“This tendency to focus too heavily on the occasional success is helped along by an asymmetry in the way we evaluate success and failure. A single success generally does more to confirm a strategy’s effectiveness than a single failure does… — Thomas Gilovich Copy Share Image
“By carefully scrutinizing and explaining away their losses, while accepting their successes at face value, gamblers do indeed rewrite their personal histories of success and failure. Losses are often counted, not as losses, but as “near wins.” — Thomas Gilovich Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 problems, whereas the nonprobabilistic science of chemistry and the nonscientific discipline of the law do not affect their students in these respects (p. 438)…. the luxury of not being confronted with messy problems that contain substantial… — Thomas Gilovich Copy Share
“To live, it seems, is to explain, to justify, and to find coherence among diverse outcomes, characteristics, and causes.” — Thomas Gilovich Copy Share Image
“social psychologist Ziva Kunda, who argues that people are indeed more likely to believe things they want to believe, but that their capacity to do so is constrained by objective evidence and by their ability “… to construct a justification of their desired conclusion that would persuade a dispassionate observer. They draw the desired conclusion only if they can muster… — Thomas Gilovich Copy Share
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 Copy Share Image
“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, and “real” when it is really random, chaotic, and illusory. Thus, one of the most fundamental tasks that we face in accurately perceiving and understanding our world—that of determining whether there is a phenomenon “out there”… — Thomas Gilovich Copy Share
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
What we believe is heavily influenced by what we think others believe — Thomas Gilovich Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
