Daniel Kahneman Quotes

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

~ Daniel Kahneman

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.

~ Daniel Kahneman

We all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero.

~ Daniel Kahneman

The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.

~ Daniel Kahneman

...the characters are useful because of some quirks of our minds, yours and mine. A sentence is understood more easily if it describes what an agent (system 2) does than if it describes what something is, what properties it has.

~ Daniel Kahneman

The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own.

~ Daniel Kahneman

The law (of least effort) asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.

~ Daniel Kahneman

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

The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact.

~ Daniel Kahneman

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

~ Daniel Kahneman

Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition. These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.

~ Daniel Kahneman

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

~ Daniel Kahneman

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

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

~ Daniel Kahneman

At work here is that powerful WYSIATI (what you see is all there is) rule. You cannot help dealing with the limited information you have as if it were all there is to know. You build the best possible story from the information available to you, and if it is a good story, you believe it. Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

~ Daniel Kahneman

Many parents have discovered, perhaps with some guilt, that they can read a story to a child while thinking of something else.

~ Daniel Kahneman

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

Freedom has a cost, which is borne by individuals who make bad choices, and by a society that feels obligated to help them.

~ Daniel Kahneman

The pleasure we found in working together made us exceptionally patient, it is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored.

~ Daniel Kahneman

There's a lot of randomness in the decisions that people make.

~ Daniel Kahneman

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking of it.

~ Daniel Kahneman

The amount of evidence and its quality do not count for much, because poor evidence can make a very good story. For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs. Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous - and it is also essential.

~ Daniel Kahneman

Dawes observed that the complex statistical algorithm adds little or no value. One can do just as well by selecting a set of scores that have some validity for predicting the outcome and adjusting the values to make them comparable (by using standard scores or ranks). A formula that combines these predictors with equal weights is likely to be just as accurate in predicting new cases as the multiple-regression formula that was optimal in the original sample. More recent research went further: formulas that assign equal weights to all the predictors are often superior, because they are not affected by accidents of sampling.

~ Daniel Kahneman

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

However, attention can be moved away from an unwanted focus, primarily by focusing intently on another target.

~ Daniel Kahneman

The expectation of intelligent gossip is a powerful motive for serious self-criticism, more powerful than New Year resolutions to improve one's decision making at work and at home.

~ Daniel Kahneman

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.

~ Daniel Kahneman

Political columnists and sports pundits are rewarded for being overconfident.

~ Daniel Kahneman

When you analyze happiness, it turns out that the way you spend your time is extremely important.

~ Daniel Kahneman

I used to hold a unitary view, in which I proposed that only experienced happiness matters, and that life satisfaction is a fallible estimate of true happiness.

~ Daniel Kahneman

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.

~ Daniel Kahneman

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.

~ Daniel Kahneman

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

~ Daniel Kahneman

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

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

It's a wonderful thing to be optimistic. It keeps you healthy and it keeps you resilient.

~ Daniel Kahneman

You know, the standard state for people is 'mildly pleasant.' Negative emotions are quite rare, and extremely positive emotions are rare. But people are mildly pleased most of the time, they're mildly tired a lot of the time, and they wish they were somewhere else a substantial part of the time - but mostly they're mildly pleased.

~ Daniel Kahneman

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

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