86 Quotes by David McRaney

This sense of alarm about the impact of speech not on yourself but on others is called the third person effect.

Ignorance of the halo effect can easily set in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy in which attitude changes behavior, which then loops back around over and over for the persons both giving and receiving a label.

As the philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, “In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

If your group includes a person who can hire or fire, groupthink comes into play.

Sure enough, all the sciences that study tribes, bands, and villages have approximated ancient groups usually maxed out around 150 people. This is the approximate upper limit to how many people you can trust and count on for favors, whom you can call up and have a conversation with. Once you go over 150 people, Dunbar says about 42 percent of the group’s time would have to be spent worrying about one another’s relationships.

To be less dumb, remember your propensity for post hoc postulation and the power positive permutations of the placebo effect have to pollute your perspicacity.

Branding builds on this by giving you the option to create the person you think you are through choosing to align yourself with the mystique of certain products.

You are unaware of the constant nudging you receive from ideas formed in your unconscious mind.

People who use the number of friends they have on Facebook as a metric of their social standing are fooling themselves. You can share videos of fainting goats with hundreds of acquaintances and thousands of followers, but you can trust a secret only with a handful of true friends.