Look Again By Tali Sharot & Cass R. Sunstein

I finished this book in October 2025. I recommend this book 6/10.

Why you should read this book:

This book is about how easily we humans accept and find comfort in recurring things. Our brain will relax more and more every time we do something scary. Hitler's small incremental changes slowly made people follow his directives.

Get your copy here.

🚀 The book in three sentences

1. Humans easily find comfort and acceptance where they are

2. The more things become normal, the less we question things

3. There is a danger in only focusing on yourself and letting things play out

📝 My notes and thoughts

• P28. While satisfaction with material goods falls sharply over time, satisfaction with experiences does not decline. Research shows that it often increases! The joy you get from refrigerators and concerts may be roughly the same at first, but while you habituate to a KitchenAid with French doors relatively fast, the happiness that is triggered by the memory of watching Prince perform at the O2 Arena in London before his untimely death lasts a lifetime. The lingering impact of experiences on happiness relative to the fleeting impact of possessions may be one reason that people are more likely to regret not purchasing an experience (a trip to Paris, a pony ride) than not purchasing a thing.

• P46. On average, you will be happier if you alter a situation you are thinking of changing: the very fact that you are considering it implies that your current state is not ideal. Perhaps most importantly, the study implies that people are not making as many changes as they should. People wrongly stick with the status quo, even when it is possible and better to try something different.

• P67. After reading this chapter, I deleted YouTube from my phone on October 24, 2025.

• P73. Rumination is typical of individuals suffering from depression. Many psychologists believe it causes depression. That is, an inability to let go of intrusive thoughts about failure, heartache, or minor disappointments leads to depression. Martin also spent time considering why he received a not-so-great grade and what he could do better next time. But he was quicker to deploy his attention elsewhere—to his dinner plans with his girlfriend, Lauren, to the chemistry project that was due next week, to his swim practice—and these thoughts crowded out the influence of the grade.

• P77. On average, it takes two years to adapt to big life changes such as divorce, after people often reach their baseline level of happiness once again.

• P90. A series of experiments led by Kelly Main revealed that a change in activity in and of itself (for example, from sitting to walking or from walking to sitting) enhances creative thought because it gears the mind for change.

• P99. Organizations can increase creative thought by inducing small changes to routines and environments, just as Kelly Main and her colleagues did. For example, they may change employees' physical surroundings or encourage employees to rotate through different kinds of jobs. As a result, some may end up jumping differently.

• P119. One small lie will habituate into more.

• P125. Repetition can make people think that a proposition is more likely to be true, whether or not it is—so if someone wants to convince you of falsehood, stating it over and over, and then once more, might actually do the trick. (Hitler knew that, and so do some commentators on television, and so do some "influencers" on social media. The interesting question is: Why? The answer is that repetition creates a feeling of familiarity. And when something sounds familiar, you assume it is true. This is because in life, a feeling of familiarity is often (rightly) associated with truth, and a feeling of surprise is often (rightly) associated with implausibility.

• P130. If you are presenting information at work or on social media, and it is in a small font or a poorly contrasting color, people are less likely to believe it. And if the statement sounds completely new, people are going to be even more skeptical. To help people trust your recommendations, make content easy to process. Make it visually easier (add pictures, use big fonts, high contrast) and conceptually easier (tie the idea to concepts that are familiar, prime people for what you are about to say, repeat!). Avoid making people skeptical of your work simply because they find it hard to process.

• P139. If repeating, easily understandable information, we will start believing it.

• P147. So suppose that you take a risk: crossing a street on a snowy night, jumping off a bridge, texting and driving, having unprotected sex, exceeding the speed limit, investing in high-risk stock, or burying yourself alive. If nothing bad happens, your brain will start to estimate the risk as lower than it did initially. After all, everything turned out fine. As a result, you are more likely to engage in the same behavior again and again and feel perfectly comfortable taking on larger and larger risks. Now, this is not necessarily irrational. It is not crazy to estimate your risk by reference to your past experiences. You are updating your beliefs, but you don't have much data on which to rely. You are relying on a small number of personal experiences that happened to go well, often leading to overconfidence.

• P165. Most people view their world through rose-colored glasses. We tend to believe that we are a bit smarter than average, more interesting, and more fun. We think that we are less likely to get COVID than the other guy, less likely to be in a car accident, and more likely to get a promotion. We think that our health care system is better than the one in the nearby city. On climate change, many of us see the overall dangers, but believe our own town will be just fine.

• P186. "Adaptive preference": if you cannot have something, you might end up not wanting it at all. Empirical evidence supports the claim that people adapt to deprivation. In countries where people have less freedom, freedom matters less to people's well-being because they don't expect to have it. They may have less autonomy, but because of habituation, they might be able to maintain a reasonable level of welfare. Income affects happiness the least in Africa, which is also the poorest continent on earth, partly because African citizens have lower expectations. In Afghanistan, where crime and corruption are among the highest in the world, crime and corruption affect people's well-being the least.

• P207. My experience in Autodesk meetings in relation to gender.

• P222. Hitler gradually made things worse over time, and people accepted it as it became habitual.

• P227. As Daniel Kahneman puts it, "Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it." For example, both people who live there and people who do not tend to believe that people are happier in California. But those who live in California have been found not to be happier than those who live elsewhere. Focusing on California weather in particular, people who live in California and people who live in Ohio believe that they would be happier in California—even though data shows that weather is not an especially important determinant of most people's happiness. The general point is that people focus on a particular loss or gain without seeing that, after the loss or gain has occurred, they are not likely to focus much on it.