You Are Not So Smart

Julia Shaw's research demonstrates the fact that there is no reason to believe a memory is more accurate just because it is vivid or detailed. Actually, that’s a potentially dangerous belief. Shaw used techniques similar to police interrogations, and over the course of three conversations she and her team were able to convince a group of college students that those students had committed a felony crime. In this episode, you’ll hear her explain how easy it is to implant the kind of false memories that cause people just like you to believe they deserve to go to jail for crimes that never happened and what she suggests police departments should do to avoid such distortions of the truth.• Show Notes: http://youarenotsosmart.comSPONSORS• Stoicon '16 - http://howtobeastoic.org/stoicon • Blue Apron - http://blueapron.com/yanss• The Great Courses - http://TheGreatCoursesPlus.com/SMARTPatreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart

Why do people cheat? Why are our online worlds often so toxic? What motivates us to "catch 'em all" in Pokemon, grinding away for hours to hatch eggs?In this episode, psychologist Jamie Madigan, author of Getting Gamers, explains how by exploring the way people interact with video games we can better understand how brains interact with everything else.SPONSORS:• The Great Courses Plus: www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/smart• Squarespace: www.squarespace.com - offer code: SOSMARTShow notes at: www.youarenotsosmart.comPatreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart

In this episode we interview Dean Burnett, author of "Idiot Brain: What Your Brain is Really Up To." Burnett's book is a guide to the neuroscience behind the things that our amazing brains do poorly.In the interview we discuss motion sickness, the pain of breakups, why criticisms are more powerful than compliments, the imposter syndrome, anti-intellectualism, irrational fears, and more. Burnett also explains how the brain is kinda sorta like a computer, but a really bad one that messes with your files, rewrites your documents, and edits your photos when you aren't around.Dean Burnett is a neuroscientist who lectures at Cardiff University and writes about brain stuff over at his blog, Brain Flapping hosted by The Guardian.SPONSORS:• The Great Courses Plus: http://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/smart• Blue Apron: http://www.blueapron.com/yanssShow notes at: http://www.youarenotsosmart.comPatreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart

This episode’s guest, Michael Bond, is the author of The Power of Others, and reading his book I was surprised to learn that despite several decades of research into crowd psychology, the answers to most questions concerning crowds can still be traced back to a book printed in 1895.Gustave’s Le Bon’s book, “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind,” explains that humans in large groups are dangerous, that people spontaneously de-evolve into subhuman beasts who are easily swayed and prone to violence. That viewpoint has informed the policies and tactics of governments and police forces for more than a century, and like many prescientific musings, much of it is wrong.Listen in this episode as Bond explains that the more research the social sciences conduct, the less the idea of a mindless, animalistic mob seems to be true. He also explains what police forces and governments should be doing instead of launching tear gas canisters from behind riot shields which actually creates the situation they are trying to prev

In this episode, psychologist Per Espen Stoknes discusses his book: What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming.Stoknes has developed a strategy for science communicators who find themselves confronted with climate change deniers who aren't swayed by facts and charts. His book presents a series of psychology-based steps designed to painlessly change people’s minds and avoid the common mistakes scientists tend to make when explaining climate change to laypeople.Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart

Oddly enough, we don’t actually know very much about how to change people’s minds, not scientifically, that's why the work of the a group of LGBT activists in Los Angeles is offering something valuable to psychology and political science - uncharted scientific territory.The Leadership Lab has been developing a technique for the last eight years that can change a person’s mind about a contentious social issue after a 20-minute conversation.This episode is about that group's redemption after their reputation was threatened by a researcher who, in studying their persuasion technique, committed scientific fraud and forced the retraction of his paper. That research and the retraction got a lot of media attention in 2015, but the story didn't end there.In the show, you will meet the scientists who uncovered that researcher's fraud and then decided to go ahead and start over, do the research themselves, and see if the technique actually worked.Show notes at http://youarenotsosmart.comPatreon: http://patreon.com/youa

Common sense used to dictate that men and women should only come together for breakfast and dinner. According to Victorian historian Kaythrn Hughes, people in the early 19th Century thought the outside world was dangerous and unclean and morally dubious and thus no place for a virtuous, fragile woman. The home was a paradise, while men went out into the world and got their hands dirty. By the mid 1800s, women were leaving home to work in factories and much more, and if you believed in preserving the separate spheres, the concept that men and women should only cross paths at breakfast and dinner, then as we approached the 20th century, this created a lot of anxiety for you.In this episode of the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, we explore how the separate spheres ideology is still affecting us today, and how some people are using it to scare people into voting down anti-discrimination legislation.Show notes at: www.youarenotsosmart.com• Patreon: www.patreon.com/youarenotsosmart• Donate Directly through PayPal: ww

Hypothetical situations involving dragons, robots, spaceships, and vampires have all been used to prove and disprove arguments.Statements about things that do not exist can still be true, and can be useful thinking tools for exploring philosophical, logical, sociological, and scientific concepts. The problem is that sometimes those same arguments accidentally require those fictional concepts to be real in order to support their conclusions, and that’s when you commit the existential fallacy.In this episode we explore the most logical logical fallacy of them all, the existential fallacy. No need to get out your pens and paper, we will do that for you, as we make sense of one the most break-breaking thinking mistakes we’ve ever discovered.Show notes at: www.youarenotsosmart.com• Patreon: www.patreon.com/youarenotsosmart• Donate Directly through PayPal: www.paypal.me/DavidMcRaneySPONSORS• Bombas: www.Bombas.com/SOSMART• Casper: www.casper.com/sosmart • The Great Courses Plus: www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/smartPat

Here is a logic puzzle created by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.Linda is single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with the issue of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in demonstrations. Which of the following is more probable: Linda is a bank teller or Linda is a bank teller AND is active in the feminist movement?In studies, when asked this question, more than 80 percent of people chose number two. Most people said it was more probably that Linda is a bank teller AND active in the feminist movement, but that's wrong. Can you tell why?This thinking mistake is an example of the subject of this episode - the conjunction fallacy. Listen as three experts in logic and reasoning explain why people get this question wrong, why it is wrong, and how you can avoid committing the conjunction fallacy in other situations.Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart

We often overestimate and overstate just how much we can learn about a claim based on where that claim originated, and that's the crux of the genetic fallacy, according to the experts in this episode.The genetic fallacy appears when people trace things back to their sources, and if you traced back to their shared source the ad hominem attack (insulting the source instead of attacking its argument) and the argument from authority (praising the source instead of supporting its argument), you would find the genetic fallacy is the mother of both kinds of faulty reasoning.You might be in danger of serially committing the genetic fallacy if your first instinct is to ask where attitude-inconsistent comes from once you feel the twinge of fear that appears after a belief is threatened.In this episode, listen as three experts in logic and rationality when we should and when we should not take the source of a statement into account when deciding if something is true or false.• Show Notes: http://bit.ly/1XCvCdr• Patreon:

Sometimes you apply a double standard to the things you love, the things you believe, and the things crucial to your identity, and often you do so without realizing it. Special pleading is all about searching for exemptions and excuses for why a standard, or a rule, or a description, or a definition does not apply to something that you hold dear.It's also used to explain away how something extraordinary fails to stand up to scrutiny, or why there is a lack of evidence for a difficult-to-believe claim. In this episode, listen as three experts in logic and reasoning dive deep into the odd thinking behind the special pleading fallacy.• Show Notes: http://bit.ly/208Sv6V• Patreon: www.patreon.com/youarenotsosmart• Donate Directly through PayPal: www.paypal.me/DavidMcRaneySPONSORS• SquareSpace: www.squarespace.com - Offer Code SoSmart• The Great Courses Plus: www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/smart• MIT Press: mitpress.mit.edu/smartPatreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart

If you believe something is bad because it is...bad, or that something is good because, well, it's good, you probably wouldn't use that kind of reasoning in an argument, yet, sometimes, without realizing it, that's exactly what you do.In this episode three experts in logic and rationality explain how circular reasoning leads us to "beg the question" when producing arguments and defending our ideas, beliefs, and behaviors.• Show Notes: http://bit.ly/1MNKhQu• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/youarenotsosmart• Donate Directly through PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/DavidMcRaneySPONSORS• SquareSpace: http://www.squarespace.com - Offer Code SoSmart• The Great Courses Plus: https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/smart• MIT Press: https://mitpress.mit.edu/smartPatreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart

We don’t treat all of our beliefs equally.For some, we see them as either true or false, correct or incorrect. For others, we see them as probabilities, chances, odds. In one world, certainty, in the other, uncertainty.In this episode you will learn from two experts in reasoning how to apply a rule from the 1700s that makes it possible to see all of your beliefs as being in “grayscale,” as neither black nor white, neither 0 nor 100 percent, but always somewhere in between, as a shade of gray reflecting your confidence in just how wrong you might be...given the evidence at hand.• Show notes: http://bit.ly/1Nfby8T• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/youarenotsosmart• Donate Directly through PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/DavidMcRaneySPONSORS• MIT Press: https://mitpress.mit.edu/smart• Casper Mattresses: https://casper.com/sosmart• The Great Courses Plus: https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/smartPatreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart

In this episode, we explore why we are unaware that we lack the skill to tell how unskilled and unaware we are. The evidence gathered so far by psychologists and neuroscientists seems to suggest that each one of us has a relationship with our own ignorance, a dishonest, complicated relationship, and that dishonesty keeps us sane, happy, and willing to get out of bed in the morning. Part of that ignorance is a blind spot we each possess that obscures both our competence and incompetence called the Dunning-Kruger Effect. It's a psychological phenomenon that arises sometimes in your life because you are generally very bad at self-assessment. If you have ever been confronted with the fact that you were in over your head, or that you had no idea what you were doing, or that you thought you were more skilled at something than you actually were – then you may have experienced this effect. It is very easy to be both unskilled and unaware of it, and in this episode we explore why that is with professor David Dunning,

When you desire meaning, when you want things to line up, when looking for something specific, you tend to notice patterns everywhere, which leads you to ask the question, “What are the odds?” Usually, the odds are actually pretty good.For instance: Does the Bermuda Triangle seem quite as mysterious once you know that just about any triangle of that size drawn over the globe just about anywhere planes and ships frequently travel will contain as many, if not more, missing planes and ships?Drawing circles (or triangles) around the spots where randomness clusters together seemingly chance events is called The Texas Sharpshooter fallacy, and it is one of the easiest mistakes to make when trying to understand big, complex sets of data.Though some things in life seem too amazing to be coincidence, too odd to be random, too similar to be chance, given enough time (and enough events) randomness will begin to clump up in places. Since you are born looking for those spots where chance events have built up like sand int

When your identity becomes intertwined with your definitions, you can easily fall victim to something called The No true Scotsman Fallacy.It often appears during a dilemma: What do you do when a member of a group to which you belong acts in a way that you feel is in opposition to your values? Do you denounce the group, or do you redefine the boundaries of membership for everyone?In this episode, you will learn from three experts in logic and argumentation how to identify, defend against, and avoid deploying this strange thinking quirk that leads to schisms and stasis in groups both big and small.• Show Notes: http://bit.ly/1NokrTa• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/youarenotsosmart• Donate Directly through PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/DavidMcRaneySPONSORS• Trunk Club: http://bit.ly/1Sp2wZj• The Great Courses Plus: https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/smartPatreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart

Obviously, the world isn't black and white, so why do we try to drain it of color when backed into a rhetorical corner? Why do we have such a hard time realizing that we've suggested the world is devoid of nuance when we are in the heat of an argument?In this episode we explore the black and white fallacy and the false dichotomies it generates. You'll learn how to spot this fallacy, what to do when someone uses it against you, and how to avoid committing it yourself.• Show Notes: http://bit.ly/1XNlc8S• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/youarenotsosmart• Donate Directly through PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/DavidMcRaneySPONSORS• Trunk Club: http://bit.ly/1Sp2wZj• The Great Courses Plus: http://bit.ly/26kDXpU• SquareSpace: http://www.squarespace.com - Offer Code SoSmartPatreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart

When confronted with dogma-threatening, worldview-menacing ideas, your knee-jerk response is usually to lash out and try to bat them away, but thanks to a nearly unavoidable mistake in reasoning, you often end up doing battle with arguments of your own creation.Your lazy brain is always trying to make sense of the world on ever-simpler terms. Just as you wouldn’t use a topographical map to navigate your way to Wendy’s, you tend to navigate reality using a sort of Google Maps interpretation of events and ideas. It’s less accurate, sure, but much easier to understand when details aren’t a priority. But thanks to this heuristical habit, you sometimes create mental men of straw that stand in for the propositions put forth by people who see the world a bit differently than you. In addition to being easy to grasp, they are easy to knock down and hack apart, which wouldn’t be a problem if only you noticed the switcheroo.This is the essence of the straw man fallacy, probably the most common of all logical fallacies.

If you have ever been in an argument, you've likely committed a logical fallacy, and if you know how logical fallacies work, you've likely committed the fallacy fallacy. Listen as three experts in logic and arguing explain just what a formal argument really is, and how to spot, avoid, and defend against the one logical fallacy that is most likely to turn you into an internet blowhard.• Show Notes: http://bit.ly/1nfOgcu• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/youarenotsosmart• Donate Directly through PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/DavidMcRaneySPONSORS• Trunk Club: http://bit.ly/1Sp2wZj• The Great Courses Plus: http://bit.ly/26kDXpU• Casper Mattresses: https://casper.com/sosmartPatreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart

The problem with sorting out failures and successes is that failures are often muted, destroyed, or somehow removed from sight while successes are left behind, weighting your decisions and perceptions, tilting your view of the world. That means to be successful you must learn how to seek out what is missing. You must learn what not to do. Unfortunately, survivorship bias stands between you and the epiphanies you seek.To learn how to combat this pernicious bias, we explore the story of Abraham Wald and the Department of War Math founded during World War II.Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart