The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World (181 POCHE)

“When someone says something, don’t ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of.”

“Confirmation bias,” he’d heard this called. The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see.

People’s emotional response to extremely long odds led them to reverse their usual taste for risk, and to become risk seeking when pursuing a long-shot gain and risk avoiding when faced with the extremely remote possibility of loss. (Which is why they bought both lottery tickets and insurance.) “If you think about the possibilities at all, you thin

By changing the context in which two things are compared, you submerge certain features and force others to the surface.

The first was the realization that people responded to changes rather than absolute levels. The second was the discovery that people approached risk very differently when it involved losses than when it involved gains. Exploring people’s responses to specific gambles, they found a third raisin: People did not respond to probability in a straightfor

psychology was a noisy dinner party during which the guests talked past one another and changed the subject with bewildering frequency. The Gestalt psychologists and the behaviorists and the psychoanalysts might all be jammed into the same building with a plaque on the front that said Department of Psychology, but they didn’t waste a lot of time li

both mainly saw only what they had been trained to see. The problem was not what they knew, or didn’t know. It was their need for certainty or, at least, the appearance of certainty. Standing beside the slide projector,

the article described three ways in which people made judgments when they didn’t know the answer for sure. The names the authors had given these—representativeness, availability, anchoring—were at once weird and seductive.

This “ability” to explain that which we cannot predict, even in the absence of any additional information, represents an important, though subtle, flaw in our reasoning. It leads us to believe that there is a less uncertain world than there actually is, and that we are less bright than we actually might be. For if we can explain tomorrow what we ca