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You Are Not So Smart
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You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney- 3 Stars
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Great review, Joi! :-)
I can understand why this was only a three star read for you, as most of the studies referenced (above) are usually part of an Intro to Psychology class. Sometimes authors fail to recognize that potential readers often have a fair amount of knowledge about the subject, especially for self-help/psychology types of books. Readers are looking for something new, not a repeat of what they learned in high school or college.
I can understand why this was only a three star read for you, as most of the studies referenced (above) are usually part of an Intro to Psychology class. Sometimes authors fail to recognize that potential readers often have a fair amount of knowledge about the subject, especially for self-help/psychology types of books. Readers are looking for something new, not a repeat of what they learned in high school or college.
I really wanted to like this book. Similar to Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, but studying psychology and thinking about how you think. This book basically told me my brain and memory is constantly making mistakes, why it does this, and how this can effect your thinking, perception, expectation, and memory. A fun pop psychology book for those who normally aren't super into psychology.
The book goes one by one, explaining different psychological adaptions your brain makes to trick you into different things. Confirmation bias (you ignore facts you don't think are true, and assume things that might be fake are true based on previous knowledge), deception your brain puts on you (remembering facts and things that didn't actually happen), expectation and brand loyalty (you'll think a more expensive wine is better based on the price). Very interesting concepts. The problem was most of their studies referenced were things I already knew about. (Stanford prison experiment, Kitty Gervaise, studies on confabulation and such). Maybe I had too much previous psychology knowledge, but I didn't find this book to have that much new information, and it wasn't very revelation-ary.
Albeit extremely interesting while reading, the overall concepts are strong, but there are SO MANY little heuristics and fallacies that they study that some of listings get lost and seem repetitive. Honestly, I know I won't remember a lot of what I read in this a month later- but at least I know why I won't remember it!