The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.

We are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world, in which regularities appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or of someone´s intention. We do not expect to see regularity produced...

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.

pay attention” is apt: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail.

If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do. My Princeton colleague Danny Oppenheimer refuted a myth prevalent among undergraduates about the vocabulary that professors...

However, attention can be moved away from an unwanted focus, primarily by focusing intently on another target.

The law (of least effort) asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is...

Searching for wisdom in historic events requires an act of faith—a belief in the existence of recurrent patterns waiting to be discovered.

…the characters are useful because of some quirks of our minds, yours and mine. A sentence is understood more easily if it describes what an agent (system 2) does than if it describes what something...

The ‘Instagram Generation’ now experiences the present as an anticipated memory.

The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.

There’s a lot of randomness in the decisions that people make.

Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high...

Dawes observed that the complex statistical algorithm adds little or no value. One can do just as well by selecting a set of scores that have some validity for predicting the outcome and adjusting the...

The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact.

Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance...

Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.

Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.

Freedom has a cost, which is borne by individuals who make bad choices, and by a society that feels obligated to help them.

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.