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.
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.