Thomas Gilovich > Quotes

“When examining evidence relevant to a given belief, people are inclined to see what they expect to see, and conclude what they expect to conclude. Information that is consistent with our pre-existing beliefs is often accepted at face value, whereas evidence that contradicts them is critically scrutinized and discounted. Our beliefs may thus be less responsive than they should to the implications of new information”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

“People will always prefer black-and-white over shades of grey, and so there will always be the temptation to hold overly-simplified beliefs and to hold them with excessive confidence”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

“What we believe is heavily influenced by what we think others believe”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

“it seems that once again people engage in a search for evidence that is biased toward confirmation. Asked to assess the similarity of two entities, people pay more attention to the ways in which they are similar than to the ways in which they differ. Asked to assess dissimilarity, they become more concerned with differences than with similarities. In other words, when testing a hypothesis of similarity, people look for evidence of similarity rather than dissimilarity, and when testing a hypothesis of dissimilarity, they do the opposite. The relationship one perceives between two entities, then, can vary with the precise form of the question that is asked”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

“We humans seem to be extremely good at generating ideas, theories, and explanations that have the ring of plausibility. We may be relatively deficient, however, in evaluating and testing our ideas once they are formed”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

“For desired conclusions, we ask ourselves, "Can I believe this?", but for unpalatable conclusions we ask, "Must I believe this?”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

“When we do cross paths with people whose beliefs and attitudes conflict with our own, we are rarely challenged.”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

“Note that the best rationalizations are those that have an element of truth. Whether you vote or not will almost certainly have no influence on the outcome of an election. Nor will the amount of carbon you personally put into the atmosphere make a difference in the fate of the planet. And perhaps it really should be up to governments rather than the charities that are soliciting your contributions to feed the hungry and homeless in America or save children around the world from crushing poverty and abuse. But the fact that these statements are true doesn't mean they aren't also rationalizations that you and others use to justify questionable behavior.

This uncomfortable truth is crucial to an understanding of the link between rationalization and evil—an understanding that starts with the awareness that sane people rarely, if ever, act in a truly evil manner unless they can successfully rationalize their actions... [The] process of rationalizing evil deeds committed by whole societies is a collective effort rather than a solely individual enterprise.”
― Thomas Gilovich, The Wisest One in the Room: How You Can Benefit from Social Psychology's Most Powerful Insights

“We hold many dubious beliefs, in other words, not because they satisfy some important psychological need, but because they seem to be the most sensible conclusions consistent with the available evidence. People hold such beliefs because they seem, in the words of Robert Merton, to be the “irresistible products of their own experience.”7 They are the products, not of irrationality, but of flawed rationality.”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

“How do we distinguish between the legitimate skepticism of those who scoffed at cold fusion, and the stifling dogma of the seventeenthcentury clergymen who, doubting Galileo's claim that the earth was not the center of the solar system, put him under house arrest for the last eight years of his life? In part, the answer lies in the distinction between skepticism and closed-mindedness. Many scientists who were skeptical about cold fusion nevertheless tried to replicate the reported phenomenon in their own labs; Galileo's critics refused to look at the pertinent data.”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

“People are often unaware of their own unawareness”
― Thomas Gilovich, Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment

“As the distinguished British philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote as he reflected on the bitter lessons of the twentieth century, 'Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups (or tribes or states or nations or churches) that he or she or they are in sole possession of the truth, especially about how to live, what to be and do - that those who differ from them are not merely mistaken, but wicked or mad: and need restraining or suppressing. It is terrible and dangerous arrogance to believe that you alone are right, have a magical eye which sees the truth, and that others cannot be right if they disagree.”
― Thomas Gilovich, The Wisest One in the Room: How You Can Benefit from Social Psychology's Most Powerful Insights

“We must recognize that our view of the world is just that - a view that has been shaped by our own vantage point, history, and idiosyncratic knowledge.”
― Thomas Gilovich, The Wisest One in the Room: How You Can Benefit from Social Psychology's Most Powerful Insights

“Perhaps the most general and most important mental habit to instill is an appreciation of the folly of trying to draw conclusions from incomplete and unrepresentative evidence. An essential corollary of this appreciation should be an awareness of how often our everyday experience presents us with biased samples of information.”
― Thomas Gilovich

“We tend to resolve our perplexity arising out of the experience that other people see the world differently than we see it ourselves by declaring that these others, in consequence of some basic intellectual and moral defect, are unable to see things “as they really are” and to react to them “in a normal way.” We thus imply, of course, that things are in fact as we see them, and that our ways are the normal ways. (Ichheiser, 1949, p. 39)”
― Thomas Gilovich, Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment

“A person's conclusions can only be as solid as the information on which they are based. Thus, a person who is exposed to almost nothing but inaccurate information on a given subject almost inevitably develops an erroneous belief, a belief that can seem to be "an irresistible product" of the individual's (secondhand) experience.”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

“We learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.”
― Thomas Gilovich, Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment

“If we want to understand the actions of other people, we have to understand how they interpreted their circumstances and the choices they faced--not the way we would interpret them or, rather, the way we think we would interpret them if we were in their shoes.”
― Thomas Gilovich, The Wisest One in the Room: How You Can Benefit from Social Psychology's Most Powerful Insights

“Often when we get to know someone whose words and deeds were off-putting, once we get a better sense of how that person is understanding events, our dislike dissipates.”
― Thomas Gilovich, The Wisest One in the Room: How You Can Benefit from Social Psychology's Most Powerful Insights

“The fact that these statements are true doesn't mean they aren't also rationalizations that you and others use to justify questionable behavior.

This uncomfortable truth is crucial to an understanding of the link between rationalization and evil--an understanding that starts with the awareness that sane people rarely, if ever, act in a truly evil manner unless they can successfully rationalize their actions. Hollywood films notwithstanding, villains who proudly embrace evil are virtually nonexistent in real life. The problem is that people are extraordinarily adept at rationalizing. This applies not only to personal misdeeds, but also to the greater sins of omission and commission associated with genocide, slavery, apartheid, war atrocities, and the denial of basic human rights and human dignity. A further problem is that in contrast to the kind of dissonance reduction shown [in studies], the process of rationalizing evil deeds committed by whole societies is a collective effort rather than a solely individual enterprise.

Perpetrators are encouraged to rationalize their deeds by leaders and their propaganda machines, who insist that "'they' deserve what is being done to them," or that what is being done serves some noble end or necessary goal.”
― Thomas Gilovich, The Wisest One in the Room: How You Can Benefit from Social Psychology's Most Powerful Insights

“When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.”11 As individuals and as a society, we should be less accepting of superstition and sloppy thinking, and should strive to develop those “habits of mind” that promote a more accurate view of the world.”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

“Finally, it has been shown that the tendency for people to think of themselves as above average is reduced—even for ambiguous traits—when people are required to use specific definitions of each trait in their judgments.27”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

“People rate themselves more favorably on amorphous traits like sensitivity and idealism (at the 73rd percentile, on average) than on relatively straightforward traits like thriftiness and being well-read (48th percentile).”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

“we believe certain things because they ought to be true.”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

“Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups (or tribes or states or nations or churches) that he or she or they are in sole possession of the truth, especially about how to live, what to be and do—that those who differ from them are not merely mistaken, but wicked or mad: and need restraining or suppressing. It is terrible and dangerous arrogance to believe that you alone are right, have a magical eye which sees the truth, and that others cannot be right if they disagree.”19”
― Thomas Gilovich, The Wisest One in the Room: How You Can Benefit from Social Psychology's Most Powerful Insights

“One of the simplest and yet most powerful ways we do so lies in how we frame the very question we ask of the evidence. When we prefer to believe something, we may approach the relevant evidence by asking ourselves, “what evidence is there to support this belief?”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

“some evidence has accumulated that people who habitually fail to put the most favorable cast on their circumstances run the risk of depression.”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

“Our motivations thus influence our beliefs through the subtle ways we choose a comforting pattern from the fabric of evidence.”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

“Psychologists have known for some time that rewarding desirable responses is generally more effective in shaping behavior than punishing undesirable responses.19 However, the average person tends to find this fact surprising, and punishment has been the preferred reinforcer for the majority of parents in both modern society19 and in earlier periods.”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

“The false consensus effect refers to the tendency for people’s own beliefs, values, and habits to bias their estimates of how widely such views and habits are shared by others.”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life