The brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.

It's a wonderful things to be optimistic. It keeps you healthy and it keeps you resilient.

Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality.

Overconfidence is a powerful source of illusions, primarily determined by the quality and coherence of the story that you can construct, not by its validity.

For many people, commuting is the worst part of the day, and policies that can make commuting shorter and more convenient would be a straightforward way to reduce minor but widespread suffering.

Experienced radiologists who evaluate chest X-rays as “normal” or “abnormal” contradict themselves 20% of the time when they see the same picture on separate occasions.

The effort invested in ‘getting it right’ should be commensurate with the importance of the decision.

You build the best possible story from the information available to you, and if it is a good story, you believe it. Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

The idea that you can ask one question and it makes the point – well, that wasn’t how psychology was done at the time.

Intuitive predictions need to be corrected because they are not regressive and therefore are biased.