Policy makers, like most people, normally feel that they already know all the psychology and all the sociology they are likely to need for their decisions. I don’t think they are right, but that’s the way it is.
Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.
There is a huge wave of interest in happiness among researchers. There is a lot of happiness coaching. Everybody would like to make people happier.
We don’t see very far in the future, we are very focused on one idea at a time, one problem at a time, and all these are incompatible with rationality as economic theory assumes it.
The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved.
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.
When people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.
Question: So investors shouldn’t delude themselves about beating the market? Answer: “They’re just not going to do it. It’s just not going to happen.”
Most of the time, we think fast. And most of the time we’re really expert at what we’re doing, and most of the time, what we do is right.
Mental effort, I would argue, is relatively rare. Most of the time we coast.
The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.
Most people are highly optimistic most of the time.
Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.
My impression is that the elimination of memories greatly reduces the value of the experience.
Organizations may be better able to tame optimism than individuals are.
People are really happier with friends than they are with their families or their spouse or their child.
Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.
A person who has not made peace with his losses is likely to accept gambles that would be unacceptable to him otherwise.
You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.
It’s very easy for trusted companies to mislead naive customers, and life insurance companies are trusted.