Quotes About Behavior

Decision makers tend to prefer the sure thing over the gamble (they are risk averse) when the outcomes are good. They tend to reject the sure thing and accept the gamble (they are risk seeking) when both outcomes are negative.

The emotional tail wags the rational dog

You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behaviours than from hearing surprising facts from the behaviour of others

In a paper titled "Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth," they showed that, on average, the most active traders had the poorest results, while the investors who traded the least earned the highest returns.

rewards for improved performance work better than punishment of mistakes. This proposition is supported by much evidence from research on pigeons, rats, humans, and other animals.

An inconsistency is built into the design of our mind.

the response to losses is stronger than the response to corresponding gains. This is loss aversion.

general "law of least effort" applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs.

System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions. When all goes smoothly, which is most of the time, System 2 adopts the suggestions of System 1 with little or no modification. You generally believe your impressions and act on your desires, and that is fine—usually.

This remarkable priming phenomenon—the influencing of an action by the idea—is known as the ideomotor effect. Although you surely were not aware of it, reading this paragraph primed you as well. If you had needed to stand up to get a glass of water, you would have been slightly slower than usual to rise from your chair—unless you happen to dislike the elderly, in which case research suggests that you might have been slightly faster than usual!

There is essentially no evidence of situations in which people do very poorly and models do very well with the same information.

there is a large amount of objective ignorance in the prediction of human behavior.

rewards for improved performance work better than punishment of mistakes.

the decision weights that people assign to outcomes are not identical to the probabilities of these outcomes

Reciprocal priming effects tend to produce a coherent reaction: if you were primed to think of old age, you would tend to act old, and acting old would reinforce the thought of old age.

One of the tasks of System 2 is to overcome the impulses of System 1. In other words, System 2 is in charge of self-control.

System 1 provides the impressions that often turn into your beliefs, and is the source of the impulses that often become your choices and your actions.

She says experience has taught her that criticism is more effective than praise. What she doesn't understand is that it's all due to regression to the mean.

sympathy we would feel for the patient would not be under our control; it would arise from System 1.

They found that putting the participants in a good mood before the test by having them think happy thoughts more than doubled accuracy. An even more striking result is that unhappy subjects were completely incapable of performing the intuitive task accurately; their guesses were no better than random. Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.

act calm and kind regardless of how you feel

The laziness of System 2 is an important fact of life, and the observation that representativeness can block the application of an obvious logical rule is also of some interest.

People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations. Memorizing

on reasoning about patterns of causation. They are products of System 1. In 1944, at about the same