David McRaney Quotes

The very act of looking down on others made people more confident.

You are a liar by default, and you lie most to yourself. If you fail, you forget it. If you win, you tell everyone.

THE MISCONCEPTION: You are skeptical of generalities. THE TRUTH: You are prone to believing vague statements and predictions are true, especially if they are positive and address you personally.

One of the best things about owning a brain is how you often seem to phase out of normalcy and briefly see your culture with a weirdly objective frame of mind. At some point every child realizes money...

You are the same as an insect, just with a more complex nervous system responding to stimuli with a wider array of denser behavioral routines that only appear to give rise to consciousness.

The more info you get about a statement, the more likely you are to believe that statement.

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...

So, how about spanking? After reading all this, do you think you are ready to know what science has to say about the issue? Here's the skinny: Psychologists are still studying the matter, but the curr...

You see people who speak slowly as being less intelligent—slow.

The social Web is revolutionizing the way institutions operate, and the way people communicate, but in the end it might not have much of an effect on the core social group you depend on for true frien...

İnsanları değerlerini satmakla suçlayanlar, elinde kimsenin almak isteyeceği şeyler olmayan satıcılardır. - Patton Oswalt

The affect heuristic speaks to your basic sensibilities about risk and reward while neglecting the big picture and the dangers of complex systems that require study and deeper understanding.

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 affect heuristic is stronger still when something is familiar or speaks to the primal brain. The feeling you get in your gut telling you yes or no, good or bad is greatly influenced by the affect...

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.

You expect better performances from attractive people, but when they fail, you are also more likely to forgive them.

The psychologist Jonathan Haidt says many people who don’t consciously believe in karma still believe deep down in some version of it, calling it whatever seems appropriate in their own culture. They...

You don’t believe you are an average person, but you do believe everyone else is. This tendency, which springs from self-serving bias, is called the illusory superiority effect.

If you think catharsis is good, you are more likely to seek it out when you get pissed.

It is not a fallacy to trust the consensus of thousands of researchers on how to interpret the evidence provided by decades of studies.