Logically, such a nonoccurrence is just as much an event…

“Chapter 7 takes a psychological truism, “we tend to believe what we think others believe” and turns it around: We tend to think others…

— Thomas Gilovich

“confirmatory events are in fact much more memorable than non-confirmatory events.”

— Thomas Gilovich

“Unfortunately, psychology has not adequately come to grips with the difficult subject of entertainment (or with its opposite, boredom). Despite a few initial efforts…

— Thomas Gilovich

“develop the habit of employing one of several “consider the opposite” strategies. We can learn to ask ourselves, for example, “Suppose the exact opposite…

— Thomas Gilovich

What we believe is heavily influenced by what we think others believe

— Thomas Gilovich

“In other words, when testing a hypothesis of similarity, people look for evidence of similarity rather than dissimilarity, and when testing a hypothesis of…

— Thomas Gilovich

“We therefore should be more skeptical than we seem to be about evidence presented to us secondhand. We should become accustomed to asking ourselves…

— Thomas Gilovich

“our difficulty in accurately recognizing random arrangements of events can lead us to believe things that are not true—to believe something is systematic, ordered,…

— Thomas Gilovich

We humans seem to be extremely good at generating ideas, theories, and explanations that have the ring of plausibility. We may be relatively deficient,…

— Thomas Gilovich

“social psychologist Ziva Kunda, who argues that people are indeed more likely to believe things they want to believe, but that their capacity to…

— Thomas Gilovich

“To live, it seems, is to explain, to justify, and to find coherence among diverse outcomes, characteristics, and causes.”

— Thomas Gilovich

“It appears that the probabilistic sciences of psychology and medicine teach their students to apply statistical and methodological rules to both scientific and everyday-life…

— Thomas Gilovich

“Finally, it has been shown that the tendency for people to think of themselves as above average is reduced—even for ambiguous traits—when people are…

— Thomas Gilovich

“As part of this research, one group of participants was asked which two countries are more similar to one another, East Germany and West…

— Thomas Gilovich

“Perhaps the most general and most important mental habit to instill is an appreciation of the folly of trying to draw conclusions from incomplete…

— Thomas Gilovich