUTH: Procrastination is fueled by weakness in the face of impulse and a failure to think about thinking.

Behaviors create attitudes.

THE MISCONCEPTION: If you can't trust someone, you should ignore that person's claims. THE TRUTH: What someone says and why they say it should be judged separately.

The more difficult it becomes to process a series of statements, the less credit you give them overall. During metacognition, the process of thinking about your own thinking, if you take a step back and notice that one way of looking at an argument is much easier than another, you will tend to prefer the easier way to process information and then leap to the conclusion that it is also more likely to be correct. In experiments where two facts were placed side by side, subjects tended to rate statements as more likely to be true when those statements were presented in simple, legible type than when printed in a weird font with a difficult-to-read color pattern. Similarly, a barrage of counterarguments taking up a full page seems to be less persuasive to a naysayer than a single, simple, powerful statement.

This sense of alarm about the impact of speech not on yourself but on others is called the third person effect.

You are a confabulatory creature by nature. You are always explaining to yourself the motivations for your actions and the causes to the effects in your life, and you make them up without realizing it when you don't know the answers. Over time, these explanations become your idea of who you are and your place in the world. They are your self ... You are a story you tell yourself.

What you see, recall, and feel emotionally is 100 percent created by chemical reactions in your braincase, and that means those things are susceptible to influence, editing, redacting, and all sorts of other ingredients that get added to consciousness when you construct reality out of inputs both external and internal.

You want to believe that those who work hard and sacrifice get ahead and those who are lazy and cheat do not. This, of course, is not always true. Success is often greatly influenced by when you were born, where you grew up, the socioeconomic status of your family, and random chance

[If you hear a] story about how eating sausage leads to anal cancer, you will be skeptical, because it has never happened to anyone you know, and sausage, after all, is delicious.

You are a liar by default, and you lie most to yourself. If you fail, you forget it. If you win, you tell everyone.

To match the complexity of your conscious experience and your unconscious processing, to deal with the constant confusion bombarding your senses and the noisy chatter of the agencies within your mind, you've developed the ability to knit everything together into something simpler and less accurate, something less informative but more entertaining, and most times more useful.