You can't reason people out of beliefs they weren't reasoned into.
The bull market, rising prices, earning lots of money, make it seem as if the good days will never end. When prices are falling and there is a recession, that also feels as though it will last for ever. Politics is the same. People simply can't imagine changing circumstances.
No executive devotes effort to proving himself wrong.
We humans, you see, have an infinite capacity for self-rationalization.
A man forgets his good luck next day, but remembers his bad luck until next year.
People forget the good, because the bad has more punch.
It is ironic that the scientific facts throw Darwin out, but leave William Paley, a figure of fun to the scientific world for more than a century, still in the tournament with a chance of being the ultimate winner... Indeed, such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific.
People had an illogical, self-serving rationale when it came to interpreting the behavior of others.
The fear of loss is greater than the desire for gain.
Our guts can really mislead us. Sometimes, what we think of as our gut is something else, like an outside influence. If you're going to buy an apartment and it smells of freshly baked bread, you're more likely to want to buy it.
As a result of a general defect of nature, we are either more confident or more fearful of unusual and unknown things.
A lot of positive psychology is stuck in being the psychology of privilege, and I reject that.
We probably have a greater love for those we support than for those who support us. Our vanity carries more weight than our self-interest.
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.
I think that bias is not a fixed thing. It's not as though some people are biased and others are not. It ebbs and flows. It can be manipulated. It changes according to a person's circumstances.
Humans have a tendency towards short-term thinking.
One believes others will do what he will do to himself.
Most people don't believe something can happen until it already has. That's not stupidity or weakness, that's just human nature.
There is something in us, somehow, that, in the most degraded condition, we snatch at a chance to deceive ourselves into a fanciedsuperiority to others, whom we suppose lower in the scale than ourselves.
The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering.
Human psychology is attuned to the negative. It’s called the negativity bias. We dread bad things more than we savor good things.
It seems that the one thing that doesn't change is people's reaction to short-term conditions and their axiomatic ability to perpetuate them far into the future.
It is a natural propensity to attribute misfortune to someone's malignity.
Understanding the psychology of changing norms starts from a simple insight: although we may wish to be perfectly rational and impartial, bias is an inescapable part of what it means to be human.
If students get a sound education in the history, social effects and psychological biases of technology, they may grow to be adults who use technology rather than be used by it.
