ERRATA: YOU ARE NOT SO SMART

Below are corrections for the first editions of You Are Not So Smart. Your book may not have these errors because they were changed in later editions, but if you have a copy with mistakes, the correct information is below.

• Page XV

“Confident men” should be “confidence men”

• Page XIII

“Now, which card or cards must you flip over to prove I’m telling the truth?” should read “Now, which card or cards must you flip over to prove I’m lying?”

• Page 1

“Gallactica” should be “Galactica”

• Page 8

“slide rulers” should be “slide rules”

• Page 24

“Miller and Nisbett” should be “Wilson and Nisbett”

• Page 25

“Nisbett and Miller” should be “Nisbett and Wilson”

• Page 34

“‘…is a duck?'” should be “‘is a duck’?” (The question mark should be after the quotation mark.)

• Page 41

“2002 to the 2006” should be “2002 to 2006”

• Page 50

The study of three schedules for students to turn in papers by Ariely and Wertenbroch was spread over a twelve-week semester, not over three weeks.

• Page 59

Fear bradycardia and tonic immobility are not interchangeable terms. Bradycardia refers only to heartbeat.

• Page 85

“especially (cf. the number three and the Trinity).” should be “especially regarding the number three and the Trinity.”

• Page 94

Walter Freeman, while considered the Johnny Appleseed of lobotomy, didn’t win the Nobel, but was following the work of his mentor Antonio Egas Moniz who was the man who won the 1949 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering and popularizing lobotomy, or leucotomy as was then called. Some editions reflect this, and some have an error.

If your edition is in error, that paragraph should read like so:

“Starting in the 1930s, neurologist Walter Freeman followed in the footsteps of his mentor Antonio Egas Moniz, and began performing in hospitals around the country a technique for which Moniz would later win the Nobel Prize – lobotomizing mentally ill people by jabbing a spike behind their eyeballs. Freeman modified the method a bit, but some reports say he performed this technique around 2,500 times, often without anesthesia.”

• Page 116

“hip-to-waist” should read “waist-to-hip”

• Page 142

“the card game stud” should be “the card game study”

• Page 159

Clarification: People tend to believe they perform above average on easy tasks and below average on difficult tasks, but the study explored on this page does not suggest that telling a person that a task is easy will make that person believe he or she performed above average on that task.

• Page 181

“become” should be “became”

• Page 187

The Milgram experiments began in 1961 and the research was published in 1963.

• Page 200

The second sentence needs closing quotation marks.

• Page 212

“describe” should be “described”

• Page 228

“slide rulers” should be “slide rules”

• Page 241

Hazel Markus is a professor at Stanford. She studied at the University of Michigan.

• Page 244

“conducted an study” should be “conducted a study”

• Page 222

Two lines from bottom of page, “you” should appear after “Instead.”

• Page 247

“representative” should be “representativeness”

BIBLIOGRAPHY (Missing Citations)

Confabulation

Liebman, A. (Producer). (1997). The Man With Two Brains. Scientific American Frontiers. PBS.

Bystander Effect

D. G. (2005). Social psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Affect Heuristic

Yudkowsky, E. (2007, November 27). The Affect Heuristic. Less Wrong. Retrieved December 2010 from http://lesswrong.com/lw/lg/the_affect_heuristic/.

Dunning Kruger Effect

Hanson, R. (2008, November 8). All Are Skill Unaware. Overcoming Bias. Retrieved December 2010 from http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/11/all-are-unaware.html

Subjective Validation’s entry in the bibliography was smashed into the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy’s entry and as a result the Subjective Validation entry was omitted. Here are the citations which should be moved out of TSF and added to a new entry for Subjective Validation:

Forer, B. R. (1949). The fallacy of personal validation: A classroom demonstration of gullibility. Journal of Abnormal Psycholog, 44, 118–121. Shermer, M. (1998, January). The truth is out there and Ray Hyman wants to find it: An interview with a co-founder of Modern Skepticism. Skeptic Magazine. Retrieved December 2010 from http://www.theeway.com/skepticc/archives03.html.

And here is one which should be added to the new entry:

Carroll, R. (2008) Mass Media Funk. The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Retrieved December 2010 from http://skepdic.com/refuge/funk58.html

Procrastination

Lehrer, J. (2009, May 18) Don’t! The secret of self-control. The New Yorker. Retrieved December 2010 from http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer

Apophenia

Carroll, R. (2003) The Skeptics Dictionary. Hoboken. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Carroll, R. (2010) Littlewood’s Law of Miracles. The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Retrieved December 2010 from: http://www.skepdic.com/littlewood.html

Catharsis

Jillette, P., Price, S., Small, E., Teller. (Producers). Price, S. (Director). (2007). Anger Management. Bullshit!. Showtime. StarPrice Productions.