Top 223 Quotes & Sayings by Daniel Kahneman - Page 2

There is a huge wave of interest in happiness among researchers. There is a lot of happiness coaching. Everybody would like to make people happier.

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.

Most people are highly optimistic most of the time.

Employers who violate rules of fairness are punished by reduced productivity, and merchants who follow unfair pricing policies can expect to lose sales.

I think one of the major results of the psychology of decision making is that people's attitudes and feelings about losses and gains are really not symmetric. So we really feel more pain when we lose $10,000 than we feel pleasure when we get $10,000.

There's a tendency to look at investments in isolation. Investors focus on the risk of individual securities.

I have always emphasized the willingness to discard.

It was always assumed I would be a professor. I grew up thinking it.

Policy makers, like most people, normally feel that they already know all the psychology and all the sociology they are likely to need for their decisions. I don't think they are right, but that's the way it is.

I enjoy being active, but I look forward to the day when I can retire to the Internet.

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

We know that the French are very different from the Americans in their satisfaction with life. They're much less satisfied. Americans are pretty high up there, while the French are quite low - the world champions in life satisfaction are actually the Danes.

We're beautiful devices. The devices work well; we're all experts in what we do. But when the mechanism fails, those failures can tell you a lot about how the mind works.

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.

When people evaluate their life, they compare themselves to a standard of what a successful life is, and it turns out that standard tends to be universal: People in Togo and Denmark have the same idea of what a good life is, and a lot of that has to do with money and material prosperity.

When you look at the books about well-being, you see one word - it's happiness. People do not distinguish.

The experiencing self lives in the moment; it is the one that answers the question, 'Does it hurt?' or 'What were you thinking about just now?' The remembering self is the one that answers questions about the overall evaluation of episodes or periods of one's life, such as a stay in the hospital or the years since one left college.

Divorced women, compared to married women, are less satisfied with their lives, which is not surprising. But they're actually more cheerful, when you look at the average mood they're in in the course of the day.

Political columnists and sports pundits are rewarded for being overconfident.

Friends are sometimes a big help when they share your feelings. In the context of decisions, the friends who will serve you best are those who understand your feelings but are not overly impressed by them.

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

In essence, the optimistic style involves taking credit for successes but little blame for failures.

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

You're surprised by something, but you don't really know what surprised you; you recognize someone, but you don't really know what cues cause you to recognize that person.

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

The experiencing self lives its life continuously. It has moments of experience, one after the other.

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.

When people talk of the economy being strong, they don't seem to feel that they, too, are better off.

People should be conscious of the large contribution made by anything that gets people together easily in the reduction of loneliness and emotional well-being.

Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness. A policy to reduce the loneliness of the elderly would certainly reduce suffering.

We have no reason to expect the quality of intuition to improve with the importance of the problem. Perhaps the contrary: high-stake problems are likely to involve powerful emotions and strong impulses to action.

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

People are really happier with friends than they are with their families or their spouse or their child.

Although professionals are able to extract a considerable amount of wealth from amateurs, few stock pickers, if any, have the skill needed to beat the market consistently, year after year.

There's a very good reason for why economics developed the way it did, and that is that in many situations, the assumption that people will exploit the opportunities available to them is very plausible, and it simplifies the analysis of how markets will behave.

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.

Intuitive diagnosis is reliable when people have a lot of relevant feedback. But people are very often willing to make intuitive diagnoses even when they're very likely to be wrong.

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.

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.

People who know math understand what other mortals understand, but other mortals do not understand them. This asymmetry gives them a presumption of superior ability.

If you think in terms of major losses, because losses loom much larger than gains - that's a very well-established finding - you tend to be very risk-averse. When you think in terms of wealth, you tend to be much less risk-averse.

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.

One emphasis of my research has been on the question of how people spend their time. Time is the ultimate finite resource, or course, so the question of how people spend it would seem to be important.

All of us roughly know what memory is. I mean, memory is sort of the storage of the past. It's the storage of our personal experiences. It's a very big deal.

We have a very narrow view of what is going on.

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

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.

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.

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

Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.

The idea that you can ask one question and it makes the point - well, that wasn't how psychology was done at the time.

People talk of the new economy and of reinventing themselves in the workplace, and in that sense most of us are less secure.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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