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The Self-Deception Playbook: How Your Brain Hides the Truth from You
Paperback
Series: Dr. James Calloway: Applied Behavioral Psychology, Book 2
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Apr 25 2026
Pages: 162
Weight: 0.37
Height: 0.35 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
Your mind is lying to you right now, and you cannot tell.
Elizabeth Loftus planted false memories of being lost in a shopping mall into the minds of perfectly healthy adults. Leon Festinger watched a doomsday cult believe more fervently after the flood they predicted failed to arrive. Dan Kahan showed that higher intelligence does not protect you from motivated reasoning. It sharpens it.
The Self-Deception Playbook walks through ten mechanisms by which your brain quietly hides the truth from you, from false memory and cognitive dissonance to confirmation bias, the Dunning-Kruger effect, hindsight bias, and the strange fact that smart people are particularly vulnerable to believing strange things.
Each chapter tracks a named study with careful attention to what the evidence does and does not show, including the replication crisis and the statistical critique of famous findings.
This is not a self-help book. There are no five steps to rationality. What you will find is a grounded, evidence-based tour of the machinery of self-deception, along with a few modest techniques borrowed from forecasters, intelligence analysts, and cognitive scientists for catching yourself at the moments when catching yourself matters.
For readers of Daniel Kahneman, Adam Grant, Will Storr, and Robert Sapolsky.
Book two of Dr. James Calloway: Applied Behavioral Psychology.
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