Quotes from Thomas Gilovich

Regression effects teach us specious lessons about the relative effectiveness of reward and punishment.

A person's conclusions can only be as solid as the information on which they are based. Thus, a person who is exposed to almost nothing but inaccurate information on a given subject almost inevitably develops an erroneous belief, a belief that can seem to be "an irresistible product" of the individual's (secondhand) experience.

This tendency to focus too heavily on the occasional success is helped along by an asymmetry in the way we evaluate success and failure. A single success generally does more to confirm a strategy's effectiveness than a single failure does to disconfirm it. Indeed, successes tend to be taken as prima facie evidence that the strategy is effective.

Successes, in other words, are generally seen as confirmations of one's underlying strategy, whereas failures tend to be thought of only as failures of outcome, not as failures of strategy.

Chapter 7 takes a psychological truism, "we tend to believe what we think others believe" and turns it around: We tend to think others believe what we believe. This chapter examines a set of cognitive, social, and motivational processes that prompt us to overestimate the extent to which others share our beliefs, further bolstering our credulity.

As dysfunctional as they may be on occasion, our theories, preconceptions, and "biases" are what make us smart.

By carefully scrutinizing and explaining away their losses, while accepting their successes at face value, gamblers do indeed rewrite their personal histories of success and failure. Losses are often counted, not as losses, but as "near wins.

Rather than simply ignoring contradictory information, we often examine it particularly closely. The end product of this intense scrutiny is that the contradictory information is either considered too flawed to be relevant, or is redefined into a less damaging category.

A second way in which our motives influence the kind of evidence we entertain involves whose opinions, expert or otherwise, we consult. We can often anticipate other people's general beliefs and overall orientations, and thus can predict with some accuracy their views on a particular question. By judiciously choosing the right people to consult, we can increase our chances of hearing what we want to hear.

we believe certain things because they ought to be true.

The most favorable attitudes toward ESP were found in a survey of Canadian college students, of whom 80% reported a belief in psi.21 National surveys of the U.S. population have found that roughly 50% of the population are believers, including 67% of those who are college educated.22 Perhaps

Perhaps the most general and most important mental habit to instill is an appreciation of the folly of trying to draw conclusions from incomplete and unrepresentative evidence. An essential corrollary of this appreciation should be an awareness of how often our everyday experience presents us with biased samples of information.

develop the habit of employing one of several "consider the opposite" strategies. We can learn to ask ourselves, for example, "Suppose the exact opposite had occurred. Would I consider that outcome to be supportive of my belief as well?" Alternatively, we can ask, "How would someone who does not believe the way I do explain this result?"

Logically, such a nonoccurrence is just as much an event as an occurrence, but phenomenologically it is not.

We therefore should be more skeptical than we seem to be about evidence presented to us secondhand. We should become accustomed to asking ourselves where the information originated, and how much distortion—deliberate or otherwise—is likely to have been introduced along the way.

We may be particularly inclined to acquire and retain beliefs that make us feel good.

confirmatory events are in fact much more memorable than non-confirmatory events.

Because so much disagreement remains hidden, our beliefs are not properly shaped by healthy scrutiny and debate. The absence of such argument also leads us to exaggerate the extent to which other people believe the way we do.

In other words, when testing a hypothesis of similarity, people look for evidence of similarity rather than dissimilarity, and when testing a hypothesis of dissimilarity, they do the opposite. The relationship one perceives between two entities, then, can vary with the precise form of the question that is asked.

The false consensus effect refers to the tendency for people's own beliefs, values, and habits to bias their estimates of how widely such views and habits are shared by others.

But the wisest person in the room, or around the negotiating table, knows enough not to fall prey to naïve realism and simply assume that meanings are fixed, and shared

People are less aware, however, of another source of divergent beliefs—the fact that the same issue or situation is construed quite differently by different people, even people with the same tastes, values, and orientations. As social psychologist Solomon Asch noted many years ago, differences of opinion between people are not always linked to differences in their "judgment of the object," but often reflect differences in the very "object of judgment" itself.

This can sound rather grim, but it does have a positive flip-side: It suggests that our negative assessments of other people are less likely than our positive assessments to be correct, and we should give our foes another chance.

People are extraordinarily good at ad hoc explanation. According to past research, if people are erroneously led to believe that they are either above or below average at some task, they can explain either their superior or inferior performance with little difficulty.