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 (15 page)

Now here’s another one from the same source on the same day but for a different sign: “Don’t be too hard on yourself if you’re dragging a little toward the end of the day. You’ll be able to recharge your batteries before tomorrow. In the evening, relax at home with a good book.”

Seen straight on, horoscopes describe the sort of things we all experience, but pluck one from the bunch, turn it ever so slightly, and you will see it matching all the details of your life. If you believe you live under a sign, and the movement of the planets can divine your future, a general statement becomes specific.

It is this hope that gives subjective validation its power. If you want the psychic to be real, or the sacred stones to forecast the unknown, you will find a way to believe them even when they falter. When you need something to be true, you will look for patterns; you connect the dots like the stars of a constellation. Your brain abhors disorder. You see faces in clouds and demons in bonfires. Those who claim the powers of divination hijack these natural human tendencies. They know they can depend on you to use subjective validation in the moment and confirmation bias afterward.

The psychologist Ray Hyman has spent most of his life studying the art of deception. Before he entered the halls of science, he worked as a magician and then moved on to mentalism after discovering he could make more money reading palms than performing card tricks. The crazy thing about Hyman’s career as a palm reader is, like many psychics, over time he began to believe he actually did have psychic powers. The people who came to him were so satisfied, so bowled over, he thought he must have a real gift. Subjective validation cuts both ways.

Hyman was using a technique called cold reading, where you start with the wide-angle lens of generalities and watch the other person for cues so you can constrict the focus down to what seems like a powerful insight into the other person’s soul. It works because people tend to ignore the little misses and focus on the hits. As he worked his way through college, another mentalist, Stanley Jaks, took Hyman aside and saved him from delusion by asking him to try something new—tell people the opposite of what he believed their palms revealed. The result? They were just as flabbergasted by his abilities, if not more so. Cold reading was powerful, but tossing it aside, he was still able to amaze. Hyman realized what he said didn’t matter as long as his presentation was good. The other person was doing all the work, tricking him- or herself, seeing the general as the specific just like in the Forer effect.

Mediums and palm readers, those who speak for the dead or see into the beyond for cash, depend on subjective validation. Remember, your capacity to fool yourself is greater than the abilities of any conjurer, and conjurers come in many guises. You are a creature impelled to hope. As you attempt to make sense of the world, you focus on what falls into place and neglect that which doesn’t fit, and there is so much in life that does not fit.

When you see a set of horoscopes, read all of them. When someone claims he or she can see into your heart, realize that all of our hearts are much the same.

Cults are a side effect of natural human tendencies. You have an innate desire to belong to a group and to hang out with interesting people. If you have ever admired someone you have never actually met—like a musician—you’ve experienced the seed of the cult phenomenon.

The word “cult” is slippery, because seen from far away, many organizations, institutions, and religions could be seen as cults. The line between groups and cults is blurry. The fuzzy line is why you are far more likely to end up in a cult than you think.

The research on cults suggests you don’t usually join for any particular reason; you just sort of fall into them the way you fall into any social group. After all, when did you join your circle of friends? Your group of close friends has likely changed a great deal over the years, but have you made many active choices concerning who you hang out with other than avoiding the ones who are a pain in the ass?

The sorts of people who join cults are not all insecure or emotionally weak. You’d like to think that you are not the sort of person who could be beguiled by a charismatic leader with a clear vision—but you are not so smart. According to psychologist David Myers, cults form around sparkly, interesting individuals—Jim Jones, David Koresh, L. Ron Hubbard, Charles Manson—but people don’t usually follow the leader, they follow the ideals the leader proclaims to be serving. These leaders seem to have things figured out, and you want to figure those things out too. Gandhi, Che Guevara, Terence McKenna, and Socrates are all great thinkers who seemed to have access to secrets, insights into something bigger. Naturally, people followed them, hoping to gain their mojo through osmosis. Were their followers in a cult? See, that’s where the definition falls apart. This is why you are susceptible to this sort of behavior.

As a primate, you are keenly aware of group dynamics. You are hardwired to want to hang out with people and associate yourself with groups. Your survival has depended on it for millions of years. In addition, you don’t evaluate your behavior and choices and feelings in order to understand who you are. Instead, you have an idealistic vision of yourself, a character you’ve dreamed up in your mind, and you are always trying to become this character. You seek out groups to affiliate with to better solidify who you are in the story you tell yourself—the story explaining why you do the things you do.

Myers says cults start with a charismatic individual. Maybe this person believes he is special in some way, or maybe he is just naturally interesting. People start hanging out with him, and a spontaneous group forms with the charismatic person becoming an authority figure. If this person has an agenda, or a goal, or enemies he wants eliminated, he will cultivate the goodwill of his fans into action. If he has difficult goals to reach, he will try to expand his group with recruitment or proselytizing, often hiding his true intentions so as not to scare away potential members. Some leaders know what they are doing, but some just serve their instincts and accidentally form cults around themselves before they realize what they’ve done. How these people wield their power over others ultimately determines how history will label them. Those who abuse their power and take advantage of their followers, like Jim Jones and Charles Manson, form what you traditionally consider a cult. Others, like Mohandas Ghandi, who convinced thousands to follow him on foot for 241 miles as he walked to the sea to protest a tax on salt, aren’t seen as cult leaders. Any group with a charismatic leader has the potential to break away and form a subculture. Some make the world a better place. Others convince people to kill themselves.

If you have ever called yourself a fan of anyone—a musician, a director, a writer, a politician, a technological genius, a scientist—you are experiencing the first stage of cult indoctrination. If you were to meet the person you most admire and be offered the chance to hang out with him or her on a regular basis—would you? You would. What happens next would depend on a chaotic series of variables; sometimes the result is a cult, and sometimes those cults live on beyond their leaders. There is no agent behind it, no person deciding to form or join a cult. Cults aren’t designed. They form as a result of normal human tendencies going awry.

When a group of people come together to make a decision, every demon in the psychological bestiary will be summoned.

Conformity, rationalization, stereotyping, delusions of grandeur—they all come out to play, and no one is willing to fight them back into hell because it might lead to abandoning the plan or a nasty argument. Groups survive by maintaining harmony. When everyone is happy and all egos are free from harm it tends to increase productivity. This is true whether you are hunting buffalo or selling televisions. Team spirit, morale, group cohesion—these are golden principles long held high by managers, commanders, chieftains, and kings. You know instinctively that dissent leads to chaos, so you avoid it.

This is all well and good until you find yourself in a group your brain isn’t equipped to deal with—like at work. The same mind that was formed to deal with group survival around predators and prey doesn’t fare so well when dealing with bosses and fiscal projections. No matter what sort of job you have, from time to time everyone has to get together and come up with a plan. Sometimes you do this in small groups, sometimes as an entire company. If your group includes a person who can hire or fire, groupthink comes into play.

With a boss hanging around, you get nervous. You start observing the other members of the group in an attempt to figure out what the consensus opinion is. Meanwhile, you are simultaneously weighing the consequences of disagreeing. The problem is, every other person in the group is doing the same thing, and if everyone decides it would be a bad idea to risk losing friends or a job, a false consensus will be reached and no one will do anything about it.

Often, after these sorts of meetings, two people will talk in private and agree they think a mistake is being made. Why didn’t they just say so in the meeting?

Psychologist Irving Janis mapped out this behavior through research after reading about the U.S. decision to invade southern Cuba—the Bay of Pigs. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy tried to overthrow Fidel Castro with a force of 1,400 exiles. They weren’t professional soldiers. There weren’t many of them. Cuba knew they were coming. They were slaughtered. This led to Cuba getting friendly with the USSR and almost led to nuclear apocalypse. John F. Kennedy and his advisers were brilliant people with all the data in front of them who had gotten together and planned something incredibly stupid. After it was over, they couldn’t explain why they did it. Janis wanted to get to the bottom of it, and his research led to the scientific categorization of groupthink, a term coined earlier by William H. White in
Fortune
magazine.

It turns out, for any plan to work, every team needs at least one asshole who doesn’t give a shit if he or she gets fired or exiled or excommunicated. For a group to make good decisions, they must allow dissent and convince everyone they are free to speak their mind without risk of punishment.

It seems like common sense, but you will rationalize consensus unless you know how to avoid it. How many times have you settled on a bar or restaurant no one really wanted to go to? How many times have you given advice to someone that you knew wasn’t really your honest opinion?

The recent housing market collapse, the failure to prevent the attack at Pearl Harbor, the sinking of the
Titanic
, the invasion of Iraq—all of these can be attributed to situations in which groupthink led to awful decisions.

True groupthink depends on three conditions—a group of people who like one another, isolation, and a deadline for a crucial decision.

As a primate, you are quick to form groups and then feel as if you should defend those groups from the ill wishes of other groups. When groups get together to make a decision, an illusion of invulnerability can emerge in which everyone feels secure in the cohesion. You begin to rationalize other people’s ideas and don’t reconsider your own. You want to defend the group’s cohesion from all harm, so you suppress doubts, you don’t argue, you don’t offer alternatives—and since everyone is doing this, the leader of the group falsely assumes everyone is in agreement.

Research says the situation can be avoided if the boss is not allowed to express his or her expectations, thus preventing the boss’s opinion from automatically becoming the opinion of others. In addition, if the group breaks into pairs every once in a while to discuss the issue at hand, a manageable level of dissent can be fostered. Even better, allow outsiders to offer their opinions periodically during the process, to keep people’s objectivity afloat. Finally, assign one person the role of asshole and charge that person with the responsibility of finding fault in the plan. Before you come to a consensus, allow a cooling off period so emotions can return to normal.

The research shows that groups of friends who allow members to disagree and still be friends are more likely to come to better decisions. So the next time you are in a group of people trying to reach consensus, be the asshole. Every group needs one, and it might as well be you.

The Australian jewel beetle has sex with beer bottles.

The beetles are a light chocolate color with dimples all down their back and dark black legs and heads that peek out from underneath their carapaces. Their bodies are big and long instead of round, and they resemble cicadas more than they do ladybugs.

The male Australian jewel beetle is hardwired to like certain aspects about the female jewel beetle. They like females to be big, brown, and shiny. The bottles they make love to are bigger, browner, and shinier than any female could ever hope to be. In Australia, a certain type of bottle called stubbies overstimulates male jewel beetles. In a trash heap filled with bottles, you will often see every single stubby covered in male jewel beetles trying to get it on. The stubbies are what evolutionary psychologists call supernormal releasers. They are superstimuli, better than the real thing. The beetles will mate with these bottles even while being devoured by ants.