Top 223 Quotes & Sayings by Daniel Kahneman - Page 3

Often, the most enjoyable part of an activity is the anticipation.

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

Mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions

The evidence is unequivocal, there's a great deal more luck than skill in people getting very rich.

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.

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.

Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.

That's one of the real dangers of leader selection in many organizations: leaders are selected for overconfidence.

In strategic decisions, I'd be really concerned about overconfidence.

People have little idea, by and large, of the investment world. They are convinced they have an advantage.

Establish a closing ritual. Know when to stop working. Try to end each work day the same way, too. Straighten up your desk. Back up your computer. Make a list of what you need to do tomorrow.

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.

One of the problems with expertise is that people have it in some domains and not in others.

What happens with fear is that probability doesn't matter very much. That is, once I have raised the possibility that something terrible can happen to your child, even though the possibility is remote, you may find it very difficult to think of anything else. Emotion becomes dominant.

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

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.

A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law 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.

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

To better avoid errors, you should talk to people who disagree with you and you should talk to people who are not in the same emotional situation you are.

Experts don't know exactly where the boundaries of their expertise are.

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.

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.

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

If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.

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

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

Finally, the illusions of validity and skill are supported by a powerful professional culture. We know that people can maintain an unshakeable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers. Given the professional culture of the financial community, it is not surprising that large numbers of individuals in that world believe themselves to be among the chosen few who can do what they believe others cannot.

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

When everybody in a group is susceptible to similar biases, groups are inferior to individuals, because groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.

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

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

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

The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved.

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

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

We deeply want to be led by people who know what they're doing and who don't have to think about it too much.

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

Researchers who studied a thousand Dutch vacationers concluded that by far the greatest amount of happiness extracted from the vacation is derived from the anticipation period.

People exaggerate their confidence in their plans - something we call the planning fallacy... The existence of the plan tends to induce overconfidence.

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

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

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.

Below an income of ... $60,000 a year, people are unhappy, and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get. Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. ... Money does not buy you experiential happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.

Being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things and more time doing compulsory things and feeling stressed.

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.

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.

Some achieve a reputation for great successes when in fact all they have done is take chances that reasonable people wouldn't take.

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

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.

Ten minutes of a smartphone in front of your nose is about the equivalent of an hour long walk in bright daylight. Imagine going for an hour long walk in bright daylight and then thinking, "Now I'll get some sleep." It ain't going to happen.

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

People assign much higher probability to the truth of their opinions than is warranted.

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

The brain scientists are the wave of the future in the financial world. If you seek to maximize understanding, whether you're in academia or in the investment community, you'd better pay serious attention to them.

Laziness is built deep into our nature.

The most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast.

If you can't take the time for a vacation right now, or even a night out with friends, put something on the calendar - even if it's a month or a year down the road. Then whenever you need a boost of happiness, remind yourself about it.

If there was one ubiquitous recommendation about marriage it was this: "Don't go to bed angry."

I have always believed that scientific research is another domain where a form of optimism is essential to success: I have yet to meet a successful scientist who lacks the ability to exaggerate the importance of what he or she is doing, and I believe that someone who lacks a delusional sense of significance will wilt in the face of repeated experiences of multiple small failures and rare successes, the fate of most researchers.

Knowing the importance of luck, you should be particularly suspicious when highly consistent patterns emerge from the comparison of successful and less successful firms. In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages.