During a mental multiplication, the pupil normally dilated to a large size within a few seconds and stayed large as long as the individual kept working on the problem; it contracted immediately when she found a solution or gave up.
Why did you stop working just now?” The answer from inside the lab was often, “How did you know?” to which we would reply, “We have a window to your soul.
Why be concerned with gossip? Because it is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label the mistakes of others than to recognize our own.
I was surprised to see that the pupil remained small and did not noticeably dilate as she talked and listened. Unlike the tasks that we were studying, the mundane conversation apparently demanded little or no effort – no more than retaining two or three digits.
How many animals of each kind did Moses take into the ark?
The remembering self’s neglect of duration, its exaggerated emphasis on peaks and ends, and its susceptibility to hindsight combine to yield distorted reflections of our actual experience.
Dawes showed that marital stability is well predicted by a formula: frequency of lovemaking minus frequency of quarrels.
Errors in the initial budget are not always innocent. The authors of unrealistic plans are often driven by the desire to get the plan approved – whether by their superiors or by a client – supported by the knowledge that projects are rarely abandoned unfinished merely because of overruns in costs or completion times. In.
You can see why the common admonition to “act calm and kind regardless of how you feel” is very good advice: you are likely to be rewarded by actually feeling calm and kind.
Her favorite position is beside herself, and her favorite sport is jumping to conclusions.
The testers found that training attention not only improved executive control; scores on nonverbal tests of intelligence also improved and the improvement was maintained for several months.
Loss aversion is a powerful conservative force that favors minimal changes from the status quo.
A stupid decision that works out well becomes a brilliant decision in hindsight.
Changing one’s mind about human nature is hard work, and changing one’s mind for the worse about oneself is even harder. Nisbett.
Simple equally weighted formulas based on existing statistics or on common sense are often very good predictors of significant outcomes. In a memorable example, Dawes showed that marital stability is well predicted by a formula: frequency of lovemaking minus frequency of quarrels You don’t want your result to be a negative number.
Not all illusions are visual. There are illusions of thought, which we call cognitive illusions.
The amount of evidence and its quality do not count for much, because poor evidence can make a very good story. For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs. Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous – and it is also essential.
Rational or not, fear is painful and debilitating, and policy makers must endeavor to protect the public from fear, not only from real dangers.
As Nassim Taleb pointed out in The Black Swan, our tendency to construct and believe coherent narratives of the past makes it difficult for us to accept the limits of our forecasting ability. Everything makes sense in hindsight, a fact that financial pundits exploit every evening as they offer convincing accounts of the day’s events.
As in many other games, moving first is an advantage in single-issue negotiations – for example, when price is the only issue to be settled between a buyer and a seller. As you may have experienced when negotiating for the first time in a bazaar, the initial anchor has a powerful effect. My.