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The author of the bestselling You Are Not So Smart gives readers a fighting chance at outsmarting their not-so-smart brains.

A mix of popular psychology and trivia, You Are Now Less Dumb is grounded in the idea that we all believe ourselves to be objective observers of reality--except we're not. But that's okay, because our delusions keep us sane.

Expanding on this premise, McRaney provides eye-opening analyses of seventeen ways we fool ourselves every day, including:

Enclothed Cognition (the clothes you wear change your behavior and influence your mental abilities)
The Benjamin Franklin Effect (how you grow to like people for whom you do nice things and hate the people you harm).
Deindividuation (Despite our best intentions, we practically disappear when subsumed by a mob mentality)
The Misattribution of Arousal (Environmental factors have a greater effect on our emotional arousal than the person right in front of us)
Sunk Cost Fallacy (We will engage in something we don't enjoy just to make the time or money already invested "worth it”)

McRaney also reveals the true price of happiness, and how to avoid falling for our own lies.