Quotes About Decisions

During the first five years we spent looking at how people make decisions, we established a dozen facts about choices between risky options. Several of these facts were in flat contradiction to expected utility theory. Some had been observed before, a few were new. Then we constructed a theory that modified expected utility theory just enough to explain our collection of observations. That was prospect theory.

Most impressions and thoughts arise in your conscious experience without your knowing how they got there. You cannot trace how you came to the belief that there is a lamp on the desk in front of you, or how you detected a hint of irritation in your spouse's voice on the telephone, or how you managed to avoid a threat on the road before you became consciously aware of it. The mental work that produces impressions, intuitions, and many decisions goes on in silence in our mind.

The mental work that produces impressions, intuitions, and many decisions goes on in silence in our mind.

Personnel decisions are noisy. Interviewers of job candidates make widely different assessments of the same people. Performance ratings of the same employees are also highly variable and depend more on the person doing

The decision of whether or not to protect individuals against their mistakes therefore presents a dilemma for behavioral economists. The economists of the Chicago school do not face that problem, because rational agents do not make mistakes. For adherents of this school, freedom is free of charge.

tired and hungry judges tend to fall back on the easier default position of denying requests for parole.

Damasio and his colleagues have observed 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.

Meehl and other proponents of algorithms have argued strongly that it is unethical to rely on intuitive judgments for important decisions if an algorithm is available that will make fewer mistakes.

When forecasting the outcomes of risky projects, executives too easily fall victim to the planning fallacy. In its 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. They spin scenarios of success while overlooking the potential for mistakes and miscalculations.

investment decisions. Why be concerned with gossip? Because it is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable

and want is difficult at the best of times, and especially difficult when we most need to do it, but we can benefit from the informed opinions of others. Many

The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.

You make many small decisions as you drive your car, absorb some information as you read the newspaper, and conduct routine exchanges of pleasantries with a spouse or a colleague, all with little effort and no strain. Just like a stroll.

the leaders of enterprises who make unsound bets do not do so because they are betting with other people's money. On the contrary, they take greater risks when they personally have more at stake.

But the agricultural, industrial, and technological revolutions changed all that, and the resulting explosion of personal liberty has created a bewildering array of options, alternatives, choices, and decisions that our ancestors never faced. For the very first time, our happiness is in our hands.

MOST OF US MAKE at least three important decisions in our lives: where to live, what to do and with whom to do it.

The Supreme Court was not and never will be perfect. Some of the most heinous, morally reprehensible, logically flawed decisions have emanated from the Supreme Court. To imbue it with infallibility is to say that, when it upheld slave catching or when it upheld racial segregation, it was right.

Bisognerebbe vivere a posteriori. Decidiamo tutto troppo presto.

All of us make compromises in life. - Olivia Watson

Certain feelings and actions become decisions, rather than the other way around.

Paul reminds us that "righteous character" brings much glory and praise to God. So I want my life—my decisions and relationships and everyday walk—to be just as much of a worship celebration to my Father God.

poor countries are poor because those who have power make choices that create poverty. They get it wrong not by mistake or ignorance but on purpose. To understand this, you have to go beyond economics and expert advice on the best thing to do and, instead, study how decisions actually get made, who gets to make them, and why those people decide to do what they do.

You have to understand that in a person's life there are a few precious moments in which decisions, choices that you make now, will affect you for the rest of your life.

If you keep doing the same things, you will keep getting the same results. You are where you are now financially as a sum total of the decisions you've made to this point.