You Are Not Who You Think You Are

November 8, 2011

Interview with David McRaney, author of the book You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself

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Mike Carruthers:
Your life story is not what you think it is.

David McRaney:
We are unaware of how unaware we are. You’re the unreliable narrator in the story of your life.
 

David McRaney, author of the book You Are Not So Smart...

Part of that self-delusion is when you explain your own faults, emotions and actions you tend to explain them as if you were an outside observer and not just an outside observer but a really big fan of you. And that makes us create these stories, these narratives that build up over time they become the story of who we are. It’s how we explain ourselves to ourselves and other people and it’s not exactly a true story, it’s more like based on a true story.

How we think moment to moment is based on things like a spotlight effect.

The spotlight effect is we tend to believe that we’re on everyone’s mind as much as we’re on our own mind –which is not true. And we engage in something called self-serving bias and that’s where we attribute our successes to ourselves but we attribute out failures to either other people or forces beyond our control. The point is that self-delusion helps get us out of bed in the morning; you have to be a little bit deluded otherwise you won’t feel the effectiveness that you need to have to move forward.

We all like to think that we are right and that is confirmation bias at work.

Confirmation bias is we tend to pay attention to information that confirms our beliefs, but we tend to ignore information that challenges our beliefs. And that changes the kind of books we buy that changes the kind of magazines we subscribe to, it changes the news channel that we decide are the ones that delivers the news that we want to listen to.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here