You Are Not So Smart

You believe you chose that phone after cool, rational comparison, but your brain had already been nudged by ads, smells and stray words you never noticed. Journalist David McRaney asks why rational people keep fooling themselves, and answers with short tours through more than forty quirks of mind. He shows how confirmation bias filters the news until buying a car makes that model appear on every street, how memory quietly rewrites itself so the past feels like fiction, and how evolution capped real friendship at about 150 people no matter how large a Facebook list grows. Once you spot these stories, you start catching your own mind retelling them.