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.

Facts that challenge basic assumptions-and thereby threaten people's livelihood and self-esteem-are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them.

There are domains in which expertise is not possible. Stock picking is a good example. And in long-term political strategic forecasting, it's been shown that experts are just not better than a dice-throwing monkey.

Slow thinking has the feeling of something you do. It's deliberate.

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.

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

Psychologists really aim to be scientists, white-coat stuff, with elaborate statistics, running experiments.