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.
