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.
We know that the great majority of people have a strong need for authority which it can admire, to which it can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill-treats it.
Rather than giving people an inflated view of themselves, we need to give them concrete reasons to feel good about themselves.
Brains come in different types and they're all normal.
It was as if personality itself had a 'face'. This non-physical face of personality seemed to be the real key to personality change. It remained scarred, distorted, 'ugly' or inferior the person himself acted out this role in his behaviour regardless of the changes in physical appearance. If this 'face of personality' could be reconstructed, if old emotional scars could be removed, then the person himself changed, even without facial plastic surgery.
Everybody, to some extent, manipulates. Even children learn to cry when they want something. There are all kinds of subtle things we do to get others to follow our lead, not bother us, and so on.
If we think about emotion this way - as outside-in, not inside out - it is possible to understand how some people can have an enormous amount of influence over others. Some of us, after all, are very good at expressiing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us.
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