Quotes About Psychology

If you consider how much you should pay for a house, you will be influenced by the asking price. The same house will appear more valuable if its listing price is high than if it is low, even if you are determined to resist the influence of this number;

we quickly realized that we were just as risk seeking in the domain of losses as we were risk averse in the domain of gains. We were not the first to observe risk seeking with negative prospects—at least two authors had reported that fact, but they had not made much of it. However, we were fortunate to have a framework that made the finding of risk seeking easy to interpret, and that was a milestone in our thinking. Indeed, we identified two reasons for this effect.

shed new light on the planning fallacy

This example highlights two aspects of choice that the standard model of indifference curves does not predict. First, tastes are not fixed; they vary with the reference point. Second, the disadvantages of a change loom larger than its advantages, inducing a bias that favors the status quo.

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

essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

Our answer was that when called upon to judge probability, people actually judge something else and believe they have judged probability.

sense. A good mood is a signal that things are generally going well, the environment is safe, and it is all right to let one's guard down. A bad mood indicates that things are not going very well, there may be a threat, and vigilance is required. Cognitive

bias is a compelling figure, while noise is the background to which we pay no attention. That is how we remain largely unaware of a large flaw in our judgment.

His System 1 constructed a story, and his System 2 believed it. It happens to all of us.

the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

The implication is clear: as 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.

psychologist Eckhard Hess described the pupil of the eye as a window to the soul. I reread it recently and again found it inspiring.

book titled Rationality and the Reflective Mind

Good stories provide a simple and coherent account of people's actions and intentions.

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.

Intuitive errors are normally much more frequent among ego-depleted people, and the drinkers of Splenda showed the expected depletion effect. On the other hand, the glucose drinkers were not depleted. Restoring the level of available sugar in the brain had prevented the deterioration of performance.

manipulations that increase cognitive ease (priming, a clear font, pre-exposing words) all increase the tendency to see the words as linked.

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.

The core of his argument is that rationality should be distinguished from intelligence.

If you have recently seen or heard the word EAT, you are temporarily more likely to complete the word fragment SO_P as SOUP than as SOAP. The opposite would happen, of course, if you had just seen WASH. We call this a priming effect and say that the idea of EAT primes the idea of SOUP, and that WASH primes SOAP.

In this view, people often (but not always) take on risky projects because they are overly optimistic about the odds they face. I will return to this idea several times in this book—it probably contributes to an explanation of why people litigate, why they start wars, and why they open small businesses.

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.