This is a trap for forecasters and their clients: adding detail to scenarios makes them more persuasive, but less likely to come true.

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.

really (almost) nothing to worry about, but you cannot help images of disaster from coming to mind. As Slovic has argued, the amount of concern is not adequately sensitive to the probability of harm; you are imagining the numerator—the tragic story you saw on the news—and not thinking about the denominator. Sunstein has coined the phrase

Too much concern about how well one is doing in a task sometimes disrupts performance by loading short-term memory with pointless anxious thoughts.

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.

Their recommendation is that you should not put too much weight on regret; even if you have some, it will hurt less than you now think.

strident

the witness, concluding that the probability is 80%. The two sources of information can be combined by Bayes’s rule. The correct answer is 41%. However, you can probably guess what people do when faced with this problem: they ignore the base rate and go with the witness. The most common answer is 80%.

His idea was straightforward: people’s choices are based not on dollar values but on the psychological values of outcomes, their utilities.