Noreena Hertz Quotes

Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.

People mistakenly assume that their thinking is done by their head; it is actually done by the heart which first dictates the conclusion, then commands the head to provide the reasoning that will defend it.

In life, particularly in public life, psychology is more powerful than logic.

I just choose the scripts I want to work on. I don't know why. It's not something conscious or that I'm doing on purpose.

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.

At the constitutional level where we work, 90 percent of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections.

I'm quite intuitive about what I pick. Often it's to do with what I've just done and how I'm feeling.

We think, each of us, that we're much more rational than we are. And we think that we make our decisions because we have good reasons to make them. Even when it's the other way around. We believe in the reasons, because we've already made the decision.

Emotions are continually affecting our thought processes and decisions, below the level of our awareness. And the most common emotion of them all is the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

The unconscious is much smarter than the conscious.

A buddy of mine is doing a documentary on decisions, and they're not based on a ton of logic. It's mostly how you relate to them emotionally.

We make decisions based on what we feel in the moment.

It's kind of an intuitive process. I wish that it were more systematic, but it just isn't.

Intelligent decisions may fail you but one's instincts cannot.

I strongly believe that many of the best decisions are made on gut instinct.

It's very personal to me and doesn't work for everybody, but what I have found in my experience is that when I make pro and con lists, it's usually because I am trying to talk myself out of a good idea or talk myself into a really bad one.

I'd like to be more decisive. I can take an hour to choose between two brands of washing powder in the supermarket.

Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.

Most of the time you should use reason, there is no doubt about that because gut often makes us susceptible to lots of different biases, particularly if what you're deciding is something that you really, that expertise can be brought to bear on it, there is a way in which you can align the odds, so then you should really use reason.

Most decisions are seat-of-the-pants judgments. You can create a rationale for anything. In the end, most decisions are based on intuition and faith.

Average people didn't analyze what they thought: they thought they thought, and half of it was gut reaction.

Of course, analysis can sometimes give more accurate results than intuition but usually it’s just a lot of work. I normally do what my intuition tells me to do. Most of the time spent thinking is just to double-check.

I'm supposed to be a scientific person but I use intuition more than logic in making basic decisions.

Decision-making is difficult because, by its nature, it involves uncertainty. If there was no uncertainty, decisions would be easy! The uncertainty exists because we don't know the future, we don't know if the decision we make will lead to the best possible outcome. Cognitive science has taught us that relying on our gut or intuition often leads to bad decisions, particularly in cases where statistical information is available. Our guts and our brains didn't evolve to deal with probabilistic thinking.