Joseph T. Hallinan > Quotes

“Almost everyone is overconfident--except the people who are depressed, and they tend to be realists.”
― Joseph T. Hallinan

“As a general principle, people feel more responsible for their actions than they do for their inactions. If we are going to err at something, we would rather err by failing to act.”
― Joseph T. Hallinan, Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average

“We are blinded by the effects of habit and hubris and hobbled by a poor understanding of our own limitations. We don't see all that we observe, and yet we sometimes “see” things we don't know we've seen. We can judge someone's honesty or likability in the blink of an eye, for instance, yet not notice a change in the identity of a person carrying a door right by us.”
― Joseph T. Hallinan, Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average

“Memory, it turns out, is often more a reconstruction than a reproduction.”
― Joseph T. Hallinan, Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average

“We learn so little from experience because we often blame the wrong cause.”
― Joseph T. Hallinan, Errornomics: Why We Make Mistakes and What We Can Do To Avoid Them

“Nearly eighty years of research on answer changing shows that most answer changes are from wrong to right, and that most people who change their answers usually improve their test scores. One comprehensive review examined thirty-three studies of answer changing; in not one were test takers hurt, on average, by changing their answers. And yet, even after students are told of these results, they still tend to stick with their first answers. Investors, by the way, show the same tendencies when it comes to stocks. Even after learning that their reason for picking a stock might be wrong, they still tended to stick with their initial choice 70 percent of the time.”
― Joseph T. Hallinan, Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average

“In a gambler's hindsight, a loss isn't really a loss—it's a near win.”
― Joseph T. Hallinan, Errornomics: Why We Make Mistakes and What We Can Do To Avoid Them

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power. —ABRAHAM LINCOLN As”
― Joseph T. Hallinan, Kidding Ourselves: The Hidden Power of Self-Deception

“A man,” he once said, “always has two reasons for doing anything—a good reason and the real reason.”
― Joseph T. Hallinan, Kidding Ourselves: The Hidden Power of Self-Deception

“hope impedes adaptation.” In other words, if you're stuck with something, you learn to live with it. And the sooner you learn to live with it, the happier you will be.”
― Joseph T. Hallinan, Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average

“we have a strong aversion to reading and following directions, preferring instead to follow our own intuitions about how a thing can or should work.”
― Joseph T. Hallinan, Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average