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.
When everybody in a group is susceptible to similar biases, groups are inferior to individuals, because groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.
There are domains in which expertise is not possible. Stock picking is a good example. And in long-term political strategic forecasting, it’s been shown that experts are just not better than a dice-throwing monkey.
We’re not aware of changing our minds even when we do change our minds. And most people, after they change their minds, reconstruct their past opinion – they believe they always thought that.
Adaptation seems to be, to a substantial extent, a process of reallocating your attention.
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.
The idea that you can ask one question and it makes the point – well, that wasn’t how psychology was done at the time.
All of us would be better investors if we just made fewer decisions.
I enjoy being active, but I look forward to the day when I can retire to the Internet.
I’m not a great believer in self-help.
If individuals are rational, there is no need to protect them against their own choices.