Most of the moments of our life – and I calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long; that means that, you know, in a life there are about 600 million of them; in a month, there are about 600,000 – most of them don’t leave a trace.
If people do not know what is going to make them better off or give them pleasure, then the idea that you can trust people to do what will give them pleasure becomes questionable.
People’s mood is really determined primarily by their genetic make-up and personality, and in the second place by their immediate context, and only in the third and fourth place by worries and concerns and other things like that.
The evidence is unequivocal, there’s a great deal more luck than skill in people getting very rich.
We associate leadership with decisiveness. That perception of leadership pushes people to make decisions fairly quickly, lest they be seen as dithering and indecisive.
One thing we have lost, that we had in the past, is a sense of progress, that things are getting better. There is a sense of volatility, but not of progress.
One of the major biases in risky decision making is optimism. Optimism is a source of high-risk thinking.
People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations.
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.
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.
Intuitive diagnosis is reliable when people have a lot of relevant feedback. But people are very often willing to make intuitive diagnoses even when they’re very likely to be wrong.
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.