One of the problems with expertise is that people have it in some domains and not in others.

True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.

My impression is that the elimination of memories greatly reduces the value of the experience.

People who face a difficult question often answer an easier one instead, without realizing it.

If there was one ubiquitous recommendation about marriage it was this: "Don't go to bed angry."

I don't try to be clever at all. The idea that I could see what no one else can is an illusion.

Alternative descriptions of the same reality evoke different emotions and different associations.

The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than your own.

Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.

It's very difficult to distinguish between what a person believes and what they say they believe.

When you analyze happiness, it turns out that the way you spend your time is extremely important.

The evidence is unequivocal, there's a great deal more luck than skill in people getting very rich.

In essence, the optimistic style involves taking credit for successes but little blame for failures.

An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true.

The effort invested in 'getting it right' should be commensurate with the importance of the decision.

The experiencing self lives its life continuously. It has moments of experience, one after the other.

When people talk of the economy being strong, they don't seem to feel that they, too, are better off.

The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.

It doesn't take many observations to think you've spotted a trend, and it's probably not a trend at all.

People are really happier with friends than they are with their families or their spouse or their child.

The average investor's return is significantly lower than market indices due primarily to market timing.

One of the major biases in risky decision making is optimism. Optimism is a source of high-risk thinking.

People have little idea, by and large, of the investment world. They are convinced they have an advantage.

It's very easy for trusted companies to mislead naive customers, and life insurance companies are trusted.

When you look at the books about well-being, you see one word - it's happiness. People do not distinguish.

Psychologists really aim to be scientists, white-coat stuff, with elaborate statistics, running experiments.

We deeply want to be led by people who know what they're doing and who don't have to think about it too much.

There's a tendency to look at investments in isolation. Investors focus on the risk of individual securities.

The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.

The concept of loss aversion is certainly the most significant contribution of psychology to behavioral economics.

That's one of the real dangers of leader selection in many organizations: leaders are selected for overconfidence.

Clearly, the decision-making that we rely on in society is fallible. It's highly fallible, and we should know that.

So your emotional state really has a lot to do with what you're thinking about and what you're paying attention to.

Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers. It would be useful for us to acknowledge that fact.

We are very influenced by completely automatic things that we have no control over, and we don't know we're doing it.

If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.

In a rising market, enough of your bad ideas will pay off so that you'll never learn that you should have fewer ideas.

The idea that you can ask one question and it makes the point - well, that wasn't how psychology was done at the time.

We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.

Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.

A person who has not made peace with his losses is likely to accept gambles that would be unacceptable to him otherwise.

I would be wary of experts' intuition, except when they deal with something that they have dealt with a lot in the past.

We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are.

We can't live in a state of perpetual doubt, so we make up the best story possible and we live as if the story were true.

Nobody would say, 'I'm voting for this guy because he's got the stronger chin,' but that, in fact, is partly what happens.

People talk of the new economy and of reinventing themselves in the workplace, and in that sense most of us are less secure.

We're blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We're not designed to know how little we know.

It's not a case of: 'Read this book and then you'll think differently. I've written this book, and I don't think differently.

It's nonsense to say money doesn't buy happiness, but people exaggerate the extent to which more money can buy more happiness.

you know you have made a theoretical advance when you can no longer reconstruct why you failed for so long to see the obvious.

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