A reliable way of making people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.
Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted.
To be useful, your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability.
The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.
How do people make the judgments and how do they assign decision weights? We start from two simple answers, then qualify them. Here are the oversimplified answers: People overestimate the probabilities of unlikely events. People overweight unlikely events in their decisions.
Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality.
The worse the consequence, the greater the hindsight bias.
Because adherence to standard operating procedures is difficult to second-guess, decision makers who expect to have their decisions scrutinized with hindsight are driven to bureaucratic solutions – and to an extreme reluctance to take risks.
Remember this rule: intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.
System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and the quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions.
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.