Tversky, Amos

"The hot-cold empathy gap makes us poor at predicting our behavior under stress."

"We find it harder to imagine the truly novel than to misremember the familiar."

"Social proof is one of the most powerful forces in human behavior."

"We are terrible at understanding exponential growth."

"Reference points are not fixed; they shift based on what we're comparing to."

"The sunk cost fallacy persists even when we know it's irrational."

"Commitment and consistency drive behavior even when they're no longer rational."

"We tend to overestimate how much control we have over outcomes."

"The best way to measure a person's character is to watch how they behave when they have nothing to gain."

"Our sense of probability is largely shaped by how the question is asked."

"The illusion of skill: we see patterns in noise and call it expertise."

"The mind is a prediction machine, constantly generating expectations about the world."

"We are not rational actors in an economic sense; we are pattern-seeking creatures bound by cognitive limits."

"Overconfidence in judgment is one of the most pervasive biases in human thinking."

"The availability heuristic explains why recent events loom larger in our minds than statistics."

"We tend to see patterns that confirm what we already believe, even when they don't exist."

"The anchoring effect demonstrates how arbitrary numbers can shape our perception of value."

"Risk tolerance is not a stable trait; it fluctuates based on framing and context."

"Losses loom larger psychologically than equivalent gains—this is loss aversion."

"We are creatures of habit, bound by the paths we've already traveled."

"The representativeness heuristic leads us to judge probability by similarity rather than logic."

"Expertise can be a curse when it blinds us to new possibilities."

"The conjunction fallacy shows we often violate basic rules of probability in everyday thinking."

"Memory is not a recording device; it is a reconstruction of the past."

"Our intuitions about chance are remarkably poor, even when we understand the mathematics."

"The mind operates on two systems: one fast and intuitive, one slow and deliberate."

"We judge the quality of a decision by its outcome, not by the reasoning behind it."

"Framing is everything—the same choice presented differently yields different decisions."

"The illusion of control is pervasive; we overestimate our influence on random events."

"Regression to the mean is one of the least understood phenomena in human judgment."