Top Highlights

• centrally important finding of social psychology is that in evaluating the behavior of others, we tend to exaggerate the importance of a person’s dispositions or traits and underestimate the influence of context.
• wise decision-making poses three different challenges. The first is to avoid emotional traps that can lead to hasty and knee-jerk decisions. This chapter identifies and explores these traps. The second challenge is to analyze the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action. That is the focus of the next chapter. The third challenge is to ad...
• Fred’s perspective reflects a number of traps, or cognitive distortions, that commonly lead us to refuse to negotiate when we probably should.
• Tribalism involves an appeal to a group identity, where you see your own side—the in-group—as familiar and reliable, while the other side is an out-group that should be distrusted and disfavored.
• (1) unthinkingly charge into battle or, (2) at the other extreme, flee, conceding what is important to you in the hope of avoiding a fight.