Daniel Kahneman Quotes & Sayings

Expertise is not a single skill; it is a collection of skills, and the same professional may be highly expert in some of the tasks in her domain while remaining a novice in others. — Daniel Kahneman

Mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions — Daniel Kahneman

Much of the discussion in this book is about biases of intuition. However, the focus on error does not denigrate human intelligence, any more than the attention to diseases in medical texts denies good health. — Daniel Kahneman

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. — Daniel Kahneman

The children were watched through a one-way mirror, and the film that shows their behavior during the waiting time always has the audience roaring in laughter. About half the children managed the feat of waiting for 15 minutes, mainly by keeping their attention away from the tempting reward. Ten or fifteen years later, a large gap had opened between those who had resisted temptation and those who had not. The resisters had higher measures of executive control in cognitive tasks, and especially the ability to reallocate their attention effectively. As young adults, they were less likely to take drugs. A significant difference in intellectual aptitude emerged: the children who had shown more self-control as four-year-olds had substantially higher scores on tests of intelligence. — Daniel Kahneman

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. — Daniel Kahneman

One of the best-known studies of availability suggests that awareness of your own biases can contribute to peace in marriages, and probably in other joint projects. In a famous study, spouses were asked, "How large was your personal contribution to keeping the place tidy, in percentages?" They also answered similar questions about "taking out the garbage," "initiating social engagements," etc. Would the self-estimated contributions add up to 100%, or more, or less? As expected, the self-assessed contributions added up to more than 100%. The explanation is a simple availability bias: both spouses remember their own individual efforts and contributions much more clearly than those of the other, and the difference in availability leads to a difference in judged frequency. — Daniel Kahneman

Your muscles tensed up, your blood pressure rose, and your heart rate increased. Someone looking closely at your eyes while you tackled this problem would have seen your pupils dilate. — Daniel Kahneman

Self-control and deliberate thought apparently draw on the same limited budget of effort.... This is how the law of least effort comes to be a law. Even in the absence of time pressure, maintaining a coherent train of thought requires discipline. — 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

Multiple international bodies have specified that the absence of scientific evidence of potential damage is not sufficient justification for taking risks. As the jurist Cass Sunstein points out, the precautionary principle is costly, and when interpreted strictly it can be paralyzing. — Daniel Kahneman

Systematic errors are known as biases, and they recur predictably in particular circumstances. — Daniel Kahneman

The technical definition of heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions. The word comes from the same root as eureka. — Daniel Kahneman

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

A large portion of the weekend effects is explained by differences in the amount of time spent with friends or family between weekends and weekdays. — Daniel Kahneman

And it is natural for System 1 to generate overconfident judgments, because confidence, as we have seen, is determined by the coherence of the best story you can tell from the evidence at hand. Be warned: your intuitions will deliver predictions that are too extreme and you will be inclined to put far too much faith in them. — 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

Nisbett and Borgida summarize the results in a memorable sentence: Subjects' unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular. — Daniel Kahneman

I don't spend a lot of time taking polls around the world to tell me what I think is the right way to act. I've just got to know how I feel" (George W. Bush, November 2002). — Daniel Kahneman

I have always emphasized the willingness to discard. — Daniel Kahneman

An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true. — Daniel Kahneman

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

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. — Daniel Kahneman

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. — Daniel Kahneman

An essential design feature of the associative machine is that it represents only activated ideas. Information that is not retrieved (even unconsciously) from memory might as well not exist. — Daniel Kahneman

Modern tests of working memory require the individual to switch repeatedly between two demanding tasks, retaining the results of one operation while performing the other. People who do well on these tests tend to do well on tests of general intelligence. — Daniel Kahneman

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. — Daniel Kahneman

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. — Daniel Kahneman

A team of researchers at the University of Oregon explored the link between cognitive control and intelligence in several ways, including an attempt to raise intelligence by improving the control of attention. — Daniel Kahneman

More generally, the financial benefits of self-employment are mediocre: given the same qualifications, people achieve higher average return by selling their skills to employers than by setting out on their own. The evidence suggests that optimism is widespread, stubborn, and costly. Psychologists have confirmed that most people genuinely believe they are superior to most others on most desirable traits - they are willing to bet small amounts of money on these beliefs in the laboratory. — Daniel Kahneman

One study found that people who just thought about watching their favorite movie actually raised their endorphin levels by 27 percent. — Daniel Kahneman

The reliance on the heuristic caused predictable biases (systematic errors) in their predictions. — 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 unsurprising idea that luck often contributes to success has surprising consequences when we apply it to the first two days of a high-level golf tournament. To keep things simple, assume that on both days the average score of the competitors was at par 72. We focus on a player who did very well on the first day, closing with a score of 66. What can we — Daniel Kahneman

All of us would be better investors if we just made fewer decisions. — Daniel Kahneman

It is useful to remember, however, that neglecting valid stereotypes inevitably results in suboptimal judgments. Resistance to stereotyping is a laudable moral position, but the simplistic idea that the resistance is costless is wrong. The costs are worth paying to achieve a better society, but denying that the costs exist, while satisfying to the soul and politically correct, is not scientifically defensible. — Daniel Kahneman

His pupils widening as he watched beautiful nature pictures, and it ends with two striking pictures of the same good-looking woman, who somehow appears much more attractive in one than in the other. There is only one difference: the pupils of the eyes appear dilated in the attractive picture and constricted in the other. — Daniel Kahneman

Some memories come with a very compelling sense of truth about them. And that happens to be the case even with memories that are not true. — Daniel Kahneman

How many animals of each kind did Moses take into the ark? — Daniel Kahneman

The bat-and-ball problem is our first encounter with an observation that will be a recurrent theme of this book: many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions. — Daniel Kahneman

Your political preference determines the arguments that you find compelling. If you like the current health policy, you believe its benefits are substantial and its costs more manageable than the costs of alternatives. If you are a hawk in your attitude toward other nations, you probably think they are relatively weak and likely to submit to your country's will. — Daniel Kahneman

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. — Daniel Kahneman

Individual investors predictably flock to stocks in companies that are in the news. — 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

The truth is, as Jacoby and many followers have shown, that the name David Stenbill will look familiar when you see it because you will see it more clearly. Words that you have seen before become easier to see again - you can identify them better than other words when they are shown very briefly or masked by noise, and you will be quicker (by a few hundredths of a second) to read them than to read other words. In — Daniel Kahneman

System 2 and the electrical circuits in your home both have limited capacity, but they respond differently to threatened overload. A breaker trips when the demand for current is excessive, causing all devices on that circuit to lose power at once. In contrast, the response to mental overload is selective and precise: System 2 protects the most important activity, so it receives the attention it needs; "spare capacity" is allocated second by second to other tasks. In our version of the gorilla experiment, we instructed the participants to assign priority to the digit task. We know that they followed that instruction, because the timing of the visual target had no effect on the main task. If the critical letter was presented at a time of high demand, the subjects simply did not see it. When the transformation task was less demanding, detection performance was better. — Daniel Kahneman

The conclusion is straightforward : self-control requires attention and effort. — Daniel Kahneman

In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages. — Daniel Kahneman

I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. If you come upon an observation that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly good explanation that you are somehow missing. — Daniel Kahneman

For the billionaire looking for the extra billion, and indeed for the participant in an experimental economics project looking for the extra dollar, money is a proxy for points on a scale of self-regard and achievement. These rewards and punishments, promises and threats, are all in our heads. — Daniel Kahneman

The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little. — Daniel Kahneman

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. — Daniel Kahneman

Participants were told that they would shortly have a get-acquainted conversation with another person and were asked to set up two chairs while the experimenter left to retrieve that person. Participants primed by money chose to stay much farther apart than their nonprimed peers (118 vs. 80 centimeters). Money-primed undergraduates also showed a greater preference for being alone. The general theme of these findings is that the idea of money primes individualism: a reluctance to be involved with others, to depend on others, or to accept demands from others. — Daniel Kahneman

Earlier I traced people's confidence in a belief to two related impressions: cognitive ease and coherence. We are confident when the story we tell ourselves comes easily to mind, with no contradiction and no competing scenario. But ease and coherence do not guarantee that a belief held with confidence is true. — Daniel Kahneman

You inability to reconstruct past beliefs will inevitably cause you to underestimate the extent to which you were surprised by past events. — Daniel Kahneman

Not all illusions are visual. There are illusions of thought, which we call cognitive illusions. — Daniel Kahneman

Facts that we know do not always come to mind when we need them. People — 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

Conflict between an automatic reaction and an intention to control it is common in our lives. — Daniel Kahneman

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. — Daniel Kahneman

Mental effort, I would argue, is relatively rare. Most of the time we coast. — Daniel Kahneman

You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general. — Daniel Kahneman

Groups tend to be more extreme than individuals. — Daniel Kahneman

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

I'm not a great believer in self-help. — Daniel Kahneman

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. — Daniel Kahneman

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

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. — Daniel Kahneman

We find that firms with award-winning CEOs subsequently underperform, in terms both of stock and of operating performance. At the same time, CEO compensation increases, CEOs spend more time on activities outside the company such as writing books and sitting on outside boards, and they are more likely to engage in earnings management. — Daniel Kahneman

Rewards for improved performance work better than punishment of mistakes. This proposition is supported by much evidence from research on pigeons, rats, humans, and other animals. — Daniel Kahneman

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. — Daniel Kahneman

Walter Mischel and his students exposed four-year-old children to a cruel dilemma. They were given a choice between a small reward (one Oreo), which they could have at any time, or a larger reward (two cookies) for which they had to wait 15 minutes under difficult conditions. — Daniel Kahneman

Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, explored these so-called expert predictions in a landmark twenty-year study, which he published in his 2005 book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? — Daniel Kahneman

Hindsight bias makes surprises vanish. — Daniel Kahneman

The first surprise is that people's guesses are much more accurate than they would be by chance. I find this astonishing. A sense of cognitive ease is apparently generated by a very faint signal from the associative machine, which "knows" that the three words are coherent (share an association) long before the association is retrieved. — Daniel Kahneman

As expected, the effect of facial competence on voting is about three times larger for information-poor and TV-prone voters than for others who are better informed and watch less television. — Daniel Kahneman

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. — Daniel Kahneman

The conclusion is that the ease with which instances come to mind is a System 1 heuristic, which is replaced by a focus on content when System 2 is more engaged. Multiple lines of evidence converge on the conclusion that people who let themselves be guided by System 1 are more strongly susceptible to availability biases than others who are in a state of higher vigilance. The following are some conditions in which people "go with the flow" and are affected more strongly by ease of retrieval than by the content they retrieved: — Daniel Kahneman

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

In an article titled "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly," he showed that couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility. — Daniel Kahneman

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

Their recommendation is that you should not put too much weight on regret; even if you have some, it will hurt less than you now think. — Daniel Kahneman

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

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. — Daniel Kahneman

The media do not just shape what the public is interested in, but also are shaped by it. — Daniel Kahneman

but statistics requires thinking about many things at once, which is something that System 1 is not designed to do. — Daniel Kahneman

An organization is a factory that manufactures judgments and decisions. Every factory must have ways to ensure the quality of its products in the initial design, in fabrication, and in final inspections. The corresponding stages in the production of decisions are the framing of the problem that is to be solved, the collection of relevant information leading to a decision, and reflection and review. An organization that seeks to improve its decision product should routinely look for efficiency improvements at each of these stages. The — Daniel Kahneman

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 — Daniel Kahneman

higher income is associated with a reduced ability to enjoy the small pleasures of life. — Daniel Kahneman

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

Nobody would say, 'I'm voting for this guy because he's got the stronger chin,' but that, in fact, is partly what happens. — 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

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

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

The observers almost never missed a K that was shown at the beginning or near the end of the Add-1 task but they missed the target almost half the time when mental effort was at its peak, although we had pictures of their wide-open eye staring straight at it. — Daniel Kahneman

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

A person who has not made peace with his losses is likely to accept gambles that would be unacceptable to him otherwise. — Daniel Kahneman

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. — Daniel Kahneman

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

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. — Daniel Kahneman