Quotes About Decision-making

the behaviors and skills we want and expect our kids to demonstrate, like sound decision making, control of their emotions and bodies, empathy, self-understanding, and morality—are dependent on a part of their brain that hasn't fully developed yet.

Think back about the functions of the upstairs brain: good decision making, control over emotions and body, flexibility, empathy, self-understanding, and morality. These are the aspects of our kids' character we want to develop, right? As we put it in The Whole-Brain Child, we want to engage the upstairs brain, rather than enraging the downstairs brain. Engage, don't enrage.

When we give a child the opportunity to decide how he should act, rather than simply telling him what he should do, he becomes a better decision maker. And that's one of the ultimate goals of parenting, isn't it?

El primer paso de la disciplina es prestar atención a las emociones de los niños. Cuando los niños se portan mal, suele deberse a que no manejan bien sus sentimientos fuertes y a que aún no cuentan con las destrezas necesarias para tomar buenas decisiones. Así pues, estar atento a la experiencia emocional que subyace a una conducta es tan importante como fijarse en la conducta misma.

We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appear obvious only after the fact.

A simple rule can help: before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position. This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of knowledge and opinion in the group. The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of those who speak early and assertively, causing others to line up behind them.

The worse the consequence, the greater the hindsight bias.

To be useful, your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability.

if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion.

Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high and there is no time to collect more information.

The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.

The most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast.

If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another substitution.

Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.

An inability to be guided by a "healthy fear" of bad consequences is a disastrous flaw.

You have no compelling moral intuitions to guide you in solving that problem. Your moral feelings are attached to frames, to descriptions of reality rather than to reality itself.

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

To understand error in judgment, we must understand both bias and noise.

wherever there is judgment, there is noise—and more of it than you think.

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.

Amos and I introduced the idea of a conjunction fallacy, which people commit when they judge a conjunction of two events (here, bank teller and feminist) to be more probable than one of the events (bank teller) in a direct comparison.

The expectation of intelligent gossip is a powerful motive for serious self-criticism, more powerful than New Year resolutions to improve one's decision making at work and at home.

There's a lot of randomness in the decisions that people make.

System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and the quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions.