When you analyze happiness, it turns out that the way you spend your time is extremely important.
People have little idea, by and large, of the investment world. They are convinced they have an advantage.
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.
If you’re going to be unreligious, it’s likely going to be due to reflecting on it and finding some things that are hard to believe.
We know that the French are very different from the Americans in their satisfaction with life. They’re much less satisfied. Americans are pretty high up there, while the French are quite low – the world champions in life satisfaction are actually the Danes.
In essence, the optimistic style involves taking credit for successes but little blame for failures.
The concept of loss aversion is certainly the most significant contribution of psychology to behavioral economics.
When action is needed, optimism, even of the mildly delusional variety, may be a good thing.
We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are.
If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.
It was always assumed I would be a professor. I grew up thinking it.
The most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast.
There’s a tendency to look at investments in isolation. Investors focus on the risk of individual securities.
Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.
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.
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.
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.
Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness. A policy to reduce the loneliness of the elderly would certainly reduce suffering.
The brains of humans contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.
The experiencing self lives its life continuously. It has moments of experience, one after the other.