Quotes About Perspective

Any aspect of life to which attention is directed will loom large in a global evaluation. This is the essence of the focusing illusion, which can be described in a single sentence: Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

costs are not losses.

When no recent event comes to mind, more distant memories govern.

single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.

They instructed negotiators to focus their attention and search their memory for arguments against the anchor.

Losses are weighted about twice as much as gains in several contexts:

President Truman famously asked for a "one-armed economist" who would take a clear stand; he was sick and tired of economists who kept saying, "On the other hand Ã¢â'¬Â¦

The same sound will be experienced as very loud or quite faint, depending on whether it was preceded by a whisper or by a roar.

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

We must allow for that uncertainty in our thinking.

A matter of judgment is one with some uncertainty about the answer and where we allow for the possibility that reasonable and competent people might disagree.

This is the essence of the focusing illusion, which can be described in a single sentence: Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

Framing effects: Different ways of presenting the same information often evoke different emotions. The statement that "the odds of survival one month after surgery are 90%" is more reassuring than the equivalent statement that "mortality within one month of surgery is 10%." Similarly, cold

Once you adopt a new view of the world (or of any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.

Memories are all we get to keep from our experience of living. The only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self.

WYSIATI—what you see is all there is.

Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion—and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined.

The distinction between two selves is applied to the measurement of well-being, where we find again that what makes the experiencing self happy is not quite the same as what satisfies the remembering self.

Hindsight is especially unkind to decision makers who act as agents for others—physicians, financial advisers, third-base coaches, CEOs, social workers, diplomats, politicians. 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. There is a clear outcome bias. When

Most of us view the world as more benign than it really

El mundo que imaginamos no es una réplica precisa de la realidad;

defining risk is thus an exercise in power.

The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little. We often fail to allow for the possibility that evidence that should be critical to our judgment is missing—what we see is all there is.

We were sufficiently similar to understand each other easily, and sufficiently different to surprise each other.