Michael Lewis Quotes

In psychology and behavioral economics, people have shown that if you just describe options in a certain way, or make some features of a situation salient, you can get people to do and even see what you want. You don't have to be a Jedi to manipulate people's attention.

When the mind is in a state of uncertainty the smallest impulse directs it to either side.

This is how the human mind works. We see exceptions and spin them into rules. We take slices of information and make sweeping conclusions, as another pair of psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, found in their pioneering work on judgment and decision-making.

Between hindsight bias, fake causality, positive bias, anchoring/priming, et cetera et cetera, and above all the dreaded confirmation bias, once an idea gets into your head, it's probably going to stay there.

Would you persuade, speak of interest, not of reason.

I sit here all day trying to persuade people to do the things they ought to have the sense to do without my persuading them. That's all the powers of the President amount to.

We're able to use certain techniques to get people to behave in certain ways. We're able to use certain techniques to make it look like we're reading minds, even though we're not.

I'm probably more persuasive than the next person if I want to be, but do I want to be? In my head, I just don't go there.

The mind gives meaning to anything but the meaning it gives is meaningless.

The mind gives us thousands of ways to say no, but there's only one way to say yes, and that's from the heart.

Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.

I also doubt a man can give really clear reasons for anything.

No decision-making system is going to guarantee corporate success. The strategic decisions that corporations have to make are of mind-numbing complexity. But we know that the more power you give a single individual in the face of complexity and uncertainty, the more likely it is that bad decisions will get made.

He [D'Artangnan] succumbs to her [Miledy Winter] level of seduction and gives into it. It's only when the series starts to progress that he realizes what she's doing, and the tables turn slightly. But that relationship really pays homage to how D'Artagnan can be easily swayed. You see him grow into somebody who can actually make a decision where he's not being used and forced into doing something that he doesn't want to do.

It's not because my mind is made up that I don't want you to confuse me with any more facts. It's because my mind isn't made up. I already have more facts than I can cope with.

Fundamentalism is a kind of decision not to change your mind about something...Many of us are fundamentalists...because it worked pretty well for us.

It is easier to give directions than advice, and more agreeable to have the right to act, even in a limited sphere, than the privilege to talk at large.

Drive-Bys want you to think that Donald Trump doesn't have a mind of his own. He's either doing what Steve Bannon tells him to do or he's either doing what Jared Kushner tells him to do or he's then doing what Gary Cohn tells him to do, and then sometimes he might do what Ivanka Trump tells him to do. They want you to believe he doesn't have a mind of his own, that he actually believes the last thing somebody tells him. I don't think that's how it happened.

The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.

One of the hardest tasks as a human being is knowing when to keep an open mind, and when not to.

A crowd thinks in images, and the image itself calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first...A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective. It accepts as real the images invoked in its mind, though they most often have only a very distant relation with the observed facts....Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images.

Influence is a matter of selection - both acceptance and rejection.

There is a sense that everything should be easy, but easy decisions are the ones we should be scared of because if they're easy then we're probably being sold something. This is why I'm worried about "nudge" - it's pushing people in the direction of what you think they should be doing. Easy decisions are dangerous ones.

The person with the most certainty in a given situation will influence the other.

Time is like a ship which never anchors; while I am on board, I had better do those things that may profit me at my landing, than practice such as shall cause my commitment when I come ashore.