Quotes About Psychology

I describe mental life by the metaphor of two agents, called System 1 and System 2, which respectively produce fast and slow thinking. I speak of the features of intuitive and deliberate thought as if they were traits and dispositions of two characters in your mind. In the picture that emerges from recent research, the intuitive System 1 is more influential than your experience tells you, and it is the secret author of many of the choices and judgments you make.

Most of this book is about the workings of System 1 and the mutual influences between it and System 2.

Indeed, the mere exposure effect is actually stronger for stimuli that the individual never consciously sees

The bat-and-ball problem is our first encounter with an observation that will be a recurrent theme of this book: many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions.

Nisbett and Borgida summarize the results in a memorable sentence: Subjects' unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular.

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

el esfuerzo de la voluntad o autocontrol es fatigoso; si hemos de forzarnos a hacer algo, estamos menos dispuestos, o somos menos capaces, de ejercer el autocontrol si el próximo reto está cerca. El fenómeno se ha denominado agotamiento del ego.

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced six-cent-mihaly) has done

Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsigh

You can see why the common admonition to "act calm and kind regardless of how you feel" is very good advice: you are likely to be rewarded by actually feeling calm and

social influences create significant noise across groups.

Money-primed people become more independent than they would be without the associative trigger. They persevered almost twice as long in trying to solve a very difficult problem before they asked the experimenter for help, a crisp demonstration of increased self-reliance. Money-primed people are also more selfish: they were much less willing to spend time helping another student who pretended to be confused about an experimental task.

You have now been introduced to that stranger in you, which may be in control of much of what you do, although you rarely have a glimpse of it.

people tend to be risk averse in the domain of gains and risk seeking in the domain of losses.

The primed ideas have some ability to prime other ideas, although more weakly. Like ripples on a pond, activation spreads through a small part of the vast network of associated ideas.

An impressive series of studies by Thomas Åstebro sheds light on what happens when optimists receive bad news.

When you say 'quite clever,' which reference group do you have in mind?

The concept of loss aversion is certainly the most significant contribution of psychology to behavioral economics

Este pequeño ejemplo ilustra una gran historia: los seres humanos esperan tener reacciones emocionales más intensas (el arrepentimiento incluido) frente a un resultado producido por una acción que frente al mismo resultado producido por la inacción.

For the billionaire looking for the extra billion, and indeed for the participant in an experimental economics project looking for the extra dollar, money is a proxy for points on a scale of self-regard and achievement. These rewards and punishments, promises and threats, are all in our heads.

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.

Much of the discussion in this book is about biases of intuition.

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