The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.

To better avoid errors, you should talk to people who disagree with you and you should talk to people who are not in the same emotional situation you are.

Hindsight bias makes surprises vanish.

People who face a difficult question often answer an easier one instead, without realizing it.

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 on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.

Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.

We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.