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

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

Imagination wasn’t a flight with limitless destinations. It was a tool for making sense of a world of infinite possibilities by reducing them. The imagination obeyed rules: the rules of undoing. One rule was that the more items there were to undo in order to create some alternative reality, the less likely the mind was to undo them. People seemed l

When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret. As the starting point for a new theory, it sounded promising.

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

“He who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises.”

Amos liked to say that if you are asked to do anything—go to a party, give a speech, lift a finger—you should never answer right away, even if you are sure that you want to do it.

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.

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

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