We don’t always know what we think we know. Confirmation bias (your brain’s tendency to cue into, or seek out, information that confirms opinions you already have), the Dunning-Kruger effect (your overestimation of your competence), subjective validation (your tendency to believe vague, positive predictions) – each of these unlocks some quirk of the human mind, some way in which we misperceive the world.
In his entertaining new book, You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself (Gotham, 2011), journalist David McRaney has collected such well-established theories – many of them culled from his blog of the same.
Frank Bures 