Quotes About Bias

we humans constantly fool ourselves by constructing flimsy accounts of the past and believing they are true.

Optimism is normal, but some fortunate people are more optimistic than the rest of us. If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias, you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person—you already feel fortunate. An optimistic attitude is largely inherited, and it is part of a general disposition for well-being, which may also include a preference for seeing the bright side of everything.

Consistent overweighting of improbable outcomes—a feature of intuitive decision making—eventually leads to inferior outcomes.

The neglect of duration combined with the peak-end rule causes a bias that favors a short period of intense joy over a long period of moderate happiness.

You may believe that you are subtler, more insightful, and more nuanced than the linear caricature of your thinking. But in fact, you are mostly noisier.

Amos liked the idea of an adjust-and-anchor heuristic as a strategy for estimating uncertain quantities: start from an anchoring number, assess whether it is too high or too low, and gradually adjust your estimate by mentally "moving" from the anchor. The adjustment typically ends prematurely, because people stop when they are no longer certain that they should move farther.

It is tempting to explain entrepreneurial optimism by wishful thinking, but emotion is only part of the story. Cognitive biases play an important role, notably the System 1 feature WYSIATI.

many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions.

the psychologist Jonathan Haidt said in another context, "The emotional tail wags the rational dog." The affect heuristic simplifies our lives by creating a world that is much tidier than reality.

Wherever there is judgment, there is noise—and more of it than we think.

people tend to be overly optimistic about their relative standing on any activity in which they do moderately well.

judgment heuristics "are quite useful, but sometimes lead to severe and systematic errors.

You may have noticed that the decomposition of system noise into level noise and pattern noise follows the same logic as the error equation in the previous chapter, which decomposed error into bias and noise. This time, the equation can be written as follows: System Noise2 = Level Noise2 + Pattern Noise2

People can overcome some of the superficial factors that produce illusions of truth when strongly motivated to do so.

Some experimenters have reported that an angry face "pops out" of a crowd of happy faces, but a single happy face does not stand out in an angry crowd. The brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.

THE VALUES ARE UNEQUAL BECAUSE OF LOSS AVERSION

Regret, frustration, and self-satisfaction can also be affected by framing (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982). If

Daniel Kahneman

Los estudios sobre cognición humana atribuyen este exceso de optimismo a numerosos motivos. Uno de los más poderosos es la tendencia de los individuos a exagerar el propio talento, a creer que están por encima de la media en su asignación de características y habilidades positivas.

Many African Americans, Hispanics, and women read Scripture through Third World eyes, and this presents a deep challenge to First World readers, who all too often expect Scripture to endorse their comfortable, middle-class way of life.

memory's malfunctions can be divided into seven fundamental transgressions or "sins," which I call transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence.

But just as we tend to treat the details of future events that we do imagine as though they were actually going to happen, we have an equally troubling tendency to treat the details of future events that we don't imagine as though they were not going to happen. In other words, we fail to consider how much imagination fills in, but we also fail to consider how much it leaves out.

the only thing these facts clearly show is that people tend to see what they want to see.

I mistrust the judgment of every man in a case in which his own wishes are concerned.