Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If people can construct a simple and coherent story, they will feel confident regardless of how well grounded it is in reality.
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.
Some achieve a reputation for great successes when in fact all they have done is take chances that reasonable people wouldn't take.
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.
One study found that people who just thought about watching their favorite movie actually raised their endorphin levels by 27 percent.
Managers think of themselves as captains of a ship on a stormy sea. Risk for them is danger, but they are fighting it, very controlled.
Banks are run by executives, and executives protect themselves, and that does not always mean that banks are going to behave rationally.
Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.
When people think of the outcomes of their decisions, they think much more short term than that. They think in terms of gains and losses.
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.
The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of the [investment management] industry.
Some memories come with a very compelling sense of truth about them. And that happens to be the case even with memories that are not true.
You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.
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.
Many ideas happen to us. We have intuition, we have feeling, we have emotion, all of that happens, we don't decide to do it. We don't control it.
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.
A large portion of the weekend effects is explained by differences in the amount of time spent with friends or family between weekends and weekdays.
You can always find an evolutionary quotation for anything. But the question is whether it's functional, which is not the same as being evolutionary.
We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories, our memory tells us stories. That is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.
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."
People exaggerate their confidence in their plans - something we call the planning fallacy... The existence of the plan tends to induce overconfidence.
People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations.
Facts that challenge basic assumptions-and thereby threaten people's livelihood and self-esteem-are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them.
There is general agreement among researchers that nearly all stock pickers, whether they know it or not-and few of them do-are playing a game of chance.
Employers who violate rules of fairness are punished by reduced productivity, and merchants who follow unfair pricing policies can expect to lose sales.
When everybody in a group is susceptible to similar biases, groups are inferior to individuals, because groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.
Lucky risk takers use hindsight to reinforce their feeling that their gut is very wise. Hindsight also reinforces others' trust in that individual's gut.
I would not advise people to buy a car or house without making a list. You will probably improve your intuitions by making a list and then sleeping on it.
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.
To better avoid errors, you should talk to people who disagree with you and you should talk to people who are not in the same emotional situation you are.
Being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things and more time doing compulsory things and feeling stressed.
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.
The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.
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.
All of us roughly know what memory is. I mean, memory is sort of the storage of the past. It's the storage of our personal experiences. It's a very big deal.
Overconfidence is a powerful source of illusions, primarily determined by the quality and coherence of the story that you can construct, not by its validity.
People should be conscious of the large contribution made by anything that gets people together easily in the reduction of loneliness and emotional well-being.
I used to hold a unitary view, in which I proposed that only experienced happiness matters, and that life satisfaction is a fallible estimate of true happiness.
A plan is only a scenario, and almost by definition, it is optimistic... As a result, scenario planning can lead to a serious underestimate of the risk of failure.
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.
People who know math understand what other mortals understand, but other mortals do not understand them. This asymmetry gives them a presumption of superior ability.
We associate leadership with decisiveness. That perception of leadership pushes people to make decisions fairly quickly, lest they be seen as dithering and indecisive.
We're beautiful devices. The devices work well; we're all experts in what we do. But when the mechanism fails, those failures can tell you a lot about how the mind works.
You're surprised by something, but you don't really know what surprised you; you recognize someone, but you don't really know what cues cause you to recognize that person.
Happiness is determined by factors like your health, your family relationships and friendships, and above all by feeling that you are in control of how you spend your time.
Acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions.
An investment said to have an 80% chance of success sounds far more attractive than one with a 20% chance of failure. The mind can't easily recognize that they are the same.
The planning fallacy is that you make a plan, which is usually a best-case scenario. Then you assume that the outcome will follow your plan, even when you should know better.
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.
Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness. A policy to reduce the loneliness of the elderly would certainly reduce suffering.