Top 223 Quotes & Sayings by Daniel Kahneman
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Israeli psychologist Daniel Kahneman.
Last updated on September 9, 2024.
Clearly, the decision-making that we rely on in society is fallible. It's highly fallible, and we should know that.
It's nonsense to say money doesn't buy happiness, but people exaggerate the extent to which more money can buy more happiness.
There's a lot of randomness in the decisions that people make.
My impression is that the elimination of memories greatly reduces the value of the experience.
We think of our future as anticipated memories.
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.
If there is time to reflect, slowing down is likely to be a good idea.
The brains of humans contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.
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.
Doubting what you see is a very odd experience. And doubting what you remember is a little less odd than doubting what you see. But it's also a pretty odd experience, because some memories come with a very compelling sense of truth about them, and that happens to be the case even for memories that are not true.
Negotiations over a shrinking pie are especially difficult because they require an allocation of losses. People tend to be much more easygoing when they bargain over an expanding pie.
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.
Slow thinking has the feeling of something you do. It's deliberate.
It's very easy for trusted companies to mislead naive customers, and life insurance companies are trusted.
Suppose you like someone very much. Then, by a familiar halo effect, you will also be prone to believe many good things about that person - you will be biased in their favor. Most of us like ourselves very much, and that suffices to explain self-assessments that are biased in a particular direction.
After a crisis we tell ourselves we understand why it happened and maintain the illusion that the world is understandable. In fact, we should accept the world is incomprehensible much of the time.
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.
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.
The concept of happiness has to be reorganised.
Hindsight bias makes surprises vanish.
I'm not a great believer in self-help.
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.
Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it.
We're generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments.
We're blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We're not designed to know how little we know.
If individuals are rational, there is no need to protect them against their own choices.
People are very complex. And for a psychologist, you get fascinated by the complexity of human beings, and that is what I have lived with, you know, in my career all of my life, is the complexity of human beings.
Adaptation seems to be, to a substantial extent, a process of reallocating your attention.
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.
Most successful pundits are selected for being opinionated, because it's interesting, and the penalties for incorrect predictions are negligible. You can make predictions, and a year later people won't remember them.
All of us would be better investors if we just made fewer decisions.
It's clear that policymakers and economists are going to be interested in the measurement of well-being primarily as it correlates with health; they also want to know whether researchers can validate subjective responses with physiological indices.
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.
Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.
It's very difficult to distinguish between what a person believes and what they say they believe.
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.
It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.
We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories, our memory tells us stories. That is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.
For many people, commuting is the worst part of the day, and policies that can make commuting shorter and more convenient would be a straightforward way to reduce minor but widespread suffering.
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.
One thing we have lost, that we had in the past, is a sense of progress, that things are getting better. There is a sense of volatility, but not of progress.
Most of the time, we think fast. And most of the time we're really expert at what we're doing, and most of the time, what we do is right.
True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.
Optimism is normal, but some fortunate people are more optimistic than the rest of us. If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias, you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person - you already feel fortunate.
We think, each of us, that we're much more rational than we are. And we think that we make our decisions because we have good reasons to make them. Even when it's the other way around. We believe in the reasons, because we've already made the decision.
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.
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.
Nobody would say, 'I'm voting for this guy because he's got the stronger chin,' but that, in fact, is partly what happens.
When you analyze happiness, it turns out that the way you spend your time is extremely important.
There are domains in which expertise is not possible. Stock picking is a good example. And in long-term political strategic forecasting, it's been shown that experts are just not better than a dice-throwing monkey.
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.
So your emotional state really has a lot to do with what you're thinking about and what you're paying attention to.
Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.
The average investor's return is significantly lower than market indices due primarily to market timing.
It's a wonderful thing to be optimistic. It keeps you healthy and it keeps you resilient.
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.
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.
Mental effort, I would argue, is relatively rare. Most of the time we coast.
Alternative descriptions of the same reality evoke different emotions and different associations.
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