Clearly, the decision-making that we rely on in society is fallible. It’s highly fallible, and we should know that.
Laziness is built deep into our nature.
Endlessly amused by people’s minds.
We can’t live in a state of perpetual doubt, so we make up the best story possible and we live as if the story were true.
Hindsight bias makes surprises vanish.
The conclusion is straightforward : self-control requires attention and effort.
The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.
We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.
Acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions.
Survival prospects are poor for an animal that is not suspicious of novelty.
I have always emphasized the willingness to discard.
Groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.
Individual investors predictably flock to stocks in companies that are in the news.
Banks are run by executives, and executives protect themselves, and that does not always mean that banks are going to behave rationally.
Alternative descriptions of the same reality evoke different emotions and different associations.
Slow thinking has the feeling of something you do. It’s deliberate.
My interest in well-being evolved from my interest in decision making – from raising the question of whether people know what they will want in the future and whether the things that people want for themselves will make them happy.
We have a very narrow view of what is going on.
What happens with fear is that probability doesn’t matter very much. That is, once I have raised the possibility that something terrible can happen to your child, even though the possibility is remote, you may find it very difficult to think of anything else. Emotion becomes dominant.
You can always find an evolutionary quotation for anything. But the question is whether it’s functional, which is not the same as being evolutionary.