You Are Not So Smart

by David McRaney

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  Latane, B., Williams, K., & Harkins, S. (1979, June). Many hands make light the work: The causes and consequences of social loafing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37, 822–832.

  Myers, D. G. (2005). Social psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill.

  The Illusion of Transparency

  Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., & Savitsky, K. (1998). The illusion of transparency: Biased assessments of others’ ability to read one’s emotional states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75(2), 332–346.

  Savitsky, K., & Gilovich, T. (2003, March 25). The illusion of transparency and the alleviation of speech anxiety. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 39, 618–625.

  Learned Helplessness

  Abramson, L. Y., Seligman, M. E., & Teasdale, J. D. (1978, February). Learned helplessness in humans: Critique and reformulation. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 87(1), 49–74.

  Langer, E. & Rodin, J. (1976). The effects of choice and enhanced personal responsibility for the aged: A field experiment in an institutional setting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 34, 191–198.

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  Myers, D. G. (2005). Social psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill.

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  Servan-Schreiber, D. (2008). Anticancer: a new way of life. New York: Viking.

  Embodied Cognition

  Ackerman, J. M., Nocera, C. C., & Bargh, J. A. (2010, June 25). Incidental haptic sensations influence social judgments and decisions. Science 328(5986), 1712–1715.

  Lawrence, E. W., & Bargh, J. A. (2008, October). Experiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth. Science 322(5901), 606–607.

  The Anchoring Effect

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  Ariely, D., Loewenstein, G., & Prelec, D. (2006). Tom Sawyer and the construction of value. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 60, 1–10.

  Cialdini, R. B., Vincent, J. E., Lewis, S. K., Catalan, J., Wheeler, D., & Darby, B. L. (1975). Reciprocal concessions procedure for inducing compliance: The door-in the face technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 31(2), 206–215.

  Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., & Tversky, A. (1982). Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Attention

  Chabris, C., & Simons, D. (2010). The invisible gorilla: and other ways our intuitions deceive us. New York: Crown.

  Chua, H. F., Boland, J. E., & Nisbett, R. E. (2005). Cultural variation in eye movements during scene perception. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 35, 12629–12633.

  Levin, D. T., & Simons, D. J. (1997). Failure to detect changes to attended objects in motion pictures. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 4, 501–506.

  Masuda, T., Akase, M., & Radford, M. H. B. (2008). Cultural differences in patterns of eye-movement: Comparing context sensitivity between the Japanese and Westerners. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94(3), 365–381.

  Simons, D. J., & Chabris, C. F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception 28(9), 1059–1074.

  Simons, D. J., & Levin, D. T. (1998). Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 5, 644–649.

  Self-Handicapping

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  Carey, B. (2009). Some protect the ego by working on their excuses early. New York Times.

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  Kay, A. C., Jimenez, M.C., & Jost, J. T. (2002). Sour Grapes, Sweet Lemons, and the Anticipatory Rationalization of the Status Quo. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28(9), 1300–1312.

  Kolditz, T. A., & Arkin, R. M. (1982). An impression management interpretation of the self-handicapping strategy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 43, 492–502.

  Smith, T. W., Snyder, C. R., & Perkins, S. C. (1983). The self-serving function of hypochondriacal complaints: Physical symptoms as self-handicapping strategies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 44(4), 787–797.

  Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

  Burger, J. M. (1999). The foot-in-the-door compliance procedure: A multiple-process analysis and review. Personality and Social Psychology Review 3(4), 303–325.

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  Steele C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995, November). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69(5), 797–811.

  The Moment

  Kahneman, D. (2010, March). The riddle of experience vs. memory. Retrieved December 2010 from http://blog.ted.com/2010/03/01/the_riddle_of_e/.

  Consistency Bias

  Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably irrational: The hidden forces that shape our decisions. New York: HarperCollins.

  Burger, J. M., & Petty, R. E. (1981). The low-ball compliance technique: Task or person commitment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 40(3), 492–500.

  Cialdini, R. B., Cacioppo, J. T., Bassett, R., & Miller, J. A. (1978, May). Low-ball procedure for producing compliance: Commitment then cost. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36(5), 463–476.

  Dean, J. (2008, February). How the consistency bias warps our personal and political memories. Retrieved December 2010 from http://www.spring.org.uk/2008/02/how-consistency-bias-warps-our-personal.php

  Goethals, G. R., & Reckman, R. F. (1973, November). The perception of consistency in attitudes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 9(6), 491–501.

  Markus, G. B. (1986). Stability and change in political attitudes: observed, recalled, and explained. Political Behavior 8(1), 21–44.

  Markus, H., & Kunda, Z. (1986). Stability and Malleability of the Self-Concept. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51(4), 858–866.

  Scharfe, E., & Bartholomew, K. (1998). Do you remember? Recollections of adult attachment patterns. Personal Relationships 5(2), 219–234.

  The Representativeness Heuristic

  Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., & Tversky, A. (1982). Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1983, October). Extension versus intuitive reasoning: The conjunction fallacy in probability judgment. Psychological Review 90(4), 293–315.

  Yudkowsky, E. (2007, September 19). Conjunction fallacy. Less Wrong. Retrieved December 2010 from http://lesswrong.com/lw/ji/conjunction_fallacy/.

  Expectation

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  Bertolucci, J. (2008, November 24). HD or standard def? One in five HDTV owners don’t know the difference. PCWorld.

  Brochet, F. (n.d.). Chemical object representation in the field of consciousness. Retrieved December 2010 from http://www.enophilia.net/writable/uploadfile/chimica%20della%20degustazione.pdf.

  Goldstein, R., Almenberg, J.,
Dreber, A., Emerson, J. W., Hersch-kowitsch, A., & Katz, J. (2008, Spring). Do more expensive wines taste better? Journal of Wine Economics 3(1), 1–9.

  Lehrer, J. (2007, November 2). The subjectivity of wine. Frontal Cortex. Retrieved December 2010 from http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2007/11/the_subjectivity_of_wine.php.

  Lehrer, J. (2008, February 24). Grape expectations: What wine can tell us about the nature of reality. Boston Globe.

  Logan, M. (2009, June 11). The pull of cigarette packaging. The Star. Morrot, G., Brochet, F., & Dubourdieu, D. (2001 November). The color of odors. Brain and Language 79(2), 309–320.

  Simonite, T. (2009, October 7). Think yourself a better picture. New Scientist.

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  The Illusion of Control

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  Jarrett, C. (2010, November). Can psychology help combat pseudoscience? British Psychological Society Research Digest. Retrieved December 2010 from http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2010/11/can-psychology-help-combat.html.

  Jenkins, H. H., & Ward, W. C. (1965). Judgement of contingency between responses and outcomes. Psychological Monographs 79, 1–17.

  Kluger, J. (2009, March 10). Why powerful people overestimate themselves. Time. Retrieved December 2010 from http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1883658,00.html.

  Langer, E. J. (1977). The psychology of chance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 7(2), 185–203.

  Langer, E. J. (1975). The illusion of control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32(2), 311–328.

  Langer, E. J., Roth, J. Heads I win, tails it’s chance: The illusion of control as a function of the sequence of outcomes in a purely chance task. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32(6), 951–955.

  Pronin, E., Wegner, D. M., McCarthy, K., & Rodriguez, S. (2006). Everyday magical powers: The role of apparent mental causation in the overestimation of personal influence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 91(2), 218–231.

  Tijms, H. C. (2004). Understanding probability: Chance rules in everyday life. New York: Cambridge University Press.

  Ward, W. C., & Jenkins, H. M. (1965). The display of information and the judgment of contingency. Canadian Journal of Psychology 19, 231–241.

  The Fundamental Attribution Error

  Ames, M. (2005). Going postal: Rage, murder, and rebellion: From Reagan’s workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and beyond. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press.

  Dreifus, C. (2007, April 3). Finding hope in knowing the universal capacity for evil. New York Times.

  Kluger, J. (2007, April 19). Inside a mass murderer’s mind. Time.

  Weir, B., Horng, E., Kotzen, J., & Sterns, O. (2008, Februrary 9). What pushes shooters over the edge? ABC News. Retrieved December 2010 from http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story? id= 4267309&page=1.

  Zimbardo, P. G. (2010). A simulation study of the psychology of imprisonment conducted at Stanford University. Retrieved December 2010 from http://www.prisonexp.org/.

  1

  To be precise, the right hemisphere gets information from the left visual field, not just the left eye. The opposite is true for the right. A portion of the left visual field can be seen by the right eye, just around the nose.