Daniel Kahneman Quotes

#1. Daniel Kahneman is one of the most original and interesting thinkers of our time.

Daniel Kahneman

#2. Isn't the initial loss that does for him, but the stupid plays he makes in an effort to deny that the loss has happened. The great economic psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky summarised the behaviour in their classic analysis of the psychology of risk:

Tim Harford

#3. We enshrine things to memory very differently than we experience them in real time. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman has coined a couple of terms to make the distinction. He talks about the "experiencing self" versus the "remembering self.

Jennifer Senior

#4. Forbes describes how Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, discovered that "people would rather do business with a person they like and trust rather than someone they don't, even if the likeable person is offering a lower quality product or service at a higher price.

Sally Hogshead

#5. it is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored.

Daniel Kahneman

#6. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced six-cent-mihaly) has done

Daniel Kahneman

#7. People just hate the idea of losing. Any loss, even a small one, is just so terrible to contemplate that they compensate by buying insurance, including totally absurd policies like air travel.

Daniel Kahneman

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. If there is time to reflect, slowing down is likely to be a good idea.

Daniel Kahneman

#11. The only difference between the two groups was that the students conceded that they were influenced by the anchor, while the professionals denied that influence.

Daniel Kahneman

#12. 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

#13. The reliance on the heuristic caused predictable biases (systematic errors) in their predictions.

Daniel Kahneman

#14. Survival prospects are poor for an animal that is not suspicious of novelty.

Daniel Kahneman

#15. Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion - and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined.

Daniel Kahneman

#16. The errors of a theory are rarely found in what it asserts explicitly; they hide in what it ignores or tacitly assumes.

Daniel Kahneman

#17. Psychologists really aim to be scientists, white-coat stuff, with elaborate statistics, running experiments.

Daniel Kahneman

#18. The "Florida effect" involves two stages of priming. First, the set of words primes thoughts of old age, though the word old is never mentioned; second, these thoughts prime a behavior, walking slowly, which is associated with old age. All this happens without any awareness.

Daniel Kahneman

#19. We are very influenced by completely automatic things that we have no control over, and we don't know we're doing it.

Daniel Kahneman

#20. We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.

Daniel Kahneman

#21. True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.

Daniel Kahneman

#22. Experts who acknowledge the full extent of their ignorance may expect to be replaced by more confident competitors, who are better able to gain the trust of clients. An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality - but it is not what people and organizations want.

Daniel Kahneman

#23. 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

#24. The classic experiment I describe next shows that people will not draw from base-rate information an inference that conflicts with other beliefs. It also supports the uncomfortable conclusion that teaching psychology is mostly a waste of time.

Daniel Kahneman

#25. A recurrent theme of this book is that luck plays a large role in every story of success;

Daniel Kahneman

#26. 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

#27. Adaptation seems to be, to a substantial extent, a process of reallocating your attention.

Daniel Kahneman

#28. Simple, common gestures can also unconsciously influence our thoughts and feelings.

Daniel Kahneman

#29. prepared for the future as you could be. An odd feature of what happened is that your System 1 treated the mere conjunction of

Daniel Kahneman

#30. Baumeister's group has repeatedly found that an effort of will or self-control is tiring; 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. In

Daniel Kahneman

#31. 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

#32. You have no compelling moral intuitions to guide you in solving that problem. Your moral feelings are attached to frames, to descriptions of reality rather than to reality itself.

Daniel Kahneman

#33. In a rising market, enough of your bad ideas will pay off so that you'll never learn that you should have fewer ideas.

Daniel Kahneman

#34. You inability to reconstruct past beliefs will inevitably cause you to underestimate the extent to which you were surprised by past events.

Daniel Kahneman

#35. We must be inclined to believe it because it has been repeated so often, but let's think it through again.

Daniel Kahneman

#36. 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

#37. Overconfidence: As the WYSIATI rule implies, neither the quantity nor the quality of the evidence counts for much in subjective confidence.

Daniel Kahneman

#38. The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.

Daniel Kahneman

#39. There is research on the effects of 9/11, and you know, compared to the enormity of it, it didn't have a huge effect on people's mood. They were going about their business, mostly.

Daniel Kahneman

#40. When people think of the outcomes of their decisions, they think much more short term than that. They think in terms of gains and losses.

Daniel Kahneman

#41. Some experimenters have reported that an angry face "pops out" of a crowd of happy faces, but a single happy face does not stand out in an angry crowd. The brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.

Daniel Kahneman

#42. It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness.

Daniel Kahneman

#43. Whether professionals have a chance to develop intuitive expertise depends essentially on the quality and speed of feedback, as well as on sufficient opportunity to practice.

Daniel Kahneman

#44. Many decisions are based on beliefs concerning the likelihood of uncertain events such as the outcome of an election, the guilt of a defendant, or the future value of the dollar.

Daniel Kahneman

#45. It's not a case of: 'Read this book and then you'll think differently. I've written this book, and I don't think differently.

Daniel Kahneman

#46. The statement "Hitler loved dogs and little children" is shocking no matter how many times you hear it, because any trace of kindness in someone so evil violates the expectations set up by the halo effect.

Daniel Kahneman

#47. How do people make the judgments and how do they assign decision weights? We start from two simple answers, then qualify them. Here are the oversimplified answers: People overestimate the probabilities of unlikely events. People overweight unlikely events in their decisions.

Daniel Kahneman

#48. Managers think of themselves as captains of a ship on a stormy sea. Risk for them is danger, but they are fighting it, very controlled.

Daniel Kahneman

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. Something is still missing from this story: the answers need to be fitted to the original questions.

Daniel Kahneman

#53. An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true.

Daniel Kahneman

#54. However, the ability to control attention is not simply a measure of intelligence; measures of efficiency in the control of attention predict performance of air traffic controllers and of Israeli Air Force pilots beyond the effects of intelligence.

Daniel Kahneman

#55. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public's mind. It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media.

Daniel Kahneman

#56. 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

#57. Organizations may be better able to tame optimism than individuals are.

Daniel Kahneman

#58. When action is needed, optimism, even of the mildly delusional variety, may be a good thing.

Daniel Kahneman

#59. The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time.

Daniel Kahneman

#60. They added a cheap gift to the expensive product, and made the whole deal less attractive. Less is more in this case.

Daniel Kahneman

#61. 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

#62. Jonathan Haidt said in another context, The emotional tail wags the rational dog.

Daniel Kahneman

#63. One of the major biases in risky decision making is optimism. Optimism is a source of high-risk thinking.

Daniel Kahneman

#64. My impression is that the elimination of memories greatly reduces the value of the experience.

Daniel Kahneman

#65. Mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions

Daniel Kahneman

#66. Learning medicine consists in part of learning the language of medicine. A deeper understanding of judgments and choices also requires a richer vocabulary than is available in everyday language.

Daniel Kahneman

#67. The often-used phrase "pay attention" is apt: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail.

Daniel Kahneman

#68. The average investor's return is significantly lower than market indices due primarily to market timing.

Daniel Kahneman

#69. Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.

Daniel Kahneman

#70. Loss aversion is a powerful conservative force that favors minimal changes from the status quo

Daniel Kahneman

#71. It's very easy for trusted companies to mislead naive customers, and life insurance companies are trusted.

Daniel Kahneman

#72. And you should not expect much from pundits making long-term forecasts - although they may have valuable insights into the near future. The

Daniel Kahneman

#73. People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations.

Daniel Kahneman

#74. And want is difficult at the best of times, and especially difficult when we most need to do it, but we can benefit

Daniel Kahneman

#75. The concept of loss aversion is certainly the most significant contribution of psychology to behavioral economics.

Daniel Kahneman

#76. It was beyond imagining that bad font influences judgments of truth and improves cognitive performance, or that an emotional response to the cognitive ease of a triad of words mediates impressions of coherence. Psychology has come a long way.

Daniel Kahneman

#77. Why be concerned with gossip? Because it is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label the mistakes of others than to recognize our own.

Daniel Kahneman

#78. The extra daily social time of 1.7 hours in weekends raises average happiness by about 2%.

Daniel Kahneman

#79. 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

#80. Highly intelligent women tend to marry men who are less intelligent than they are.

Daniel Kahneman

#81. Experienced happiness refers to your feelings, to how happy you are as you live your life. In contrast, the satisfaction of the remembering self refers to your feelings when you think about your life.

Daniel Kahneman

#82. I would not advise people to buy a car or house without making a list. You will probably improve your intuitions by making a list and then sleeping on it.

Daniel Kahneman

#83. The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.

Daniel Kahneman

#84. If people are failing, they look inept. If people are succeeding, they look strong and good and competent. That's the 'halo effect.' Your first impression of a thing sets up your subsequent beliefs. If the company looks inept to you, you may assume everything else they do is inept.

Daniel Kahneman

#85. Whenever we can replace human judgment by a formula, we should at least consider it.

Daniel Kahneman

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. Spend some effort in figuring out why each decision did or did not pan out. Doing that systematically is key: really try to question the way you make decisions, and improve it.

Daniel Kahneman

#89. You think with your body, not with your brain.

Daniel Kahneman

#90. Individual investors predictably flock to stocks in companies that are in the news.

Daniel Kahneman

#91. Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.

Daniel Kahneman

#92. Remember this rule: intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.

Daniel Kahneman

#93. People who face a difficult question often answer an easier one instead, without realizing it.

Daniel Kahneman

#94. System 1 represents sets by averages, norms, and prototypes, not by sums. Each

Daniel Kahneman

#95. Intense focusing on a task can make people effectively blind, even to stimuli that

Daniel Kahneman

#96. Banks are run by executives, and executives protect themselves, and that does not always mean that banks are going to behave rationally.

Daniel Kahneman

#97. In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages.

Daniel Kahneman

#98. The events that took place as a result of your seeing the words happened by a process called associative activation: ideas that have been evoked trigger many other ideas, in a spreading cascade of activity in your brain. The

Daniel Kahneman

#99. We're not aware of changing our minds even when we do change our minds. And most people, after they change their minds, reconstruct their past opinion - they believe they always thought that.

Daniel Kahneman

#100. 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