Quotes About Bias

recurrent theme of this book: many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions.

The emotional tail wags the rational dog." The affect heuristic simplifies our lives by creating a world that is much tidier than reality.

the idea that our minds are susceptible to systematic errors is now generally accepted.

If it is the only one that comes to mind, it may be subjectively undistinguishable from valid judgments that you make with expert confidence. This is why subjective confidence is not a good diagnostic of accuracy: judgments that answer the wrong question can also be made with high confidence

The affect heuristic is an instance of substitution, in which the answer to an easy question (How do I feel about it?) serves as an answer to a much harder question (What do I think about it?).

When the handsome and confident speaker bounds onto the stage, for example, you can anticipate that the audience will judge his comments more favorably than he deserves.

Can your System 1 distinguish degrees of belief? The principle of WYSIATI suggests that it cannot.

The strong bias toward believing that small samples closely resemble the population from which they are drawn is also part of a larger story: we are prone to exaggerate the consistency and coherence of what we see.

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. As he points out, the negative trumps the positive in many ways, and loss aversion is one of many manifestations of a broad negativity dominance.

Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality. Statistics

As you can guess, this is a test of the readers' vulnerability to stereotypes: do people rate the essay more favorably when it is attributed to a middle-aged man than they do when they believe that a young woman wrote it? They do, of course. But importantly, the difference is larger in the good-mood condition. People who are in a good mood are more likely to let their biases affect their thinking.

In terms of its consequences for decisions, the optimistic bias may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases. Because optimistic bias can be both a blessing and a risk, you should be both happy and wary if you are temperamentally optimistic.

optimistic bias plays a role—sometimes the dominant role—whenever individuals or institutions voluntarily take on significant risks.

The impression of familiarity is produced by System 1, and System 2 relies on that impression for a true/false judgment.

Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs.

simple mechanical rules were generally superior to human judgment.

Intuitive predictions are almost completely insensitive to the actual predictive quality of the evidence.

our mind is strongly biased toward causal explanations and does not deal well with "mere statistics." When our attention is called to an event, associative memory will look for its cause—more precisely, activation will automatically spread to any cause that is already stored in memory.

Contrary to the rules of philosophers of science, who advise testing hypotheses by trying to refute them, people (and scientists, quite often) seek data that are likely to be compatible with the beliefs they currently hold.

We focus on what we know and neglect what we do not know, which makes us overly confident in our beliefs.

The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved. The psychologist Paul Slovic has proposed an affect heuristic in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world.

when System 2 is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything. System 1 is gullible and biased to believe

For one thing, it helps us see the logical consistency of Human preferences for what it is—a hopeless mirage

when System 2 is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything. 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. 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.