Most subjects in gambling experiments prefer not to lose [of course! BUT they] will take risky options in which 'not losing' is a possible outcome in preference to 'sure loss.' Faced with various options involving various probabilities and amounts of loss, with 'not losing' as the other possible outcome, subjects almost routinely picked the option with the higher probability of 'not losing.'
— W. Edwards, American Journal of Psychology, 66: "Probability-preferences in gambling," 1953; and 67: "Probability-preferences among bets with differing expected values," 1954a

 

The way in which base rate information is learned may affect the way decision-makers use this information. For example, when base rates are directly experienced through trial-by-trial outcome feedback, their impact on judgments increases (Lindeman, Van Den Brink, & Hoogstraten, 1988; Manis et al., 1980; Medin & Edelson, 1988).

.    .    .    .

In short, where information is naturally sampled, or where there is a good deal of redundant information, decision-makers probably will not suffer from a relative inattention to, or underweighting of, base rates. But this strategy is riskier when reliable and extreme base rates are at odds with other data, or when little individuating information is available.
— Jonathan J. Koehler, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 19 (1): "The base rate fallacy reconsidered: Descriptive, normative, and methodological challenges," 1996: ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/.WWW/bbs.koehler.html

 

... people engage in a search for evidence that is biased toward confirmation. [For example] 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.
— Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life, 1991

 

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Many people ... naively assume that the emotions they see others display are what those others actually feel.
— Stephen P Robbins, Essentials of Organizational Behavior (6th ed.), 1999

 

Substantial evidence demonstrates that when we judge others we usually underweigh the influence of external factors and attribute, for example, poor behavior too much so to internal or personal traits. The opposite is true, however, when we judge ourselves: We tend to attribute our own failures to external factors and our successes to internal or personal traits.
— Harold H Kelley, Attribution: Perceiving the Causes of Behavior: "Attribution in Social Interaction," 1972; and L Ross, "The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings," in Advances in the Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 10, 1977; and A G Miller and T Lawson, "The Effect of an Informational Option on the Fundamental Attribution Error," in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, June 1989

 

...people often distort their thoughts about reality in order to make themselves feel more comfortable or happier. One instance is wishful thinking, in which a person has an irrational belief that something he wants will happen or that some aspect of himself or herself is better than in fact it is.
— (Norman) Stuart Sutherland, Irrationality: Why We Don't Think Straight!, 1992

 

People like to kid themselves.
— Detlof von Winterfeldt and Ward Edwards, Decision Analysis and Behavioral Research, 1993

 

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Don't get involved with proving anything; let the data guide you.
— James A. Dyal, Readings in Psychology: Understanding Human Behavior, 1967

 

Genuine intellectual integrity is found in experimental knowing.
— John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic

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