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Thinking, Fast and Slow

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As we navigate our lives, we normally allow ourselves to be guided by impressions and feelings, and the confidence we have in our intuitive beliefs and preferences is usually justified. But not always. We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are. — location: 44 ^ref-46277

we had not developed an intuitive sense of the reliability of statistical results observed in small samples. — location: 62 ^ref-12209

The pleasure we found in working together made us exceptionally patient; it is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored. — location: 71 ^ref-13966

A recurrent theme of this book is that luck plays a large role in every story of success; it is almost always easy to identify a small change in the story that would have turned a remarkable achievement into a mediocre outcome. Our story was no exception. — location: 145 ^ref-31953

“Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk,” — location: 157 ^ref-30098

“The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.” — location: 183 ^ref-5748

emotion now looms much larger in our understanding of intuitive judgments and choices than it did in the past. — location: 196 ^ref-36093

affect heuristic, where judgments and decisions are guided directly by feelings of liking and disliking, with little deliberation or reasoning. — location: 198 ^ref-32909

when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution. — location: 205 ^ref-53948

A goal is to introduce a language for thinking and talking about the mind. — location: 219 ^ref-1249

a puzzling limitation of our mind: our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in. — location: 223 ^ref-3466

the worse episode leaves a better memory. — location: 236 ^ref-13911

what makes the experiencing self happy is not quite the same as what satisfies the remembering self. — location: 238 ^ref-39213

we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness. — location: 334 ^ref-43318

many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions. They apparently find cognitive effort at least mildly unpleasant and avoid it as much as possible. — location: 691 ^ref-10249

cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain. — location: 808 ^ref-5229

the influencing of an action by the idea—is known as the ideomotor effect. — location: 851 ^ref-39105

“act calm and kind regardless of how you feel” is very good advice: you are likely to be rewarded by actually feeling calm and kind. — location: 871 ^ref-8421

Money-primed people become more independent than they would be without the associative trigger. They persevered almost twice as long in trying to solve a very difficult problem before they asked the experimenter for help, a crisp demonstration of increased self-reliance. — location: 885 ^ref-30372

the idea of money primes individualism: a reluctance to be involved with others, to depend on others, or to accept demands from others. — location: 892 ^ref-6539

Feeling that one’s soul is stained appears to trigger a desire to cleanse one’s body, an impulse that has been dubbed the “Lady Macbeth effect.” — location: 903 ^ref-25334

your subjective experience consists largely of the story that your System 2 tells itself about what is going on. Priming phenomena arise in System 1, and you have no conscious access to them. — location: 916 ^ref-8112

“They were primed to find flaws, and this is exactly what they found.” — location: 940 ^ref-62157

Hearing a speaker when you are in a good mood, or even when you have a pencil stuck crosswise in your mouth to make you “smile,” also induces cognitive ease. — location: 956 ^ref-21333

The impression of familiarity is produced by System 1, and System 2 relies on that impression for a true/false judgment. — location: 999 ^ref-10280

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. — location: 1002 ^ref-46542

anything you can do to reduce cognitive strain will help, so you should first maximize legibility. — location: 1011 ^ref-64191

couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility. — location: 1020 ^ref-50756

System 2 is lazy and that mental effort is aversive. — location: 1032 ^ref-50175

On most occasions, however, the lazy System 2 will adopt the suggestions of System 1 and march on. — location: 1042 ^ref-43669

Cognitive strain, whatever its source, mobilizes System 2, which is more likely to reject the intuitive answer suggested by System 1. — location: 1060 ^ref-33890

It appears to be a feature of System 1 that cognitive ease is associated with good feelings. — location: 1066 ^ref-59519

putting the participants in a good mood before the test by having them think happy thoughts more than doubled accuracy. — location: 1120 ^ref-46944

Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition. — location: 1122 ^ref-55123

Cognitive ease is both a cause and a consequence of a pleasant feeling. — location: 1128 ^ref-58813

an emotional response to the cognitive ease of a triad of words mediates impressions of coherence. — location: 1145 ^ref-29337

“I’m in a very good mood today, and my System 2 is weaker than usual. I should be extra careful.” — location: 1151 ^ref-9017

thinking, that event was destined to be the explanation of whatever happened in the market on that day. — location: 1231 ^ref-37343

but a statement that can explain two contradictory outcomes explains nothing at all. — location: 1232 ^ref-40153

We are evidently ready from birth to have impressions of causality, which do not depend on reasoning about patterns of causation. — location: 1253 ^ref-20525

that we are born prepared to make intentional attributions: — location: 1261 ^ref-27239

Very little repetition is needed for a new experience to feel normal!” — location: 1284 ^ref-53653

“She can’t accept that she was just unlucky; she needs a causal story. She will end up thinking that someone intentionally sabotaged her work.” — location: 1287 ^ref-1730

System 1 does not keep track of alternatives that it rejects, or even of the fact that there were alternatives. — location: 1313 ^ref-26532

when System 2 is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything. — location: 1328 ^ref-2847

System 1 is gullible and biased to believe, System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy. — location: 1329 ^ref-6902

that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted. — location: 1330 ^ref-9884

In other situations, evidence accumulates gradually and the interpretation is shaped by the emotion attached to the first impression. — location: 1350 ^ref-58974

Ben. The initial traits in the list change the very meaning of the traits that appear later. The stubbornness of an intelligent person is seen as likely to be justified and may actually evoke respect, but intelligence in an envious and stubborn person makes him more dangerous. — location: 1355 ^ref-51284

first. I had told the students that the two essays had equal weight, but that was not true: the first one had a much greater impact on the final grade than the second. — location: 1370 ^ref-19988

The uncomfortable inconsistency that was revealed when I switched to the new procedure was real: it reflected both the inadequacy of any single question as a measure of what the student knew and the unreliability of my own grading. — location: 1383 ^ref-61909

If the observers share a bias, the aggregation of judgments will not reduce it. Allowing the observers to influence each other effectively reduces the size of the sample, and with it the precision of the group estimate. — location: 1391 ^ref-62884

To derive the most useful information from multiple sources of evidence, you should always try to make these sources independent of each other. — location: 1393 ^ref-33723

The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of — location: 1401 ^ref-21107

those who speak early and assertively, causing others to line up behind them. — location: 1401 ^ref-43149

And there also remains a bias favoring the first impression. — location: 1419 ^ref-37211

The combination of a coherence-seeking System 1 with a lazy System 2 implies that System 2 will endorse many intuitive beliefs, which closely reflect the impressions generated by System 1. — location: 1419 ^ref-3445

Furthermore, participants who saw one-sided evidence were more confident of their judgments than those who saw both sides. — location: 1441 ^ref-5838

It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. — location: 1443 ^ref-23994

“They didn’t want more information that might spoil their story. WYSIATI.” — location: 1466 ^ref-64236

approach. Good mood and cognitive ease are the human equivalents of assessments of safety and familiarity. — location: 1484 ^ref-9378

In about 70% of the races for senator, congressman, and governor, the election winner was the candidate whose face had earned a higher rating of competence. — location: 1498 ^ref-55082

ratings of competence were far more predictive of voting outcomes in Todorov’s study than ratings of likability. — location: 1500 ^ref-49188

Evidently, the relative importance of System 1 in determining voting choices is not the same for all people. — location: 1511 ^ref-33770

oil. The almost complete neglect of quantity in such emotional contexts has been confirmed many times. — location: 1543 ^ref-33076

down. An intention to answer one question evoked another, which was not only superfluous but actually detrimental to the main task. — location: 1582 ^ref-45617

that the combination of a mental shotgun with intensity matching explains why we have intuitive judgments about many things that we know little about. — location: 1591 ^ref-47288

a lazy System 2 often follows the path of least effort and endorses a heuristic answer without much scrutiny of whether it is truly appropriate. — location: 1652 ^ref-48612

cases, satisfaction in the particular domain dominates happiness reports. — location: 1697 ^ref-14065

The present state of mind looms very large when people evaluate their happiness. — location: 1699 ^ref-19484

enforcer. Its search for information and arguments is mostly constrained to information that is consistent with existing beliefs, not with an intention to examine them. An active, coherence-seeking System 1 suggests solutions to an undemanding System 2. — location: 1716 ^ref-43475

when endorsed by System 2 these become beliefs, attitudes, and intentions — location: 1731 ^ref-25630

The rural lifestyle cannot explain both very high and very low incidence of kidney cancer. — location: 1761 ^ref-19840

extreme outcomes (very high and/or very low cancer rates) are most likely to be found in sparsely populated counties. This is all there is to the story. — location: 1781 ^ref-972

call artifacts, observations that are produced entirely by some aspect of the method of research—in this case, by differences in sample size. — location: 1789 ^ref-53208

But “knowing” is not a yes-no affair — location: 1792 ^ref-16743

even sophisticated researchers have poor intuitions and a wobbly understanding of sampling effects. — location: 1800 ^ref-48879

The author pointed out that psychologists commonly chose samples so small that they exposed themselves to a 50% risk of failing to confirm their true hypotheses! — location: 1814 ^ref-22826

we are prone to exaggerate the consistency and coherence of what we see. — location: 1851 ^ref-6004

“To the untrained eye,” Feller remarks, “randomness appears as regularity or tendency to cluster.” — location: 1877 ^ref-34637

that if you follow your intuition, you will more often than not err by misclassifying a random event as systematic. — location: 1901 ^ref-35598

We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random. — location: 1902 ^ref-57085

Causal explanations of chance events are inevitably wrong. — location: 1922 ^ref-40475

“well-intentioned child who turns down exceptionally loud music to meet a parent’s demand that it be played at a ‘reasonable’ volume may fail to adjust sufficiently from a high anchor, and may feel that genuine attempts at compromise are being overlooked.” — location: 1968 ^ref-22051

lines, you are likely to stop when you are no longer sure you should go farther—at the near edge of the region of uncertainty. — location: 1976 ^ref-37840

Insufficient adjustment is a failure of a weak or lazy System 2. — location: 1981 ^ref-40038

that any prime will tend to evoke information that is compatible with it. — location: 2010 ^ref-53291

The only difference between the two groups was that the students conceded that they were influenced by the anchor, while the professionals denied that influence. — location: 2030 ^ref-316

The anchoring effect was above 30%, indicating that increasing the initial request by $100 brought a return of $30 in average willingness to pay. — location: 2040 ^ref-53580

anchors do not have their effects because people believe they are informative. — location: 2053 ^ref-7212

that if you think the other side has made an outrageous proposal, you should not come back with an equally outrageous counteroffer, creating a gap that will be difficult to bridge in further negotiations. Instead you should make a scene, storm out or threaten to do so, and make it clear—to yourself as well as to the other side—that you will not continue the negotiation with that number on the table. — location: 2071 ^ref-42795

In general, a strategy of deliberately “thinking the opposite” may be a good defense against anchoring effects, because it negates the biased recruitment of thoughts that produces these effects. — location: 2077 ^ref-51317

Consider the effect of capping awards at $1 million. This rule would eliminate all larger awards, but the anchor would also pull up the size of many awards that would otherwise be much smaller. It would almost certainly benefit serious offenders and large firms much more than small ones. — location: 2082 ^ref-33257

a message, unless it is immediately rejected as a lie, will have the same effect on the associative system regardless of its reliability. — location: 2090 ^ref-31827

our thoughts and our behavior are influenced, much more than we know or want, by the environment of the moment. — location: 2097 ^ref-47296

you should assume that any number that is on the table has had an anchoring effect on you, and if the stakes are high you should mobilize yourself (your System 2) to combat the effect. — location: 2103 ^ref-20103

“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.” — location: 2107 ^ref-4166

The same bias contributes to the common observation that many members of a collaborative team feel they have done more than their share and also feel that the others are not adequately grateful for their individual contributions. — location: 2156 ^ref-25996

people who had just listed twelve instances rated themselves as less assertive than people who had listed only six. — location: 2175 ^ref-12090

Self-ratings were dominated by the ease with which examples had come to mind. — location: 2177 ^ref-50245

the frowners would have more difficulty retrieving examples of assertive behavior and would therefore rate themselves as relatively lacking in assertiveness. And so it was. — location: 2183 ^ref-38721

are less confident in a choice when they are asked to produce more arguments to support — location: 2187 ^ref-27990

it — location: 2187 ^ref-18397

are less confident that an event was avoidable after listing more ways it could have been avoided — location: 2187 ^ref-58353

if I am having so much more trouble than expected coming up with instances of my assertiveness, then I can’t be very assertive. — location: 2196 ^ref-53845

result: judgments are no longer influenced by ease of retrieval when the experience of fluency is given a spurious explanation by the presence of curved or straight text boxes, by the background color of the screen, or by other irrelevant factors that the experimenters dreamed up. — location: 2204 ^ref-32163

the ease with which instances come to mind is a System 1 heuristic, which is replaced by a focus on content when System 2 is more engaged. — location: 2226 ^ref-8089

people who let themselves be guided by System 1 are more strongly susceptible to availability biases than others who are in a state of higher vigilance. — location: 2227 ^ref-56906

protective actions, whether by individuals or governments, are usually designed to be adequate to the worst disaster actually experienced. — location: 2254 ^ref-20578

reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed. — location: 2271 ^ref-51998

the ease with which ideas of various risks come to mind and the emotional reactions to these risks are inextricably linked. — location: 2273 ^ref-25265

that people who do not display the appropriate emotions before they decide, sometimes because of brain damage, also have an impaired ability to make good decisions. — location: 2282 ^ref-44949

An inability to be guided by a “healthy fear” of bad consequences is a disastrous flaw. — location: 2283 ^ref-38118

risks. Although they had received no relevant evidence, the technology they now liked more than before was also perceived as less risky. — location: 2295 ^ref-55396

illustrates a basic limitation in the ability of our mind to deal with small risks: we either ignore them altogether or give them far too much weight—nothing in between. — location: 2369 ^ref-14650

it is difficult to reason oneself into a state of complete calm. — location: 2379 ^ref-39030

policy makers must endeavor to protect the public — location: 2387 ^ref-30918

from fear, not only from real dangers. — location: 2388 ^ref-20936

Psychology should inform the design of risk policies that combine the experts’ knowledge with the public’s emotions and intuitions. — location: 2393 ^ref-38693

expected, he substituted a judgment of representativeness for the probability he was asked to assess. — location: 2458 ^ref-9755

The question about probability (likelihood) was difficult, but the question about similarity was easier, and it was answered instead. — location: 2462 ^ref-43436

This is a serious mistake, because judgments of similarity and probability are not constrained by the same logical rules. — location: 2463 ^ref-17208

Even when the heuristic has some validity, exclusive reliance on it is associated with grave sins against statistical logic. — location: 2497 ^ref-38024

that instructing people to “think like a statistician” enhanced the use of base-rate information, while the instruction to “think like a clinician” had the opposite effect. — location: 2512 ^ref-22415

Frowning, as we have seen, generally increases the vigilance of System 2 and reduces both overconfidence and the reliance on intuition. — location: 2516 ^ref-62411

Their System 2 “knows” that base rates are relevant even when they are not explicitly mentioned, but applies that knowledge only when it invests special effort in the task. — location: 2524 ^ref-29225

true. There is one thing you can do when you have doubts about the quality of the evidence: let your judgments of probability stay close to the base rate. — location: 2532 ^ref-13407

Bayes’s rule specifies how prior beliefs (in the examples of this chapter, base rates) should be combined with the diagnosticity of the evidence, the degree to which it favors the hypothesis over the alternative. For example, if you believe that 3% of graduate students are enrolled in computer science (the base rate), and you also believe that the description of Tom W is 4 times more likely for a graduate student in that field than in other fields, then Bayes’s rule says you must believe that the probability that Tom W is a computer scientist is now 11%. If the base rate had been 80%, the new degree of belief would be 94.1%. And so on. — location: 2546 ^ref-61525

that base rates matter, even in the presence of evidence about the case at hand. — location: 2551 ^ref-16585

Anchor your judgment of the probability of an outcome on a plausible base rate. Question the diagnosticity of your evidence. — location: 2554 ^ref-38730

a conjunction fallacy, which people commit when they judge a conjunction of two events (here, bank teller and feminist) to be more probable than one of the events (bank teller) in a direct comparison. — location: 2617 ^ref-36234

The most coherent stories are not necessarily the most probable, but they are plausible, and the notions of coherence, plausibility, and probability are easily confused by the unwary. — location: 2632 ^ref-16929

clients: adding detail to scenarios makes them more persuasive, but less likely to come true. — location: 2640 ^ref-21880

If the average dominates the evaluation, it is not surprising that Set B is valued more. — location: 2670 ^ref-18257

the frequency representation, as it is known, makes it easy to appreciate that one group is wholly included in the other. — location: 2710 ^ref-34224

a question phrased as “how many?” makes you think of individuals, but the same question phrased as “what percentage?” does not. — location: 2711 ^ref-57678

representativeness can block the application of an obvious logical rule is also of some interest. — location: 2721 ^ref-63886

logic rules in joint evaluation. — location: 2725 ^ref-13606

to demolish a case they raise doubts about the strongest arguments that favor it; to discredit — location: 2738 ^ref-64311

a witness, they focus on the weakest part of the testimony. — location: 2739 ^ref-9410

“They added a cheap gift to the expensive product, and made the whole deal less attractive. Less is more in this case.” — location: 2748 ^ref-33830

Statistical base rates are facts about a population to which a case belongs, but they are not relevant to the individual case. Causal base rates change your view of how the individual case came to be. — location: 2782 ^ref-29920

In sensitive social contexts, we do not want to draw possibly erroneous conclusions about the individual from the statistics of the group. — location: 2803 ^ref-12076

difference. This base rate is a purely statistical fact about the ensemble from which cases have been drawn. — location: 2823 ^ref-7077

individuals feel relieved of responsibility when they know that others have heard the same request for help. — location: 2847 ^ref-45484

In the absence of useful new information, the Bayesian solution is to stay with the base rates. — location: 2871 ^ref-28159

When we teach our students about the behavior of people in the helping experiment, we expect them to learn something they had not known before; we wish to change how they think about people’s behavior in a particular situation. This goal was not accomplished in the Nisbett-Borgida study, and there is no reason to believe that the results would have been different if they had chosen another surprising psychological experiment. — location: 2880 ^ref-46858

To teach students any psychology they did not know before, you must surprise them. — location: 2891 ^ref-27858

Nisbett and Borgida found that when they presented their students with a surprising statistical fact, the students managed to learn nothing at all. But when the students were surprised by individual cases—two nice people who had not helped—they immediately made the generalization and inferred that helping is more difficult than they had thought. — location: 2892 ^ref-49763

The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact. — location: 2899 ^ref-58793

surprising individual cases have a powerful impact and are a more effective tool for teaching psychology because the incongruity must be resolved and embedded in a causal story. — location: 2902 ^ref-10293

You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general. — location: 2904 ^ref-44234

rewards for improved performance work better than punishment of mistakes. — location: 2913 ^ref-62998

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. — location: 2937 ^ref-55853

The fact that you observe regression when you predict an early event from a later event should help convince you that regression does not have a causal explanation. — location: 2969 ^ref-64831

The commentator had obviously detected regression to the mean and had invented a causal story for which there was no evidence. — location: 2979 ^ref-4572

The point to remember is that the change from the first to the second jump does not need a causal explanation. — location: 2981 ^ref-40501

the following are some examples of — location: 3016 ^ref-27614

coefficients: — location: 3016 ^ref-59441

that correlation and regression are not two concepts—they are different perspectives on the same concept. — location: 3024 ^ref-26252

whenever the correlation between two scores is imperfect, there will be regression to the mean. — location: 3025 ^ref-20111

equivalent. If the correlation between the intelligence of spouses is less than perfect (and if men and women on average do not differ in intelligence), then it is a mathematical inevitability that highly intelligent women will be married to husbands who are on average less intelligent than they are (and vice versa, of course). The observed regression to the mean cannot be more interesting or more explainable than the imperfect correlation. — location: 3035 ^ref-24511

Causal explanations will be evoked when regression is detected, but they will be wrong because the truth is that regression to the mean has an explanation but does not have a cause. — location: 3042 ^ref-8632

Bull. In order to conclude that an energy drink—or any other treatment—is effective, you must compare a group of patients who receive this treatment to a “control group” that receives no treatment (or, better, receives a placebo). — location: 3058 ^ref-44104

the aim of the experiment is to determine whether the treated patients improve more than regression can explain. — location: 3060 ^ref-13072

the concept of regression is far from obvious. — location: 3084 ^ref-52274

“Our screening procedure is good but not perfect, so we should anticipate regression. We shouldn’t be surprised that the very best candidates often fail to meet our expectations.” — location: 3089 ^ref-19164

intuitive predictions are almost completely insensitive to the actual predictive quality of the evidence. When a link is found, as in the case of Julie’s early reading, WYSIATI applies: your associative memory quickly and automatically constructs the best possible story from the information available. — location: 3114 ^ref-41358

the prediction of the future is not distinguished from an evaluation of current evidence—prediction matches evaluation. — location: 3153 ^ref-50715

They had simply translated their own grades onto the scale used in officer school, applying intensity matching. Once again, the failure to address the (considerable) uncertainty of their predictions had led them to predictions that were completely nonregressive. — location: 3168 ^ref-39682

the correlation between two measures—in the present case reading age and GPA—is equal to the proportion of shared factors among their determinants. — location: 3179 ^ref-59029

Here are the directions for how to get there in four simple steps: — location: 3181 ^ref-6207

Start with an estimate of average GPA. Determine the GPA that matches your impression of the evidence. Estimate the correlation between your evidence and GPA. If the correlation is .30, move 30% of the distance from the average to the matching GPA. — location: 3182 ^ref-54387

You still make errors when your predictions are unbiased, but the errors are smaller and do not favor either high or low outcomes. — location: 3200 ^ref-20027

intuitive predictions tend to be overconfident and overly extreme. — location: 3215 ^ref-36965

In such cases, the use of extreme language (“very good prospect,” “serious risk of default”) may have some justification for the comfort it provides, even if the information on which these judgments are based is of only modest validity. — location: 3232 ^ref-42608

rational individuals predicting the revenue of a firm will not be bound to a single number—they should consider the range of uncertainty around the most likely outcome. — location: 3236 ^ref-59045

If you choose to delude yourself by accepting extreme predictions, however, you will do well to remain aware of your self-indulgence. — location: 3239 ^ref-43646

Extreme predictions and a willingness to predict rare events from weak evidence are both manifestations of System 1. — location: 3259 ^ref-17531

your intuitions will deliver predictions that are too extreme and you will be inclined to put far too much faith in them. — location: 3262 ^ref-60405

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. — location: 3285 ^ref-47390

The ultimate test of an explanation is whether it would have made the event predictable in advance. — location: 3308 ^ref-28576

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance. — location: 3322 ^ref-3181

The core of the illusion is that we believe we understand the past, which implies that the future also should be knowable, but in fact we understand the past less than we believe we do. — location: 3332 ^ref-28235

To think clearly about the future, we need to clean up the language that we use in labeling the beliefs we had in the past. — location: 3336 ^ref-22293

Once you adopt a new view of the world (or of any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed. — location: 3343 ^ref-12665

Asked to reconstruct their former beliefs, people retrieve their current ones instead—an instance of substitution—and many cannot believe that they ever felt differently. — location: 3348 ^ref-1785

Hindsight bias has pernicious effects on the evaluations of decision makers. It leads observers to assess the quality of a decision not by whether the process was sound but by whether its outcome was good or bad. — location: 3360 ^ref-47255

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. — location: 3366 ^ref-58828

A few lucky gambles can crown a reckless leader with a halo of prescience and boldness. — location: 3388 ^ref-65180

  1. The coefficient was defined earlier (in relation to regression to the mean) by the extent to which two measures are determined by shared factors. — location: 3399 ^ref-17397

time. A correlation of .30 implies that you would find the stronger CEO leading the stronger firm in about 60% of the pairs—an improvement of a mere 10 percentage points over random guessing, hardly grist for the hero worship of CEOs we so often witness. — location: 3406 ^ref-46220

The CEO of a successful company is likely to be called flexible, methodical, and decisive. Imagine that a year has passed and things have gone sour. The same executive is now described as confused, rigid, and authoritarian. — location: 3420 ^ref-37613

Because of the halo effect, we get the causal relationship backward: we are prone to believe that the firm fails because its CEO is rigid, when the truth is that the CEO appears to be rigid because the firm is failing. This is how illusions of understanding are born. — location: 3424 ^ref-53165

Knowing the importance of luck, you should be particularly suspicious when highly consistent patterns emerge from the comparison of successful and less successful firms. In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages. — location: 3433 ^ref-18912

The average gap must shrink, because the original gap was due in good part to luck, which contributed both to the success of the top firms and to the lagging performance of the rest. — location: 3443 ^ref-47148

Stories of how businesses rise and fall strike a chord with readers by offering what the human mind needs: a simple message of triumph and failure that identifies clear causes and ignores the determinative power of luck and the inevitability of regression. — location: 3445 ^ref-13870

These stories induce and maintain an illusion of understanding, imparting lessons of little enduring value to readers who are all too eager to believe them. — location: 3447 ^ref-14388

We were quite willing to declare, “This one will never make it,” “That fellow is mediocre, but he should do okay,” or “He will be a star.” We felt no need to question our forecasts, moderate them, or equivocate. — location: 3490 ^ref-20866

The dismal truth about the quality of our predictions had no effect whatsoever on how we evaluated candidates and very little effect on the confidence we felt in our judgments and predictions about individuals. — location: 3499 ^ref-57478

Subjective confidence in a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that this judgment is correct. Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true. — location: 3516 ^ref-5580

men acted on their useless ideas significantly more often than women, and that as a result women achieved better investment results than men. — location: 3550 ^ref-13709

a basic test of skill: persistent achievement. — location: 3560 ^ref-43562

In highly efficient markets, however, educated guesses are no more accurate than blind guesses. — location: 3570 ^ref-41802

contrary to what they could learn from a dispassionate evaluation of their personal experience? — location: 3607 ^ref-62512

skill in evaluating the business prospects of a firm is not sufficient for successful stock trading, where the key question is whether the information about the firm is already incorporated in the price of its stock. Traders apparently lack the skill to answer this crucial question, but they appear to be ignorant of their ignorance. — location: 3612 ^ref-27775

Those who know more forecast very slightly better than those who know less. But those with the most knowledge are often less reliable. The reason is that the person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident. — location: 3648 ^ref-5956

if a test predicts an important outcome with a validity of .20 or .30, the test should be used. — location: 3676 ^ref-6164

The line that separates the possibly predictable future from the unpredictable distant future is yet to be drawn. — location: 3679 ^ref-17799

Ashenfelter’s formula is extremely — location: 3730 ^ref-12319

accurate—the correlation between his predictions and actual prices is above .90. — location: 3731 ^ref-35123

predictions. Complexity may work in the odd case, but more often than not it reduces validity. Simple combinations of features are better. — location: 3733 ^ref-4150

it is possible to develop useful algorithms without any prior statistical research. — location: 3769 ^ref-737

matters. The story of a child dying because an algorithm made a mistake is more poignant than the story of the same tragedy occurring as a result of human error, and the difference in emotional intensity is readily translated into a moral preference. — location: 3823 ^ref-51233

intuition adds value even in the justly derided selection interview, but only after a disciplined collection of objective information and disciplined scoring of separate traits. — location: 3873 ^ref-17656

do. First, select a few traits that are prerequisites for success in this position (technical proficiency, engaging personality, reliability, and so on). — location: 3885 ^ref-31096

six dimensions is a good number. The traits you choose should be as independent as possible from each other, and you should feel that you can assess them reliably by asking a few factual questions. — location: 3886 ^ref-40555

you are much more likely to find the best candidate if you use this procedure than if you do what people normally do in such situations, which is to go into the interview unprepared and to make choices by an overall intuitive judgment such as “I looked into his eyes and liked what I saw.” — location: 3894 ^ref-9977

“adversarial collaborations,” in which scholars who disagree on the science agree to write a jointly authored paper on their differences, and sometimes conduct research together. — location: 3911 ^ref-50453

do not trust anyone—including yourself—to tell you how much you should trust their judgment. — location: 4010 ^ref-6554

intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment. — location: 4035 ^ref-13340

Whether professionals have a chance to develop intuitive expertise depends essentially on the quality and speed of feedback, as well as on sufficient opportunity to practice. — location: 4043 ^ref-61590

contrast, radiologists obtain little information about the accuracy of the diagnoses they make and about the pathologies they fail to detect. Anesthesiologists are therefore in a better position to develop useful intuitive skills. If an anesthesiologist says, “I have a feeling something is wrong,” everyone in the operating room should be prepared for an emergency. — location: 4053 ^ref-63303

justified. Short-term anticipation and long-term forecasting are different tasks, and the therapist has had adequate opportunity to learn one but not the other. — location: 4059 ^ref-50914

The unrecognized limits of professional skill — location: 4062 ^ref-59290

help explain why experts are often overconfident. — location: 4063 ^ref-31431

associative memory also generates subjectively compelling intuitions that are false. — location: 4069 ^ref-49308

on the way to near perfection some mistakes are made with great confidence. — location: 4071 ^ref-15793

You may want to forecast the commercial future of a company, for example, and believe that this is what you are judging, while in fact your evaluation is dominated by your impressions of the energy and competence of its current executives. Because substitution occurs automatically, you often do not know the origin of a judgment that you (your System 2) endorse and adopt. — location: 4075 ^ref-19663

judgments that answer the wrong question can also be made with high confidence. — location: 4079 ^ref-27500

assessing the regularity of the environment and the expert’s learning history— — location: 4080 ^ref-49751

this is what always happens when a project ends reasonably well: once you understand the main conclusion, it seems it was always obvious. — location: 4085 ^ref-56573

finding as much intellectual agreement as we did is surely more important than the persistent emotional differences that remained. — location: 4092 ^ref-38952

“Did he really have an opportunity to learn? How quick and how clear was the feedback he received on his judgments?” — location: 4099 ^ref-31646

the proper way to elicit information from a group is not by starting with a public discussion but by confidentially collecting each person’s judgment. — location: 4110 ^ref-59166

Our estimates were — location: 4144 ^ref-55839

closer to a best-case scenario than to a realistic assessment. — location: 4144 ^ref-752

Facing a choice, we gave up rationality rather than give up the enterprise. — location: 4146 ^ref-54144

mistake. We were forecasting based on the information in front of us—WYSIATI—but the chapters we wrote first were probably easier than others, and our commitment to the project was probably then at its peak. — location: 4152 ^ref-38750

There are many ways for any plan to fail, and although most of them are too improbable to be anticipated, the likelihood that something will go wrong in a big project is high. — location: 4159 ^ref-31087

He had in his head all the knowledge required to estimate the statistics of an appropriate reference class, but he reached his initial estimate without ever using that knowledge. — location: 4172 ^ref-15876

people who have information about an individual case rarely feel the need to know the statistics of the class to which the case belongs. — location: 4178 ^ref-56107

“Pallid” statistical information is routinely discarded when it is incompatible with one’s personal impressions of a case. — location: 4181 ^ref-55113

customers’ inability to imagine how much their wishes will escalate over time. They end up paying much more than they would if they had made a realistic plan and stuck to it. — location: 4206 ^ref-44658

The prevalent tendency to underweight or ignore distributional information is perhaps the major source of error in forecasting. Planners should therefore make every effort to frame the forecasting problem so as to facilitate utilizing all the distributional information that is available. — location: 4215 ^ref-14942

A well-run organization will reward planners for precise execution and penalize them for failing to anticipate difficulties, and for failing to allow for difficulties that they could not have anticipated—the unknown unknowns. — location: 4233 ^ref-45211

grip, they make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than on a rational weighting of gains, losses, and probabilities. They overestimate benefits and underestimate costs. — location: 4241 ^ref-37650

They spin scenarios of success while overlooking the potential for mistakes and miscalculations. As a result, they pursue initiatives that are unlikely to come in on budget or on time or to deliver the expected returns—or even to be completed. — location: 4242 ^ref-46177

“He’s taking an inside view. He should forget about his own case and look for what happened — location: 4264 ^ref-46185

in other cases.” — location: 4264 ^ref-13436

“We are making an additional investment because we do not want to admit failure. This is an instance of the sunk-cost fallacy.” — location: 4270 ^ref-40871

the blessings of optimism are offered only to individuals who are only mildly biased and who are able to “accentuate the positive” without losing track of reality. — location: 4287 ^ref-24081

the people who have the greatest influence on the lives of others are likely to be optimistic and overconfident, and to take more risks than they realize. — location: 4293 ^ref-60627

Their confidence in their future success sustains a positive mood that helps them obtain resources from others, raise the morale of their employees, and enhance their prospects of prevailing. When action is needed, optimism, even of the mildly delusional variety, may be a good thing. — location: 4298 ^ref-40742

Discouraging news led about half of the inventors to quit after receiving a grade that unequivocally predicted failure. However, 47% of them continued development efforts even after being told that their project was hopeless, and on average these persistent (or obstinate) individuals doubled their initial losses before giving up. — location: 4316 ^ref-53042

The evidence suggests that optimism is widespread, stubborn, and costly. — location: 4322 ^ref-15905

A common thread of boldness and optimism links businesspeople, from motel owners to superstar CEOs. — location: 4344 ^ref-61040

We focus on our goal, anchor on our plan, and neglect relevant base rates, exposing ourselves to the planning fallacy. We focus on what we want to do and can do, neglecting the plans and skills of others. Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck. We are therefore prone to an illusion of control. We focus on what we know and neglect what we do not know, which makes us overly confident in our beliefs. — location: 4353 ^ref-16468

Considering what others will do, how many people will see our film? — location: 4381 ^ref-25031

“optimistic martyrs”—good for the economy but bad for their investors. — location: 4386 ^ref-8356

Allowing for the information that does not come to mind—perhaps because one never knew it—is impossible. — location: 4399 ^ref-17245

inadequate appreciation of the uncertainty of the environment inevitably leads economic agents to take risks they should avoid. — location: 4411 ^ref-21076

that there are periods in which competition, among experts and among organizations, creates powerful forces that favor a collective blindness to risk and uncertainty. — location: 4413 ^ref-47512

“clinicians who were ‘completely certain’ of the diagnosis antemortem were wrong 40% of the time.” — location: 4419 ^ref-653

someone who lacks a delusional sense of significance will wilt in the face of repeated experiences of multiple small failures and rare successes, the fate of most researchers. — location: 4437 ^ref-43775

subjective confidence is determined by the coherence of the story one has constructed, not by the quality and amount of the information that supports it. — location: 4444 ^ref-42292

the large changes of preferences that are sometimes caused by inconsequential variations in the wording of a choice problem. — location: 4520 ^ref-3181

The poorer man will happily pay a premium to transfer the risk to the richer one, which is what insurance is about. — location: 4570 ^ref-53016

you need to know the reference before you can predict the utility of an amount of wealth. — location: 4586 ^ref-40877

Betty is much more likely to take her chances, as others do when faced with very bad options. — location: 4604 ^ref-62139

it cannot explain Betty’s risk-seeking preference for the gamble, a behavior that is often observed in entrepreneurs and in generals when all their options are bad. — location: 4608 ^ref-23396

theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. — location: 4613 ^ref-62056

He, on the other hand, faces options that are all bad, so he’d rather take the risk.” — location: 4626 ^ref-18180

You know you have made a theoretical advance when you can no longer reconstruct why you failed for so long to see the obvious. — location: 4645 ^ref-27507

Outcomes that are better than the reference points are gains. Below the reference point they are losses. — location: 4704 ^ref-9632

All bets are off, of course, if the possible loss is potentially ruinous, or if your lifestyle is threatened. — location: 4740 ^ref-41730

In mixed gambles, where both a gain and a loss are possible, loss aversion causes extremely risk-averse choices. In bad choices, where a sure loss is compared to a larger loss that is merely probable, diminishing sensitivity causes risk seeking. — location: 4744 ^ref-46333

It is reasonable to put priority on helping students acquire the basic tools of the discipline. — location: 4775 ^ref-33434

Prospect theory cannot cope with this fact, because it does not allow the value of an outcome (in this case, winning nothing) to change when it is highly unlikely, or when the alternative is very valuable. — location: 4790 ^ref-57317

In simple words, prospect theory cannot deal with disappointment. Disappointment and the anticipation of disappointment are real, however, and the failure to acknowledge them is as obvious a flaw as the counterexamples that I invoked to criticize Bernoulli’s theory. — location: 4791 ^ref-40857

In regret, the experience of an outcome depends on an option you could have adopted but did not. — location: 4800 ^ref-32499

Richer and more realistic assumptions do not suffice to make a theory successful. Scientists use theories as a bag of working tools, and they will not take on the burden of a heavier bag unless the new tools are very useful. — location: 4806 ^ref-13901

The convex shape indicates diminishing marginal utility: — location: 4822 ^ref-20378

This preference for the status quo is a consequence of loss aversion. — location: 4850 ^ref-55250

First, tastes are not fixed; they vary with the reference point. — location: 4860 ^ref-659

Conventional indifference maps and Bernoulli’s representation of outcomes as states of wealth share a mistaken assumption: that your utility for a state of affairs depends only on that state and is not affected by your history. Correcting that mistake has been one of the achievements of behavioral economics. — location: 4864 ^ref-60018

The long-term effects of the decision are identical for the two groups. The only difference is in the emotion of the moment. The high price that Sellers set reflects the reluctance to give up an object that they already own, — location: 4937 ^ref-26081

“Bad Is Stronger Than Good,” summarized the evidence as follows: “Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good. — location: 5036 ^ref-10433

ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones.” — location: 5038 ^ref-54556

long-term success of a relationship depends far more on avoiding the negative than on seeking the positive. — location: 5039 ^ref-61662

Goals are Reference Points — location: 5049 ^ref-46340

The idea of loss aversion, which surprises no one except perhaps some economists, generated a precise and nonintuitive hypothesis and led researchers to a finding that surprised everyone—including professional golfers. — location: 5075 ^ref-42598

If the affected parties have any political influence, however, potential losers will be more active and determined than potential winners; the outcome will be biased in their favor and inevitably more expensive and less effective than initially planned. — location: 5094 ^ref-30826

A basic rule of fairness, we found, is that the exploitation of market power to impose losses on others is unacceptable. — location: 5118 ^ref-57895

respondents liked a firm better and described it as more fair if it was generous when its profits increased, but they did not brand as unfair a firm that did not share. They showed indignation only when a firm exploited its power to break informal contracts with workers or customers, and to impose a loss on others in order to increase its profit. — location: 5135 ^ref-26359

If people who lose suffer more than people who merely fail to gain, they may also deserve more protection from the law. — location: 5162 ^ref-26803

“This reform will not pass. Those who stand to lose will fight harder than those who stand to gain.” — location: 5164 ^ref-9948

Most often, however, you are just an observer to a global evaluation that your System 1 delivers. — location: 5181 ^ref-23739

The utility of a gamble, in his theory, is the average of the utilities of its outcomes, each weighted by its probability. — location: 5188 ^ref-49491

the possibility effect, which causes highly unlikely outcomes to be weighted disproportionately more than they “deserve.” — location: 5202 ^ref-63109

that a large industry of “structured settlements” exists to provide certainty at a hefty price, by taking advantage of the certainty effect. — location: 5211 ^ref-15809

Overweighting of small probabilities increases the attractiveness of both gambles and insurance policies. — location: 5216 ^ref-23629

The 2% difference between a 100% and a 98% chance to win in problem B is vastly more impressive than the same difference between 63% and 61% in problem A. — location: 5246 ^ref-37635

problem. As often happens when a theory that has been widely adopted and found useful is challenged, they noted the problem as an anomaly and continued using expected utility theory as if nothing had happened. — location: 5252 ^ref-58648

asymmetry between the possibility effect and the certainty effect, — location: 5272 ^ref-37175

fourfold pattern of preferences is considered one of the core achievements of prospect theory. — location: 5309 ^ref-45456

what people acquire with a ticket is more than a chance to win; it is the right to dream pleasantly of winning. — location: 5315 ^ref-12083

when you consider a choice between a sure loss and a gamble with a high probability of a larger loss, diminishing sensitivity makes the sure loss more aversive, and the certainty effect reduces the aversiveness of the gamble. — location: 5326 ^ref-24072

people who face very bad options take desperate gambles, accepting a high probability of making things worse in exchange for a small hope of avoiding a large loss. Risk taking of this kind often turns manageable failures into disasters. — location: 5332 ^ref-27408

When you take the long view of many similar decisions, you can see that paying a premium to avoid a small risk of a large loss is costly. — location: 5371 ^ref-9105

The probability of a rare event is most likely to be overestimated when the alternative is not fully specified. — location: 5433 ^ref-62305

In both theories, the decision weights depend only on probability, not on the outcome. — location: 5459 ^ref-25809

“Money, Kisses, and Electric Shocks: On the Affective Psychology of Risk.” — location: 5462 ^ref-43144

irrelevant but vivid details to a monetary outcome also disrupts calculation. — location: 5490 ^ref-51845

How could this tie in to clinical diagnostics?

Laker thesis emphasis frame: could hurt outcome if sufficiently irrelevant

different ways of communicating risks vary so much in their effects. — location: 5514 ^ref-8085

Obsessive concerns (the bus in Jerusalem), vivid images (the roses), concrete representations (1 of 1,000), and explicit reminders (as in choice from description) all contribute to overweighting. — location: 5589 ^ref-14126

dominates option AD (the technical term for one option being unequivocally better than another). — location: 5621 ^ref-31714

Because we are susceptible to WYSIATI and averse to mental effort, we tend to make decisions as problems arise, even when we are specifically instructed to consider them jointly. — location: 5638 ^ref-23070

We have neither the inclination nor the mental resources to enforce consistency on our preferences, and our preferences are not magically set to be coherent, as they are in the rational-agent model. — location: 5640 ^ref-41545

you win a few, you lose a few. The main purpose of the mantra is to control your emotional response when you do lose. — location: 5675 ^ref-30587

If you have the emotional discipline that this rule requires, you will never consider a small gamble in isolation or be loss averse for a small gamble until you are actually on your deathbed—and not even then. — location: 5681 ^ref-2233

broad framing blunted the emotional reaction to losses and increased the willingness to take risks. — location: 5692 ^ref-17228

Closely following daily fluctuations is a losing proposition, because the pain of the frequent small losses exceeds the pleasure of the equally frequent small gains. — location: 5694 ^ref-35909

An organization that could eliminate both excessive optimism and excessive loss aversion should do so. The combination of the outside view with a risk policy should be the goal. — location: 5715 ^ref-23072

For Humans, mental accounts are a form of narrow framing; they keep things under control and manageable by a finite mind. — location: 5746 ^ref-47666

The emotions that people attach to the state of their mental accounts are not acknowledged in standard economic theory. — location: 5758 ^ref-6796

A rational agent would have a comprehensive view of the portfolio and sell the stock that is least likely to do well in the future, without considering whether it is a winner or a loser. — location: 5774 ^ref-32584

A rational decision maker is interested only in the future consequences of current investments. — location: 5788 ^ref-57655

Justifying earlier mistakes is not among the Econ’s concerns. — location: 5789 ^ref-4805

where the choice is between a sure loss and an unfavorable gamble, which is often unwisely preferred. — location: 5796 ^ref-57398

The sunk-cost fallacy keeps people for too long in poor jobs, unhappy marriages, and unpromising research projects. — location: 5805 ^ref-10501

Regret and blame are both evoked by a comparison to a norm, but the relevant norms are different. — location: 5827 ^ref-4415

story: people expect to have stronger emotional reactions (including regret) to an outcome that is produced by action than to the same outcome when it is produced by inaction. — location: 5842 ^ref-47077

The key is not the difference between commission and omission but the distinction between default options and actions that deviate from the default. — location: 5845 ^ref-46487

The asymmetry in the risk of regret favors conventional and risk-averse choices. — location: 5854 ^ref-10277

You could have stayed with the default option and done nothing, and now this counterfactual will haunt you for the rest of your life. — location: 5880 ^ref-19510

resistance may be motivated by a selfish fear of regret more than by a wish to optimize the child’s safety. — location: 5893 ^ref-11216

The dilemma between intensely loss-averse moral attitudes and efficient risk management does not have a simple and compelling solution. — location: 5903 ^ref-57601

If you can remember when things go badly that you considered the possibility of regret carefully before deciding, you are likely to experience less of it. — location: 5913 ^ref-61453

Poignancy (a close cousin of regret) is a counterfactual feeling, which is evoked because the thought “if only he had shopped at his regular store…” comes readily to mind. — location: 5945 ^ref-6243

We normally experience life in the between-subjects mode, in which contrasting alternatives that might change your mind are absent, and of course WYSIATI. As a consequence, the beliefs that you endorse when you reflect about morality do not necessarily govern your emotional reactions, and the moral intuitions that come to your mind in different situations are not internally consistent. — location: 5950 ^ref-64116

people choose B over A, but if they imagine owning only one of them, they set a higher value on A than on B. — location: 5966 ^ref-5626

Theoretical beliefs are robust, and it takes much more than one embarrassing finding for established theories to be seriously questioned. — location: 5991 ^ref-3984

The system of administrative penalties is coherent within agencies but incoherent globally. — location: 6095 ^ref-17386

losses evokes stronger negative feelings than costs. — location: 6126 ^ref-20499

arousal (the amygdala) was most likely to be active when subjects’ choices conformed to the frame. — location: 6159 ^ref-51860

A brain region known to be associated with conflict and self-control (the anterior cingulate) was more active when subjects did not do what comes naturally— — location: 6162 ^ref-13423

the “rational” individuals were not those who showed the strongest neural evidence of conflict. It appears that these elite participants were (often, not always) reality-bound with little conflict. — location: 6166 ^ref-3096

Medical training is, evidently, no defense against the power of framing. — location: 6179 ^ref-54400

Reframing is effortful and System 2 is normally lazy. — location: 6185 ^ref-21689

Unless there is an obvious reason to do otherwise, most of us passively accept decision problems as they are framed and therefore rarely have an opportunity to discover the extent to which our preferences are frame-bound rather than reality-bound. — location: 6186 ^ref-55408

Decision makers tend to prefer the sure thing over the gamble (they are risk averse) when the outcomes are good. — location: 6201 ^ref-41437

Most people find that their System 2 has no moral intuitions of its own to answer the question. — location: 6214 ^ref-29741

Your moral feelings are attached to frames, to descriptions of reality rather than to reality itself. — location: 6238 ^ref-26315

also in the problems of the Asian disease and of surgery versus radiation for lung cancer—there is no underlying preference that is masked or distorted by the frame. Our preferences are about framed problems, and our moral intuitions are about descriptions, not about substance. — location: 6240 ^ref-37430

The best single predictor of whether or not people will donate their organs is the designation of the default option that will be adopted without having to check a box. — location: 6289 ^ref-15128

As we have seen again and again, an important choice is controlled by an utterly inconsequential feature of the situation. — location: 6298 ^ref-63290

Skeptics about rationality are not surprised. They are trained to be sensitive to the power of inconsequential factors as determinants of preference— — location: 6306 ^ref-37686

in decision theory the only basis for judging that a decision is wrong is inconsistency with other preferences. — location: 6342 ^ref-40121

the procedure ended at a bad moment, leaving him with an unpleasant memory. — location: 6374 ^ref-47727

Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion—and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined. — location: 6395 ^ref-35852

What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self. — location: 6397 ^ref-6409

80% of the participants who reported that their pain diminished during the final phase of the longer episode opted to repeat it, thereby declaring themselves willing to suffer 30 seconds of needless pain in the anticipated third trial. — location: 6420 ^ref-47946

Their decision was governed by a simple rule of intuitive choice: pick the option you like the most, or dislike the least. Rules of memory determined how much they disliked the two options, which in turn determined their choice. The cold-hand experiment, like my old injections puzzle, revealed a discrepancy between decision utility and experienced utility. — location: 6426 ^ref-54746

The rats quickly learned to fear the light, and the intensity of their fear could be measured by several physiological responses. The main finding was that the duration of the shock has little or no effect on fear—all that matters is the painful intensity of the stimulus. — location: 6440 ^ref-5657

Here again, only intensity matters. Up to a point, increasing the duration of a burst of stimulation does not appear to increase the eagerness of the animal to obtain it. — location: 6445 ^ref-12885

pleasure. We want pain to be brief and pleasure to last. But our memory, a function of System 1, has evolved to represent the most intense moment of an episode of pain or pleasure (the peak) and the feelings when the episode was at its end. — location: 6461 ^ref-39993

A memory that neglects duration will not serve our preference for long pleasure and short pains. — location: 6462 ^ref-7185

A story is about significant events and memorable moments, not about time passing. Duration neglect is normal in a story, and the ending often defines its character. — location: 6483 ^ref-65517

Caring for people often takes the form of concern for the quality of their stories, not for their feelings. — location: 6489 ^ref-31859

her “total happiness” was the happiness of a typical period in her lifetime, not the sum (or integral) of happiness over the duration of her life. — location: 6503 ^ref-29294

In intuitive evaluation of entire lives as well as brief episodes, peaks and ends matter but duration does not. — location: 6512 ^ref-50717

What truly matters when we intuitively assess such episodes is the progressive deterioration or improvement of the ongoing experience, and how the person feels at the end. — location: 6516 ^ref-47757

hand, a significant minority of the population experienced considerable emotional distress for much of the day. It appears that a small fraction of the population does most of the suffering—whether because of physical or mental illness, an unhappy temperament, or the misfortunes and personal tragedies in their life. — location: 6609 ^ref-15643

There are exceptions, where the quality of subjective experience is dominated by recurrent thoughts rather than by the events of the moment. — location: 6625 ^ref-27290

that another way to improve experience is to switch time from passive leisure, such as TV watching, to more active forms of leisure, including socializing and exercise. — location: 6633 ^ref-32649

the second best predictor of the feelings of a day is whether a person did or did not have contacts with friends or relatives. — location: 6643 ^ref-46339

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you. — location: 6643 ^ref-33367

Severe poverty amplifies the experienced effects of other misfortunes of life. — location: 6659 ^ref-36032

the beneficial effects of the weekend on experienced well-being are significantly smaller for the very poor than for most everyone else. — location: 6663 ^ref-34240

The satiation level beyond which experienced well-being no longer increases was a household income of about $75,000 in high-cost areas — location: 6664 ^ref-1395

“The objective of policy should be to reduce human suffering. We aim for a lower U-index in society. Dealing with depression and extreme poverty should be a priority.” — location: 6675 ^ref-46299

Experienced well-being is on average unaffected by marriage, not because marriage makes no difference to happiness but because it changes some aspects of life for the better and others for the worse. — location: 6726 ^ref-12892

one recipe for a dissatisfied adulthood is setting goals that are especially difficult to attain. — location: 6748 ^ref-39510

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it. — location: 6762 ^ref-23786

most long-term circumstances of life, including paraplegia and marriage, are part-time states that one inhabits only when one attends to them. — location: 6812 ^ref-40615

Here it appears that the remembering self is subject to a massive focusing illusion about the life that the experiencing self endures quite comfortably. — location: 6828 ^ref-46091

The mistake that people make in the focusing illusion involves attention to selected moments and neglect of what happens at other times. — location: 6849 ^ref-11530

The mirror image of the same bias makes us fear a short period of intense but tolerable suffering more than we fear a much longer period of moderate pain. — location: 6882 ^ref-60450

Duration neglect also makes us prone to accept a long period of mild unpleasantness because the end will be better, and it favors giving up an opportunity for a long happy period if it is likely to have a poor ending. — location: 6883 ^ref-64074

a brief awful event that causes PTSD should be weighted by the total duration of the long-term misery it causes. — location: 6893 ^ref-43075

For behavioral economists, however, freedom has a cost, which is borne by individuals who make bad choices, and by a society that feels obligated to help them. — location: 6945 ^ref-34232

The acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions. — location: 7015 ^ref-59506

A marker of skilled performance is the ability to deal with vast amounts of information swiftly and efficiently. — location: 7018 ^ref-55297

errors of others than my own. The way to block errors that originate in System 1 is simple in principle: recognize the signs that you are in a cognitive minefield, slow down, and ask for reinforcement from System 2. — location: 7036 ^ref-3448

Constant quality control is an alternative to the wholesale reviews of processes that organizations commonly undertake in the wake of disasters. — location: 7053 ^ref-34573

There is a direct link from more precise gossip at the watercooler to better decisions. Decision makers are sometimes better able to imagine the voices of present gossipers and future critics than to hear the hesitant voice of their own doubts. They will make better choices when they trust their critics to be sophisticated and fair, and when they expect their decision to be judged by how it was made, not only by how it turned out. — location: 7060 ^ref-13496