Views from Crestmont Drive

David McRaney’s second book, YOU ARE NOW LESS DUMB, extends the themes of his first book, in greater depth — there are 17 chapters in some 300 total pages, compared to 48 shorter chapters in the first book. And it’s anchored by two deep themes, the first and last chapters, about ‘narrative bias’ and ‘self-enhancement bias’. The chapters in this book to some extent consolidate and amplify ideas from the first book, but these two endpiece chapters describe basic themes that have many implications that the author, perhaps wisely, does not spell out.

Like the first book, the introduction and each chapter in this book begins with a theme, stated as a ‘misconception’ and a ‘truth’. Here are those from the introduction:

Misconception: You are a being of logic and reason.
Truth: You are a being capable of logic and reason who falls short of that ideal in predictable ways.

The introduction describes a contested football game between Dartmouth and Princeton in which fans of each school, watching an identical pre-recorded video of a key game, had vastly different reactions about which side was unfairly rough. We are all ‘naive realists’, McRaney says; we think what we see is what actually happens, but this is a philosophical idea long discredited by science. Eye-witness testimony is basically worthless [an idea that is, gradually, creeping into public policy].

This book, more than the first one, has deeply affected and channeled my thinking. It consolidates ideas I’ve been pondering for some time, and given them a framework for further thought.

The first, anchoring, chapter, is about ‘narrative bias’.

Misc: You make sense of life through rational contemplation.
Truth: You make sense of life through narrative.

A key psychological experiment recounted here is about three mental patients, each of whom believed he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. When confronted with each other, brought together in the same mental institution — what happened? (This experiment took place decades ago and would be regarded as unethical now.) Each one explained the others away, without abandoning their own personal narrative. Each one clang to his personal narrative.

Every culture finds ‘meaning’ in the world through narrative. These are the basic narratives that Joseph Campbell identified — the character who faces adversity, embarks on an adventure, and succeeds against great odds. Or–does not succeed; the tragedy. Both narratives appeal because anyone can map their own experiences onto one of these two templates.

The brain/mind [they are the same] tries to make sense of any experience by trying to detect causes. A revealing case is how Air Force pilots, subject to such high G forces that they black out, have experiences very similar to the so-called ‘near-death’ experiences: the tunnel, the white light, friends and family, memories. Even as it’s dying, the brain keeps trying the make sense of things, in a narrative fashion.

All humans reduce life to two questions: where did we come from, and why are we here?

Narrative psychology asks, why are these questions so important? It seems that *meaning*, to these questions, is more important than ordinary happiness. And meaning requires narratives.

McRaney touches on the ‘concept of mind’ notion that I’ve read about in Daniel Dennett and Jesse Bering. It’s the idea that babies, until they are two or three years old, don’t realize that other people have minds of their own. The naive notion is that other objects — the sun, the moon, the winds and the rains — also have ‘minds’, a notion that has given rise to many mythologies — or religions [they are the same? ;)]. McRaney remarks,

Out of that sense of self and other selves come the narratives that have kept whole societies together. The great mythologies of the ancients and moderns are stories made up to make sense of things on a grand scale. So strong is the narrative bias that people live and die for such stories and devote whole lives to them (as well as take lives for them).

Here is where I perceive McRaney taking a very diplomatic stance. He does not mention the word ‘religion’, or ‘faith’, even though this is obviously what he is talking about — but to make this explicit would make this a very different kind of book. One that might alienate many a reader. I think this is a wise decision, because as long as he does not alienate these readers, he can make them think about these biases. Making them think.

Enough for now. More in a later post.

As I mentioned in a Facebook post last night, without bookstores to browse through, I discover titles and authors I might not otherwise have seen most often through web excerpts and interviews — at sites like Slate and Salon, Huffington Post, various science and skeptic blogs. As I recall my first exposure to David McRaney was an excerpt from his latest book, YOU ARE NOW LESS DUMB, on Salon a couple months ago — I quoted from it, here.

I then bought that book, and then his first book, YOU ARE NOT SO SMART from 2011 (both published by Gotham Books), and paused reading the second to read the first first.

It was reading these books that prompted me to recall LOGIC AND CONTEMPORARY RHETORIC, which I posted about here; these McRaney books appeal to interests I’ve had for decades: how to think logically, and how to see through illogical arguments; pseudoscience and why people believe things so passionately for which there is such dubious evidence at best; and, more grandly, the limits of human perception about reality, if the human mind is capable of perceiving what is real instead of basking in illusions of its own making (which in my recent reading is most acutely addressed by Jesse Bering’s THE BELIEF INSTINCT, which I’ll blog about eventually).

I’ve read books along this spectrum over the decades — books by Carl Sagan, Michael Shermer, Thomas Gilovich, and others — but in just the past couple three years it seems like there is a relative wealth of such books, McRaney’s and Daniel Kahneman’s big book (which I haven’t read yet), and others (or, just as likely, it’s my confirmation bias ticking in that I notice such books now that I’m attuned to them…)

Enough preamble. The difference between any of those earlier books that I read and the two by David McRaney is that McRaney isn’t focused so much on logical fallacies or the tricks used by others (advertisers, politicians) to sway you, as the way your mind is biased to *trick yourself*.

McRaney’s YOU ARE NOT SO SMART has 48 chapters in 300 pages. Each chapter, and the introduction, is headed by a two-part summary of its theme, contrasting the common misconception and the ‘truth’, e.g., for the introduction:

THE MISCONCEPTION: You are a rational, logical being who sees the world as it really is.
THE TRUTH: You are as deluded as the rest of us, but that’s OK, it keeps you sane.

Each chapter then follows with an expansion of the theme: a mixture of psychological case studies, the author’s interpretive elaboration, and occasional anecdotes from the author’s own life.

It’s a mix of cognitive biases, heuristics, and logical fallacies. Many of these, in this first book, are very familiar: confirmation bias, argument from authority, the straw man fallacy, the ad hominem fallacy.

This is principally a book about psychology, how the mind works, and it’s grounded in the many psychological experiments the author describes. To take the first chapter, about ‘priming’, which is how you are influenced (without being aware of it) by past experiences and your immediate environment into making decisions. One case study was a game that involved splitting $10, with greedier behavior observed by those who had just seen business related photos or items in the room they were in — and then who later confabulated rationalizations for why they made the decisions that they did.

Later chapters cover a couple very famous (and terrifying) psychological experiments — the 1971 experiment in which students were randomly assigned prisoner or guard roles, and over several days came to exploit those roles; and the 1963 Stanley Milgram experiment in which subjects kept giving higher and higher electrical shocks to a person in another room, as long the professor [the authority figure] kept telling them to do so. [Not mentioned in the book, but I recall the made-for-TV movie with none other that William Shatner dramatizing this study — The Tenth Level.] These experiments, and others, have huge implications about social policy that have yet to be incorporated into legal policy.

This is a terrific book for becoming more self-aware about how you think, and how what you believe may or may not reflect what is real.

McRaney is a journalist, not a psychologist himself, but this book is as compelling as anything by a university Ph.D. And his second book, YOU ARE NOW LESS DUMB, is even better — it’s deeper. (Yes let me mention that these rather flip titles don’t do the books justice; though if they attract casual readers, then I suppose they’re justified.)

I’ll address the second book in a later post.