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    You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself
    You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself
    You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself
    Audiobook8 hours

    You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself

    Written by David McRaney

    Narrated by Don Hagen

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The author of the bestselling You Are Not So Smart shares more discoveries about self-delusion and irrational thinking, and gives listeners a fighting chance at outsmarting their not-so-smart brains

    David McRaney's first audiobook, You Are Not So Smart, evolved from his wildly popular blog of the same name. A mix of popular psychology and trivia, McRaney's insights have struck a chord with thousands, and his blog-and now podcasts and videos-have become an Internet phenomenon.

    Like You Are Not So Smart, 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 fifteen more ways we fool ourselves every day, including:
    • The Misattribution of Arousal (Environmental factors have a greater affect 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”)
    • Deindividuation (Despite our best intentions, we practically disappear when subsumed by a mob mentality)

    McRaney also reveals the true price of happiness, why Benjamin Franklin was such a badass, and how to avoid falling for our own lies. This smart and highly entertaining audiobook will be wowing listeners for years to come.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAscent Audio
    Release dateJul 30, 2013
    ISBN9781469088792
    You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself
    Author

    David McRaney

    David McRaney is a journalist, author and podcaster. His blog exploring how we delude ourselves laid the groundwork for his first book, You Are Not So Smart, which became an international bestseller and was translated into fourteen languages. He lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. @davidmcraney davidmcraney.com

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    Reviews for You Are Now Less Dumb

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      This is a good book to Read and listen to in order to learn about and praise self-delusion. The podcast is a good addition s as well
    • 3/5
      Similar to his last one - "You Are Not So Smart", but I found this one to be a bit more boring. Some of it is a retread from the last book, or similar enough to the last one just in changed up ways, that it felt like reading a bit of a repeat. But not completely. There is still a lot of new stuff, a lot of different stuff. But for some reason, this one just didn't engage me as much as the first one. Still interesting and fascinating stuff to read about how our brains work and deceive ourselves. Would still recommend the two books, but just know this one is a bit more of a slog going into it perhaps. Though everyone's mileage may vary.
    • 4/5
      I devour pop psychology books, the nonfiction equivalent of potato chips. This one was had a heavy dose of studies, some going back several decades. Studies verified a variety of individual and group behaviors. 'Looking forward to reading the prequel.
    • 4/5
      This was a "bedtime storybook" that I read aloud to my eleven-year-old. (Yes, really.) And we really enjoyed it. My kid is into science so I'd recently added a few non-fiction science books to the shelf where he chooses his next book from. He sometimes watches the Brain Games show on Netflix, so he had some context going in, and largely this book was written at an accessible enough level, though there were a few examples or case studies that were sexual (not lewd) in nature, but nothing too far.

      The book is organized into chapters on common delusions or fallacies, most of which boil down to in the end your brain's need to tell itself a story about you, a you who makes sense and is generally a good person and makes rational choices, and the ways that goes wrong when your decisions aren't rational, or something endangers your view of yourself as good. It's why you sometimes get mad at someone you've unintentionally wronged, why you double-down when someone challenges a deeply held belief.

      As some have noted, this book is a little shy on strategies to beat these fallacies (which the title might lead you to believe this book is about). I think there are a lot of us who'd like tips on how to talk to people who may have voted a certain unstable, misogynist, racist narcissist into office, for example. But for that, you need another book. But don't discount the value of this -- the understanding and insight into why.
    • 3/5
      Mildly interesting commentary on a variety of experiments that shows humans aren't as rational as they think. Genetics and cultural conditioning drives much of human behavior and judgment making, and despite thinking we act based on evidence, often the contrary is true. Also has an excellent commentary on "deindividuation", where humans act differently within the anonymity of a crowd than they would alone.