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.
People should be conscious of the large contribution made by anything that gets people together easily in the reduction of loneliness and emotional well-being.
The experiencing self lives its life continuously. It has moments of experience, one after the other.
One emphasis of my research has been on the question of how people spend their time. Time is the ultimate finite resource, or course, so the question of how people spend it would seem to be important.
Divorced women, compared to married women, are less satisfied with their lives, which is not surprising. But they’re actually more cheerful, when you look at the average mood they’re in in the course of the day.
If owning stocks is a long-term project for you, following their changes constantly is a very, very bad idea. It’s the worst possible thing you can do, because people are so sensitive to short-term losses. If you count your money every day, you’ll be miserable.
When you look at the books about well-being, you see one word – it’s happiness. People do not distinguish.
We are very influenced by completely automatic things that we have no control over, and we don’t know we’re doing it.
True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.
Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.
Experienced happiness refers to your feelings, to how happy you are as you live your life. In contrast, the satisfaction of the remembering self refers to your feelings when you think about your life.
Friends are sometimes a big help when they share your feelings. In the context of decisions, the friends who will serve you best are those who understand your feelings but are not overly impressed by them.