Daniel Kahneman Quotes

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.

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.

Every night for the next week, set aside ten minutes before you go to sleep. Write down three things that went well today and why they went well...Writing about why the positive events in your life happened may seem awkward at first, but please stick with it for one week. It will get easier. The odds are that you will be less depressed, happier, and addicted to this exercise six months from now.

We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.

We don’t choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. Even when we think about the future, we don’t think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories.

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.

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.

Many ideas happen to us. We have intuition, we have feeling, we have emotion, all of that happens, we don't decide to do it. We don't control it.

By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases, and that is true for both humans and artificial intelligence, but the heuristics of AI are not necessarily the human ones.

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

We're generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments.

Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it.

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.

The 'Instagram Generation' now experiences the present as an anticipated memory

An investment said to have an 80% chance of success sounds far more attractive than one with a 20% chance of failure. The mind can't easily recognize that they are the same.

Mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions

Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.

The psychologist, Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.

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

However, optimism is highly valued, socially and in the market; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers. One of the lessons of the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession is that there are periods in which competition, among experts and among organizations, creates powerful forces that favor a collective blindness to risk and uncertainty.

We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.

We can't live in a state of perpetual doubt, so we make up the best story possible and we live as if the story were true.

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

Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers. It would be useful for us to acknowledge that fact.

When people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.

Overconfidence is a powerful source of illusions, primarily determined by the quality and coherence of the story that you can construct, not by its validity.

The effort invested in 'getting it right' should be commensurate with the importance of the decision.

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. 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. Because public interest is most easily aroused by dramatic events and by celebrities, media feeding frenzies are common

If people can construct a simple and coherent story, they will feel confident regardless of how well grounded it is in reality.

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.

Happiness is determined by factors like your health, your family relationships and friendships, and above all by feeling that you are in control of how you spend your time.

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

So your emotional state really has a lot to do with what you're thinking about and what you're paying attention to.

It doesn't take many observations to think you've spotted a trend, and it's probably not a trend at all.

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

Most of the moments of our life - and I calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long; that means that, you know, in a life there are about 600 million of them; in a month, there are about 600,000 - most of them don't leave a trace.

People's mood is really determined primarily by their genetic make-up and personality, and in the second place by their immediate context, and only in the third and fourth place by worries and concerns and other things like that.

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

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.

Optimistic people play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are inventors, entrepreneurs, political and military leaders - not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks.

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.

Facts that challenge basic assumptions-and thereby threaten people's livelihood and self-esteem-are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them.

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.

We associate leadership with decisiveness. That perception of leadership pushes people to make decisions fairly quickly, lest they be seen as dithering and indecisive.

To know whether you can trust a particular intuitive judgment, there are two questions you should ask: Is the environment in which the judgment is made sufficiently regular to enable predictions from the available evidence? The answer is yes for diagnosticians, no for stock pickers. Do the professionals have an adequate opportunity to learn the cues and the regularities? The answer here depends on the professionals' experience and on the quality and speed with which they discover their mistakes.

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

The amount of success it takes for leaders to become overconfident isn't terribly large.

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.