I'm not a great believer in self-help.
Organizations may be better able to tame optimism than individuals are.
There is research on the effects of 9/11, and you know, compared to the enormity of it, it didn't have a huge effect on people's mood. They were going about their business, mostly.
Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.
If people do not know what is going to make them better off or give them pleasure, then the idea that you can trust people to do what will give them pleasure becomes questionable.
In a rising market, enough of your bad ideas will pay off so that you'll never learn that you should have fewer ideas.
Most people are highly optimistic most of the time.
Divorced women, compared to married women, are less satisfied with their lives, which is not surprising. But they're actually more cheerful, when you look at the average mood they're in in the course of the day.
By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases, and that is true for both humans and artificial intelligence, but the heuristics of AI are not necessarily the human ones.
Intuitive diagnosis is reliable when people have a lot of relevant feedback. But people are very often willing to make intuitive diagnoses even when they're very likely to be wrong.
Political columnists and sports pundits are rewarded for being overconfident.
The concept of happiness has to be reorganised.
When people talk of the economy being strong, they don't seem to feel that they, too, are better off.
We think of our future as anticipated memories.
All of us roughly know what memory is. I mean, memory is sort of the storage of the past. It's the storage of our personal experiences. It's a very big deal.
An investment said to have an 80% chance of success sounds far more attractive than one with a 20% chance of failure. The mind can't easily recognize that they are the same.
Most of the moments of our life - and I calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long; that means that, you know, in a life there are about 600 million of them; in a month, there are about 600,000 - most of them don't leave a trace.
Most of the time, we think fast. And most of the time we're really expert at what we're doing, and most of the time, what we do is right.
We're beautiful devices. The devices work well; we're all experts in what we do. But when the mechanism fails, those failures can tell you a lot about how the mind works.
So your emotional state really has a lot to do with what you're thinking about and what you're paying attention to.
When you analyze happiness, it turns out that the way you spend your time is extremely important.
The idea that you can ask one question and it makes the point - well, that wasn't how psychology was done at the time.
Yes, there is a burden of financial insecurity. I don't think you find it in mood. Income is correlated with life satisfaction, so maybe you do find it in life satisfaction. You don't find it in mood, and I think it is very important.
True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.
It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.
People just hate the idea of losing. Any loss, even a small one, is just so terrible to contemplate that they compensate by buying insurance, including totally absurd policies like air travel.
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.
Employers who violate rules of fairness are punished by reduced productivity, and merchants who follow unfair pricing policies can expect to lose sales.
It was always assumed I would be a professor. I grew up thinking it.
There's a lot of randomness in the decisions that people make.
We are very influenced by completely automatic things that we have no control over, and we don't know we're doing it.
Most successful pundits are selected for being opinionated, because it's interesting, and the penalties for incorrect predictions are negligible. You can make predictions, and a year later people won't remember them.
You're surprised by something, but you don't really know what surprised you; you recognize someone, but you don't really know what cues cause you to recognize that person.
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.
In essence, the optimistic style involves taking credit for successes but little blame for failures.
Clearly, the decision-making that we rely on in society is fallible. It's highly fallible, and we should know that.
The average investor's return is significantly lower than market indices due primarily to market timing.
People are very complex. And for a psychologist, you get fascinated by the complexity of human beings, and that is what I have lived with, you know, in my career all of my life, is the complexity of human beings.
Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers. It would be useful for us to acknowledge that fact.
We're generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments.
There is a huge wave of interest in happiness among researchers. There is a lot of happiness coaching. Everybody would like to make people happier.
My interest in well-being evolved from my interest in decision making - from raising the question of whether people know what they will want in the future and whether the things that people want for themselves will make them happy.
It doesn't take many observations to think you've spotted a trend, and it's probably not a trend at all.
One thing we have lost, that we had in the past, is a sense of progress, that things are getting better. There is a sense of volatility, but not of progress.
There are domains in which expertise is not possible. Stock picking is a good example. And in long-term political strategic forecasting, it's been shown that experts are just not better than a dice-throwing monkey.
People like leaders who look like they are dominant, optimistic, friendly to their friends, and quick on the trigger when it comes to enemies. They like boldness and despise the appearance of timidity and protracted doubt.
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.
People are really happier with friends than they are with their families or their spouse or their child.
Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it.
