Excerpts

The belief will not change when the reasons are defeated. The causality is reversed. People believe the reasons because they believe in the conclusion.

In politics and in religion, the main driver is social. We believe what the people we love and trust believe. This is not a conscious decision to conform by hiding one's true beliefs. It's the truth. This is how we believe. Indeed, beliefs persevere even without any social pressure

Why is it that we may agree in advance that a particular result is a fair test of our theory, then see so much more when the result is known.

To a good first approximation, people simply don't change their minds about anything that matters.

Stanford study on belief perseverance

Classic studies by the late Stanford social psychologist Lee Ross established the phenomenon of belief perseverance.

In those experiments, you first provide people with evidence that supports a particular belief. For example, you may give people the task of guessing which suicide notes are genuine, then provide feedback about accuracy. People draw inferences from what they're told. Those who have been given positive feedback, score themselves much higher on empathy than people who have been given negative feedback.

Then you discredit the feedback by telling people there was a mix-up and you test their beliefs about their empathy. The outcome? The elimination of the evidence does not eliminate the beliefs that were inferred from it. People who have raised their opinions of how empathetic they are, maintain their new belief, and the same is true if people have been convinced that they're not very good at guessing other people's feelings.

Chapter that didn’t survive repication crisis

I published Thinking, Fast and Slow. An important chapter in that book was concerned with behavioral priming. For example, the famous study in which people who have been made to think of old age walk more slowly than they normally would.

His rule

I hated it so much that I adopted a policy that Amos Tverksy thought irresponsible: I do not respond to hostile papers. And if a submitted manuscript makes me angry, I do not review it.

people are more likely to kick themselves about something they did than about something they did not do. (not true)

For example, if John invested in company A, and knows that if he had invested in B, he would've made a hundred thousand dollars—more compared to Tom who held stocks in company B and sold them to buy stock in A.

They're in the same objective situation. But one of them did something, sold his stocks and the other didn't do something. He didn't buy the better stock. It's very clear that in that case, one of them feels more regret