Top 100 Daniel Kahneman Quotes
#1. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced six-cent-mihaly) has done
Daniel Kahneman
#2. Add-1 with four digits caused a larger dilation than the task of holding seven digits for immediate recall. Add-3, which is much more difficult,
Daniel Kahneman
#3. Now suppose that at the end of the page you get another instruction: count all the commas in the next page. This will be harder, because you will have to overcome the newly acquired tendency to focus attention on the letter f.
Daniel Kahneman
#4. We found that people, when engaged in a mental sprint, may become effectively blind. The authors of The Invisible Gorilla had made the gorilla "invisible" by keeping the observers intensely busy counting passes.
Daniel Kahneman
#5. Psychologists really aim to be scientists, white-coat stuff, with elaborate statistics, running experiments.
Daniel Kahneman
#6. The general tendency to overestimate the probability of conjunctive events leads to unwarranted optimism in the evaluation of the likelihood that a plan will succeed or that a project will be completed on time.
Daniel Kahneman
#7. We don't see very far in the future, we are very focused on one idea at a time, one problem at a time, and all these are incompatible with rationality as economic theory assumes it.
Daniel Kahneman
#8. The idea that you can ask one question and it makes the point - well, that wasn't how psychology was done at the time.
Daniel Kahneman
#9. If owning stocks is a long-term project for you, following their changes constantly is a very, very bad idea. It's the worst possible thing you can do, because people are so sensitive to short-term losses. If you count your money every day, you'll be miserable.
Daniel Kahneman
#10. Intuitive errors are normally much more frequent among ego-depleted people, and the drinkers of Splenda showed the expected depletion effect. On the other hand, the glucose drinkers were not depleted. Restoring the level of available sugar in the brain had prevented the deterioration of performance.
Daniel Kahneman
#11. Employers who violate rules of fairness are punished by reduced productivity, and merchants who follow unfair pricing policies can expect to lose sales.
Daniel Kahneman
#12. A plan is only a scenario, and almost by definition, it is optimistic ... As a result, scenario planning can lead to a serious underestimate of the risk of failure.
Daniel Kahneman
#13. An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true.
Daniel Kahneman
#14. You should expect little or nothing from Wall Street stock pickers who hope to be more accurate than the market in predicting the future of prices. And you should not expect much from pundits making long-term forecasts.
Daniel Kahneman
#15. I don't spend a lot of time taking polls around the world to tell me what I think is the right way to act. I've just got to know how I feel" (George W. Bush, November 2002).
Daniel Kahneman
#16. Daniel Kahneman is one of the most original and interesting thinkers of our time.
Daniel Kahneman
#18. The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed.
Daniel Kahneman
#19. Highly intelligent women tend to marry men who are less intelligent than they are.
Daniel Kahneman
#20. the line between what clinicians can do well and what they cannot do at all well is not obvious, and certainly not obvious to them.
Daniel Kahneman
#21. We have associations to things. We have, you know, we have associations to tables and to - and to dogs and to cats and to Harvard professors, and that's the way the mind works. It's an association machine.
Daniel Kahneman
#23. Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.
Daniel Kahneman
#24. People who face a difficult question often answer an easier one instead, without realizing it.
Daniel Kahneman
#25. System 1 represents sets by averages, norms, and prototypes, not by sums. Each
Daniel Kahneman
#26. Intense focusing on a task can make people effectively blind, even to stimuli that
Daniel Kahneman
#27. The rules of the betting are intelligent: recent events and the current context have the most weight in determining an interpretation. When no recent event comes to mind, more distant memories govern.
Daniel Kahneman
#28. Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.
Daniel Kahneman
#29. If you're going to be unreligious, it's likely going to be due to reflecting on it and finding some things that are hard to believe.
Daniel Kahneman
#30. I was surprised to see that the pupil remained small and did not noticeably dilate as she talked and listened. Unlike the tasks that we were studying, the mundane conversation apparently demanded little or no effort - no more than retaining two or three digits.
Daniel Kahneman
#31. People like leaders who look like they are dominant, optimistic, friendly to their friends, and quick on the trigger when it comes to enemies. They like boldness and despise the appearance of timidity and protracted doubt.
Daniel Kahneman
#32. Most things that couples disagree upon aren't worth more than a day's combat ...
Daniel Kahneman
#33. Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers. It would be useful for us to acknowledge that fact.
Daniel Kahneman
#34. A team of researchers at the University of Oregon explored the link between cognitive control and intelligence in several ways, including an attempt to raise intelligence by improving the control of attention.
Daniel Kahneman
#35. Because it is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label the mistakes of others than to recognize our own. Questioning what we believe and want is difficult at the
Daniel Kahneman
#36. The media do not just shape what the public is interested in, but also are shaped by it.
Daniel Kahneman
#37. higher income is associated with a reduced ability to enjoy the small pleasures of life.
Daniel Kahneman
#38. This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.
Daniel Kahneman
#39. The moral is significant: when System 2 is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything. System 1 is gullible and biased to believe, System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy. Indeed,
Daniel Kahneman
#40. As you can experience, the request to retrieve and say aloud your phone number or your spouse's birthday also requires a brief but significant effort, because the entire string must be held in memory as a response is organized.
Daniel Kahneman
#41. Question: So investors shouldn't delude themselves about beating the market? Answer: "They're just not going to do it. It's just not going to happen."
Daniel Kahneman
#42. Some memories come with a very compelling sense of truth about them. And that happens to be the case even with memories that are not true.
Daniel Kahneman
#43. The selective activation of compatible memories explains anchoring: the high and the low numbers activate different sets of ideas in memory. The estimates of annual temperature draw on these biased samples of ideas and are therefore biased as well.
Daniel Kahneman
#44. Changing one's mind about human nature is hard work, and changing one's mind for the worse about oneself is even harder. Nisbett
Daniel Kahneman
#45. People have little idea, by and large, of the investment world. They are convinced they have an advantage.
Daniel Kahneman
#46. In everyday speech, we call people reasonable if it is possible to reason with them, if their beliefs are generally in tune with reality, and if their preferences are in line with their interests and their values. The
Daniel Kahneman
#47. Courage is willingness to take the risk once you know the odds. Optimistic overconfidence means you are taking the risk because you don't know the odds. It's a big difference.
Daniel Kahneman
#48. In essence, the optimistic style involves taking credit for successes but little blame for failures.
Daniel Kahneman
#49. Jeremy Bentham opened his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation with the famous sentence Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.
Daniel Kahneman
#50. Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high and there is no time to collect more information.
Daniel Kahneman
#51. living in a culture that surrounds us with reminders of money may shape our behavior and our attitudes in ways that we do not know about
Daniel Kahneman
#52. Sometimes when you are asked a question that is difficult, the mind doesn't stay silent if it doesn't have the answer. The mind produces something, and what it produces very characteristically is the answer to an easier but related question.
Daniel Kahneman
#53. The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.
Daniel Kahneman
#54. The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of the [investment management] industry.
Daniel Kahneman
#55. Researchers who pick too small a sample leave themselves at the mercy of sampling luck.
Daniel Kahneman
#56. Once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws.
Daniel Kahneman
#57. Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.
Daniel Kahneman
#58. Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.
Daniel Kahneman
#59. Their recommendation is that you should not put too much weight on regret; even if you have some, it will hurt less than you now think.
Daniel Kahneman
#60. We associate leadership with decisiveness. That perception of leadership pushes people to make decisions fairly quickly, lest they be seen as dithering and indecisive.
Daniel Kahneman
#61. You felt the burden of holding much material in memory, as you needed to keep track of where you were and of where you were going, while holding on to the intermediate result.
Daniel Kahneman
#62. Let's not fall for the outcome bias. This was a stupid decision even though it worked out well.
Daniel Kahneman
#63. Yes, there is a burden of financial insecurity. I don't think you find it in mood. Income is correlated with life satisfaction, so maybe you do find it in life satisfaction. You don't find it in mood, and I think it is very important.
Daniel Kahneman
#64. If people do not know what is going to make them better off or give them pleasure, then the idea that you can trust people to do what will give them pleasure becomes questionable.
Daniel Kahneman
#66. The Affect Heuristic The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved.
Daniel Kahneman
#67. A reliable way of making people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.
Daniel Kahneman
#68. The evidence of priming studies suggests that reminding people of their mortality increases the appeal of authoritarian ideas, which may become reassuring in the context of the terror of death.
Daniel Kahneman
#69. Poignancy (a close cousin of regret) is a counterfactual feeling, which
Daniel Kahneman
#70. How many animals of each kind did Moses take into the ark?
Daniel Kahneman
#71. A compelling narrative fosters an illusion of inevitability.
Daniel Kahneman
#72. The tasks that we studied varied considerably in their effects on the pupil. At baseline, our subjects were awake, aware, and ready to engage in a task - probably at a higher level of arousal and cognitive readiness than usual.
Daniel Kahneman
#73. Those who avoid the sin of intellectual sloth could be called "engaged." They are more alert, more intellectually active, less willing to be satisfied with superficially attractive answers, more skeptical about their intuitions.
Daniel Kahneman
#74. if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion.
Daniel Kahneman
#75. regression inevitably occurs when the correlation between two measures is less than perfect,
Daniel Kahneman
#76. In another paper, titled "Boys Will Be Boys," they showed that men acted on their useless ideas significantly more often than women, and that as a result women achieved better investment results than men.
Daniel Kahneman
#77. Acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions.
Daniel Kahneman
#78. They didn't want more information that might spoil their story. WYSIATI.
Daniel Kahneman
#79. The sunk-cost fallacy keeps people for too long in poor jobs, unhappy marriages, and unpromising research projects.
Daniel Kahneman
#80. The planning fallacy is that you make a plan, which is usually a best-case scenario. Then you assume that the outcome will follow your plan, even when you should know better.
Daniel Kahneman
#81. The bat-and-ball problem is our first encounter with an observation that will be a recurrent theme of this book: many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions.
Daniel Kahneman
#82. Unless you are a professional, however, you may not react very differently to a sample of 150 and to a sample of 3,000. That is the meaning of the statement that people are not adequately sensitive to sample size.
Daniel Kahneman
#83. The observers almost never missed a K that was shown at the beginning or near the end of the Add-1 task but they missed the target almost half the time when mental effort was at its peak, although we had pictures of their wide-open eye staring straight at it.
Daniel Kahneman
#84. The conclusion is straightforward : self-control requires attention and effort.
Daniel Kahneman
#85. The evidence is unequivocal, there's a great deal more luck than skill in people getting very rich.
Daniel Kahneman
#86. Asymmetric intensity of the motives to avoid losses and to achieve gains shows up almost everywhere.
Daniel Kahneman
#87. Recipe for a dissatisfied adulthood is setting goals that are especially difficult to attain. Measured by life satisfaction 20 years later, the least promising goal that a young person could have was becoming accomplished in a performing art.
Daniel Kahneman
#88. What makes some cognitive operations more demanding and effortful than others? What outcomes must we purchase in the currency of attention? What can System 2 do that System 1 cannot? We now have tentative answers to these questions.
Daniel Kahneman
#90. Modern tests of working memory require the individual to switch repeatedly between two demanding tasks, retaining the results of one operation while performing the other. People who do well on these tests tend to do well on tests of general intelligence.
Daniel Kahneman
#91. My interest in well-being evolved from my interest in decision making - from raising the question of whether people know what they will want in the future and whether the things that people want for themselves will make them happy.
Daniel Kahneman
#92. When you look at the books about well-being, you see one word - it's happiness. People do not distinguish.
Daniel Kahneman
#93. In an article titled "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly," he showed that couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility.
Daniel Kahneman
#94. People are really happier with friends than they are with their families or their spouse or their child.
Daniel Kahneman
#95. The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.
Daniel Kahneman
#96. Many people will admit that they made a mistake [putting money in dot-coms or telecoms at their peak] But that doesn't mean that they've changed their mind about anything in particular. It doesn't mean that they are now able to avoid that mistake.
Daniel Kahneman
#97. We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.
Daniel Kahneman
#98. Conflict between an automatic reaction and an intention to control it is common in our lives.
Daniel Kahneman
#99. It's nonsense to say money doesn't buy happiness, but people exaggerate the extent to which more money can buy more happiness.
Daniel Kahneman
#100. There is general agreement among researchers that nearly all stock pickers, whether they know it or not-and few of them do-are playing a game of chance.
Daniel Kahneman
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