You’re surprised by something, but you don’t really know what surprised you; you recognize someone, but you don’t really know what cues cause you to recognize that person.
People are very complex. And for a psychologist, you get fascinated by the complexity of human beings, and that is what I have lived with, you know, in my career all of my life, is the complexity of human beings.
Hindsight bias makes surprises vanish.
People who know math understand what other mortals understand, but other mortals do not understand them. This asymmetry gives them a presumption of superior ability.
If people are failing, they look inept. If people are succeeding, they look strong and good and competent. That’s the ‘halo effect.’ Your first impression of a thing sets up your subsequent beliefs. If the company looks inept to you, you may assume everything else they do is inept.
Clearly, the decision-making that we rely on in society is fallible. It’s highly fallible, and we should know that.
I enjoy being active, but I look forward to the day when I can retire to the Internet.
Although professionals are able to extract a considerable amount of wealth from amateurs, few stock pickers, if any, have the skill needed to beat the market consistently, year after year.
One thing we have lost, that we had in the past, is a sense of progress, that things are getting better. There is a sense of volatility, but not of progress.
Most people are highly optimistic most of the time.
Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers. It would be useful for us to acknowledge that fact.
Many ideas happen to us. We have intuition, we have feeling, we have emotion, all of that happens, we don’t decide to do it. We don’t control it.
It’s clear that policymakers and economists are going to be interested in the measurement of well-being primarily as it correlates with health; they also want to know whether researchers can validate subjective responses with physiological indices.
An investment said to have an 80% chance of success sounds far more attractive than one with a 20% chance of failure. The mind can’t easily recognize that they are the same.
The concept of happiness has to be reorganised.
Negotiations over a shrinking pie are especially difficult because they require an allocation of losses. People tend to be much more easygoing when they bargain over an expanding pie.
We’re beautiful devices. The devices work well; we’re all experts in what we do. But when the mechanism fails, those failures can tell you a lot about how the mind works.
Slow thinking has the feeling of something you do. It’s deliberate.
For many people, commuting is the worst part of the day, and policies that can make commuting shorter and more convenient would be a straightforward way to reduce minor but widespread suffering.
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