Quote collection
205 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"If people are failing, they look inept. If people are succeeding, they look strong and good and competent. That's the 'halo effect.' Your first impression of a thing sets up your subsequent beliefs. If the company looks inept to you, you may assume everything else they do is inept."
"Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do."
"Facts that challenge basic assumptions-and thereby threaten people's livelihood and self-esteem-are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them."
"The planning fallacy is that you make a plan, which is usually a best-case scenario. Then you assume that the outcome will follow your plan, even when you should know better."
"I would not advise people to buy a car or house without making a list. You will probably improve your intuitions by making a list and then sleeping on it."
"To know whether you can trust a particular intuitive judgment, there are two questions you should ask: Is the environment in which the judgment is made sufficiently regular to enable predictions from the available evidence? The answer is yes for diagnosticians, no for stock pickers. Do the professionals have an adequate opportunity to learn the cues and the regularities? The answer here depends on the professionals' experience and on the quality and speed with which they discover their mistakes."
"We associate leadership with decisiveness. That perception of leadership pushes people to make decisions fairly quickly, lest they be seen as dithering and indecisive."
"When everybody in a group is susceptible to similar biases, groups are inferior to individuals, because groups tend to be more extreme than individuals."
"A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature."
"A plan is only a scenario, and almost by definition, it is optimistic... As a result, scenario planning can lead to a serious underestimate of the risk of failure."
"The amount of success it takes for leaders to become overconfident isn't terribly large."
"Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition. These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors."
"The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time."
"Often, the most enjoyable part of an activity is the anticipation."
"The brains of humans contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news."
"If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do."
"People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations."
"Establish a closing ritual. Know when to stop working. Try to end each work day the same way, too. Straighten up your desk. Back up your computer. Make a list of what you need to do tomorrow."
"After a crisis we tell ourselves we understand why it happened and maintain the illusion that the world is understandable. In fact, we should accept the world is incomprehensible much of the time."
"People have little idea, by and large, of the investment world. They are convinced they have an advantage."