Groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.
Interpretation
Groups often amplify individual opinions and behaviors, leading to more extreme views.
This quote by Daniel Kahneman highlights the phenomenon known as group polarization, where discussions within a group can result in more extreme positions than those held by individual members. This can occur due to various factors such as social influence, conformity, and the desire for cohesion within the group, ultimately leading to decisions and opinions that may be more radical than those that individuals would arrive at alone.
In practice
During a team meeting, a suggestion can lead to a more radical decision than anyone would propose alone.
We think, each of us, that we're much more rational than we are. And we think that we make our decisions because we have good reasons to make them. Even when it's the other way around. We believe in the reasons, because we've already made the decision.
The average investor's return is significantly lower than market indices due primarily to market timing.
Banks are run by executives, and executives protect themselves, and that does not always mean that banks are going to behave rationally.
Laziness is built deep into our nature.
Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.
You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.
Worrying about scarcity is our culture's version of post-traumatic stress. It happens when we've been through too much, and rather than coming together to heal (which requires vulnerability) we're angry and scared and at each other's throats.
Such is human psychology that if we don't express our joy, we soon cease to feel it.
Cognitive therapy is based on the idea that when you change the way you think, you can change the way you feel and behave. In other words, if we can learn to think about other people in a more positive and realistic way, it will be far easier to resolve conflicts and develop rewarding personal and professional relationships.
There is no fun in psychiatry. If you try to get fun out of it, you pay a considerable price for your unjustifiable optimism.
Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history. (243)
The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone.
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