The bias has been given several names; following Paul Slovic I will call it denominator neglect.

One reason for the low correlations between individuals’ circumstances and their satisfaction with life is that both experienced happiness and life satisfaction are largely determined by the genetics of temperament.

affect heuristic, where judgments and decisions are guided directly by feelings of liking and disliking, with little deliberation or reasoning.

Earlier I traced people’s confidence in a belief to two related impressions: cognitive ease and coherence.

“Do we still remember the question we are trying to answer? Or have we substituted an easier one?”

single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.

we are driven more strongly to avoid losses than to achieve gains. A reference point is sometimes the status quo, but it can also be a goal in the future: not achieving a goal is a loss, exceeding the goal is a gain.

In general, the higher the predictability, the wider the range of predicted values.

affect heuristic in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world.