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 )