A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it
Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.
The psychologist, Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.
Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.
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.
The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.
A reliable way of making people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.
Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.
This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.
If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.
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.
A person who has not made peace with his losses is likely to accept gambles that would be unacceptable to him otherwise.
We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.
You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.
We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.
The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.
Familiarity breeds liking.
The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact.
Acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions.
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking of it.
The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.
Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty.
We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appear obvious only after the fact.
The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own.
Jonathan Haidt said in another context, “The emotional tail wags the rational dog.
To derive the most useful information from multiple sources of evidence, you should always try to make these sources independent of each other.
Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.
Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality.
The most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast.
You have no compelling moral intuitions to guide you in solving that problem. Your moral feelings are attached to frames, to descriptions of reality rather than to reality itself.
In a state of flow, however, maintaining focused attention on these absorbing activities requires no exertion of self-control, thereby freeing resources to be directed to the task at hand.
As cognitive scientists have emphasized in recent years, cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain.
Remember this rule: intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.
The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time. Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?
To be useful, your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability.
There's a lot of randomness in the decisions that people make.
A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.
In essence, the optimistic style involves taking credit for successes but little blame for failures.
If you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion.
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.
It is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored.
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.
Conflict between an automatic reaction and an intention to control it is common in our lives.
Because it is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label the mistakes of others than to recognize our own. Questioning what we believe and want is difficult at the
Do we still remember the question we are trying to answer? Or have we substituted an easier one?
System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and the quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions.
The prominence of causal intuitions is a recurrent theme in this book because people are prone to apply causal thinking inappropriately, to situations that require statistical reasoning.
Much of the discussion in this book is about biases of intuition. However, the focus on error does not denigrate human intelligence, any more than the attention to diseases in medical texts denies good health.
People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations.
The goal of venture capitalists is to call the extreme cases correctly, even at the cost of overestimating the prospects of many other ventures.
One of the significant discoveries of cognitive psychologists in recent decades is that switching from one task to another is effortful, especially under time pressure.
You can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and undemanding.
You know you have made a theoretical advance when you can no longer reconstruct why you failed for so long to see the obvious.
An inability to be guided by a “healthy fear” of bad consequences is a disastrous flaw.
The worse the consequence, the greater the hindsight bias.
I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.
