You Are Not So Smart
You Are Not So Smart is a show about psychology that celebrates science and self delusion. In each episode, we explore what we've learned so far about reasoning, biases, judgments, and decision-making.
Episodes
What is misinformation? How does it differ from disinformation or just plain ‘ole propaganda? How do we protect ourselves from people with nefarious intentions using all of these things to affect our thoughts, feelings, and behavior? That’s what we discuss in this episode with Matthew Facciani, social scientist and author of Misguided: Where Misinformation Starts, How it Spreads, and What We Can Do About It.
Two psychologists who study love, relationships, and human mating behavior pick apart the movie "The Notebook" and tell us what it gets right and what it gets wrong when it comes to portraying how humans actually, truly think, feel, and behave. Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick are the cohosts of the Love Factually podcast, a show that discusses the romantic/scientific accuracy of movies, and on this episode we listen in as they examine...
In this episode, we sit down with therapist Britt Frank to discuss the intention action gap, the psychological term for the chasm between what you very much intend to do and what you tend to do instead. It turns out, there's a well-researched psychological framework that includes a term for when you have a stated, known goal – a change you'd like to make in your life – something you wake up intending to finally do or get started do...
Sarah Stein Lubrano tells us about her new book, Don't Talk About Politics, which urges us not to lose hope or become frozen in frustration when it comes to polarization and faulty discourse because the good news is that we don't just know, scientifically, why the marketplace of ideas is currently failing us, we know how, scientifically, we can do better.
In this episode we welcome psychologist Mary C. Murphy, author of Cultures of Growth, who tells us how to create institutions, businesses, and other groups of humans that can better support collaboration, innovation, performance, and wellbeing. We also learn how, even if you know all about the growth mindset, the latest research suggests you not may not be creating a culture of growth despite what feels like your best efforts to do...
Alex Edmans, a professor of finance at London Business School, tells us how to avoid the Ladder of Misinference by examining how narratives, statistics, and articles can mislead, especially when they align with our preconceived notions and confirm what we believe is true, assume is true, and wish were true.
In this episode we sit down with Brian Klaas, author of Fluke, and get into the existential lessons and grander meaning for a life well-lived (once one finally accepts the power and influence of randomness, chaos, and chance). In addition, we learn not to fall prey to proportionality bias - the tendency for human brains to assume big, historical, or massively impactful events must have had big causes and/or complex machinations und...
If you want to overthrow a dictator, resist an authoritarian regime, or create a movement that can change the national status quo, you don't need half the country, you only need 3.5 percent of the population to join – but there are some caveats, and Erica Chenoweth whose research led to the discovery of the 3.5 Percent Rule, explains them to us in this episode.
Professor Neil Theise, the author of Notes on Complexity, provides an introduction to the science of how complex systems behave – from cells to human beings, to ecosystems, the known universe, and beyond – and we explore if Ian Malcolm was right when he told us in Jurassic Park that "Life, um, finds a way."
In this episode we sit down with Greg Satell, a communication expert whose book, Cascades, details how rapid, widespread change can sweep across groups of people big and small, and how understanding the psychological mechanisms at play in such moments can help anyone looking to create change in a family, institution, or even nation, prepare for the inevitable resistance they will face.
Therapist, teacher, speaker, and trauma specialist Britt Frank tells us all about her new book, Align Your Mind, an all-access pass to understanding, befriending, and leading the multiple voices within yourself.
Grounded in the latest research on Parts Work and Internal Family Systems, and offering proven techniques from Frank’s clinical practice and personal challenges, this engaging guide is a user manual to your own mind—and pres...
In 1974, two psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, as the New Yorker once put it, "changed the way we think about the way we think." The prevailing wisdom, before their landmark research went viral (in the way things went viral in the 1970s), was that human beings were, for the most part, rational optimizers always making the kinds of judgments and decisions that best maximized the potential of the outcomes under their c...
In this episode, the story of Clever Hans, the horse who changed psychology for the better. We also sit down with psychologist and magician Matt Tompkins. Matt is the author of The Spectacle of Illusion, a book about the long history of the manipulation of our own magical thinking and how studying deception can help us better understand perception, memory, belief, and more.
In this episode, we sit down with three disinformation researchers whose new paper found something surprising about both our resistance and our susceptibility to both true news we wish was fake and fake news we wish was true.
Our guests are three of the scientists exploring a newly named cognitive distortion, one that every human being is prone to exhibiting, one that is so common and so easily provoked that nefarious actors depend ...
This episode’s guest is Mónica Guzmán, the author of I Never Thought of It That Way – a book with very practical advice on how to have productive conversations in a polarized political environment via authentic curiosity about where people’s beliefs, opinions, attitudes, and values come from. It's also about how to learn from those with whom we disagree by establishing the sort of dynamic in which they will eagerly learn from us as...
Our guest in this episode is Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and writer for the New Yorker Magazine who is also the New York Times Bestselling author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better. His new book is Supercommunicators, a practical and approachable guide to what makes great conversations work. In the episode we discuss the science behind what it takes to form a connection with another human being ...
In an era in which we have more information available to us than ever before, when claims of “fake news” might themselves be, in fact, fake news, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, authors of The Invisible Gorilla, are back to offer us a vital tool to not only inoculate ourselves against getting infected by misinformation but prevent us from spreading it to others – a new book titled Nobody's Fool.
In this episode we return to The Dress and the psychological lessons offered by one of the most viral moments in the history of the internet via an episode of Decoder Ring in which David McRaney shares some insights from his book, How Minds Change, with Willa Paskin, the host of Decoder Ring.
In this episode we sit down with Warren Berger, the author of A More Beautiful Question – and a man who has made a career out of classifying, categorizing, and making sense of all the many varieties of questions we ask, when we are likely to ask them, and how that can lead to all manner of outcomes, some positive, some negative.
In this episode we welcome Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano, a political scientist who studies how cognitive dissonance affects all sorts of political behavior. She’s also the co-host of a podcast about activism called "What Do We Want?" and she wrote a book that’s coming out in May of 2025 titled don’t talk about politics which is about how to discuss politics without necessarily talking about politics.
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