Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.
The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen.
People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory – and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media.
Plans are best-case scenarios. Let’s avoid anchoring on plans when we forecast actual outcomes. Thinking about ways the plan could go wrong is one way to do it.
Searching for wisdom in historic events requires an act of faith – a belief in the existence of recurrent patterns waiting to be discovered.
There is good reason to believe that the administration of justice is infected by predictable incoherence in several domains. The evidence is drawn in part from experiments, including studies of mock juries, and in part from observation of patterns in legislation, regulation, and litigation.
In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.
The evidence of priming studies suggests that reminding people of their mortality increases the appeal of authoritarian ideas, which may become reassuring in the context of the terror of death.
Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.
Mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions.
We don’t choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. Even when we think about the future, we don’t think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories.
Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.
So your emotional state really has a lot to do with what you’re thinking about and what you’re paying attention to.
Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers. It would be useful for us to acknowledge that fact.
We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.
The ‘Instagram Generation’ now experiences the present as an anticipated memory.
Many ideas happen to us. We have intuition, we have feeling, we have emotion, all of that happens, we don’t decide to do it. We don’t control it.
The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.
We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.
It doesn’t take many observations to think you’ve spotted a trend, and it’s probably not a trend at all.