1
Danny explained, “Reforms always create winners and losers, and the losers will always fight harder than the winners.” How did you get the losers to accept change? The prevailing strategy on the Israeli farms — which wasn’t working very well — was to bully or argue with the people who needed to change. The psychologist Kurt Lewin had suggested persuasively that, rather than selling people on some change, you were better off identifying the reasons for their resistance, and addressing those. Imagine a plank held in place by a spring on either side of it, Danny told the students. How do you move it? Well, you can increase the force on one side of the plank. Or you can reduce the force on the other side. “In one case the overall tension is reduced, ” he said, “and in the other it is increased.” And that was a sort of proof that there was an advantage in reducing the tensions. “It’s a key idea, ” said Danny. “Making it easy to change.Unknown
2
When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, ' Amos liked to say. 'Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.Unknown
3
And [Thaler] noticed that when he had his fellow economists to dinner, they filled up on cashews, which meant they had less appetite for the meal. More to the point, he noticed that they tended to be relieved when he removed the cashew nuts, so they didn't ruin their dinners. "The idea that it could make you better off to reduce your choices–that idea was alien to economics.Unknown
4
The way it feels to me, ' he said, 'is that there were certain ideas that I was put on this earth to think. And now I can think them.Unknown
5
Weirdly–but as Danny and Amos had suspected–the further the winning number was from the number on a person's lottery ticket, the less regret they felt. "In defiance of logic, there is a definite sense that one comes closer to winning the lottery when one's ticket number is similar to the number that won, " Danny wrote in a memo to Amos, summarizing their data. In another memo, he added that "the general point is that the same state of affairs (objectively) can be experienced with very different degrees of misery, " depending on how easy it is to imagine that things might have turned out differently. Regret was sufficiently imaginable that people conjured it out of situations they had no control over. But it was of course at its most potent when people might have done something to avoid it. What people regretted, and the intensity with which they regretted it, was not obvious.Unknown
6
I share your feeling that such behavior is, in some sense, unwise or erroneous, but this does not mean that it does not occur, ' Amos wrote to an American economist who complained about the description of human nature implied by 'Value Theory.' 'A theory of vision cannot be faulted for predicting optical illusions. Similarly, a descriptive theory of choice cannot be rejected on the grounds that it predicts 'irrational behavior' if the behavior in question is in fact observed.Unknown