It's a wonderful thing to be optimistic. It keeps you healthy and it keeps you resilient.
Daniel Kahneman
We're blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We're not designed to know how little we know.
We think of our future as anticipated memories.
True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.
Optimism is normal, but some fortunate people are more optimistic than the rest of us. If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias, you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person - you already feel fortunate.
Courage is willingness to take the risk once you know the odds. Optimistic overconfidence means you are taking the risk because you don't know the odds. It's a big difference.
The planning fallacy is that you make a plan, which is usually a best-case scenario. Then you assume that the outcome will follow your plan, even when you should know better.
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.
By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases, and that is true for both humans and artificial intelligence, but the heuristics of AI are not necessarily the human ones.
Experienced happiness refers to your feelings, to how happy you are as you live your life. In contrast, the satisfaction of the remembering self refers to your feelings when you think about your life.
We think, each of us, that we're much more rational than we are. And we think that we make our decisions because we have good reasons to make them. Even when it's the other way around. We believe in the reasons, because we've already made the decision.
Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it.
Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.
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.
Clearly, the decision-making that we rely on in society is fallible. It's highly fallible, and we should know that.
Adaptation seems to be, to a substantial extent, a process of reallocating your attention.
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.
We have no reason to expect the quality of intuition to improve with the importance of the problem. Perhaps the contrary: high-stake problems are likely to involve powerful emotions and strong impulses to action.
Hindsight bias makes surprises vanish.
Nobody would say, 'I'm voting for this guy because he's got the stronger chin,' but that, in fact, is partly what happens.
It's nonsense to say money doesn't buy happiness, but people exaggerate the extent to which more money can buy more happiness.
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.
Optimistic people play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are inventors, entrepreneurs, political and military leaders - not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks.
We're generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments.
Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers. It would be useful for us to acknowledge that fact.
All of us would be better investors if we just made fewer decisions.
The effort invested in 'getting it right' should be commensurate with the importance of the decision.
When you analyze happiness, it turns out that the way you spend your time is extremely important.
If there is time to reflect, slowing down is likely to be a good idea.
Alternative descriptions of the same reality evoke different emotions and different associations.
Friends are sometimes a big help when they share your feelings. In the context of decisions, the friends who will serve you best are those who understand your feelings but are not overly impressed by them.
There's a tendency to look at investments in isolation. Investors focus on the risk of individual securities.
Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.
I think one of the major results of the psychology of decision making is that people's attitudes and feelings about losses and gains are really not symmetric. So we really feel more pain when we lose $10,000 than we feel pleasure when we get $10,000.
Most of the moments of our life - and I calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long; that means that, you know, in a life there are about 600 million of them; in a month, there are about 600,000 - most of them don't leave a trace.
It's very difficult to distinguish between what a person believes and what they say they believe.
If owning stocks is a long-term project for you, following their changes constantly is a very, very bad idea. It's the worst possible thing you can do, because people are so sensitive to short-term losses. If you count your money every day, you'll be miserable.
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.
We are very influenced by completely automatic things that we have no control over, and we don't know we're doing it.
If people do not know what is going to make them better off or give them pleasure, then the idea that you can trust people to do what will give them pleasure becomes questionable.
People are really happier with friends than they are with their families or their spouse or their child.
All of us roughly know what memory is. I mean, memory is sort of the storage of the past. It's the storage of our personal experiences. It's a very big deal.
People talk of the new economy and of reinventing themselves in the workplace, and in that sense most of us are less secure.
After a crisis we tell ourselves we understand why it happened and maintain the illusion that the world is understandable. In fact, we should accept the world is incomprehensible much of the time.
When people evaluate their life, they compare themselves to a standard of what a successful life is, and it turns out that standard tends to be universal: People in Togo and Denmark have the same idea of what a good life is, and a lot of that has to do with money and material prosperity.
The concept of happiness has to be reorganised.
I used to hold a unitary view, in which I proposed that only experienced happiness matters, and that life satisfaction is a fallible estimate of true happiness.
Psychologists really aim to be scientists, white-coat stuff, with elaborate statistics, running experiments.
If you think in terms of major losses, because losses loom much larger than gains - that's a very well-established finding - you tend to be very risk-averse. When you think in terms of wealth, you tend to be much less risk-averse.
It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.
