Quotes About Belief

System 1 is not prone to doubt. It suppresses ambiguity and spontaneously constructs stories that are as coherent as possible. Unless the message is immediately negated, the associations that it evokes will spread as if the message were true.

We hold a single interpretation of the world around us at any one time, and we normally invest little effort in generating plausible alternatives to it. One interpretation is enough, and we experience it as true. We do not go through life imagining alternative ways of seeing what we see.

Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is, the automatic System 1 is the hero of the book. I describe System 1 as effortlessly originating impressions and feelings that are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2. The

We do not expect to see regularity produced by a random process, and when we detect what appears to be a rule, we quickly reject the idea that the process is truly random. Random processes produce many sequences that convince people that the process is not random after all.

The amount of evidence and its quality do not count for much, because poor evidence can make a very good story. For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs.

For example, I recently came to doubt my long-held impression that adultery is more common among politicians than among physicians or lawyers.

la confianza viene determinada por la coherencia de la mejor historia que podamos contar partiendo de la evidencia.

Most of us, most of the time, live with the unquestioned belief that the world looks as it does because that's the way it is.

SPEAKING OF COGNITIVE EASE "Let's not dismiss their business plan just because the font makes it hard to read." "We must be inclined to believe it because it has been repeated so often, but let's think it through again." "Familiarity breeds liking. This is a mere exposure effect." "I'm in a very good mood today, and my System 2 is weaker than usual. I should be extra careful.

More advice: if your message is to be printed, use high-quality paper to maximize the contrast between characters and their background. If you use color, you are more likely to be believed if your text is printed in bright blue or red than

The core of the illusion is that we believe we understand the past, which implies that the future also should be knowable, but in fact we understand the past less than we believe we do. Know is not the only word that fosters this illusion. In common usage, the words intuition and premonition also are reserved for past thoughts that turned out to be true.

For example, if you believe that 3% of graduate students are enrolled in computer science (the base rate), and you also believe that the description of Tom W is 4 times more likely for a graduate student in that field than in other fields, then Bayes's rule says you must believe that the probability that Tom W is a computer scientist is now 11%. If the base rate had been 80%, the new degree of belief would be 94.1%.

The difficulties of statistical thinking contribute to the main theme of Part 3, which describes a puzzling limitation of our mind: our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in. We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.

Your inability to reconstruct past beliefs will inevitably cause you to underestimate the extent to which you were surprised by past events.

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

System 2 is activated when an event is detected that violates the model of the world that System 1 maintains.

Los datos sugieren que el optimismo es algo muy extendido, pertinaz y costoso.

even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience.

When action is needed, optimism, even of the mildly delusional variety, may be a good thing.

In everyday speech, we call people reasonable if it is possible to reason with them, if their beliefs are generally in tune with reality, and if their preferences are in line with their interests and their values. The

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian

even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience. On the other hand, surprising individual cases have a powerful impact and are a more effective tool for teaching psychology because the incongruity must be resolved and embedded in a causal story.

The observation that "90% of drivers believe they are better than average" is a well-established psychological finding that has become part of the culture, and it often comes up as a prime example of a more general above-average effect.

Moses illusion.