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

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

It's very easy for trusted companies to mislead naive customers, and life insurance companies are trusted. — Daniel Kahneman

Forbes describes how Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, discovered that "people would rather do business with a person they like and trust rather than someone they don't, even if the likeable person is offering a lower quality product or service at a higher price. — Sally Hogshead

Errors in the initial budget are not always innocent. The authors of unrealistic plans are often driven by the desire to get the plan approved - whether by their superiors or by a client - supported by the knowledge that projects are rarely abandoned unfinished merely because of overruns in costs or completion times. In — 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

It's very difficult to distinguish between what a person believes and what they say they believe. — Daniel Kahneman

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. — Daniel Kahneman

Flow neatly separates the two forms of effort: concentration on the task and the deliberate control of attention. — Daniel Kahneman

The events that took place as a result of your seeing the words happened by a process called associative activation: ideas that have been evoked trigger many other ideas, in a spreading cascade of activity in your brain. The — Daniel Kahneman

In a state of flow, however, maintaining focused attention on these absorbing activities requires no exertion of self-control, thereby freeing resources to be directed to the task at hand. — Daniel Kahneman

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. — Daniel Kahneman

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. — Daniel Kahneman

Simple, common gestures can also unconsciously influence our thoughts and feelings. — Daniel Kahneman

A Random Walk Down Wall Street — Daniel Kahneman

In everyday speech, we call people reasonable if it is possible to reason with them, if their beliefs are generally in tune with reality, and if their preferences are in line with their interests and their values. The — Daniel Kahneman

Put your ideas in verse if you can; they will be more likely to be taken as truth. — 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

Questioning what we believe and want is difficult at the best of times, — Daniel Kahneman

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. — Daniel Kahneman

Something is still missing from this story: the answers need to be fitted to the original questions. — Daniel Kahneman

You felt the burden of holding much material in memory, as you needed to keep track of where you were and of where you were going, while holding on to the intermediate result. — Daniel Kahneman

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

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. — Daniel Kahneman

People adjust less (stay closer to the anchor) when their mental resources are depleted, either because their memory is loaded with digits or because they are slightly drunk. — Daniel Kahneman

Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted. — 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

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. — 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

You can always find an evolutionary quotation for anything. But the question is whether it's functional, which is not the same as being evolutionary. — Daniel Kahneman

The extra daily social time of 1.7 hours in weekends raises average happiness by about 2%. — 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

More than 50% of students at Harvard, MIT, and Princeton gave the intuitive - incorrect - answer. — 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

If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? 100 minutes OR 5 minutes — Daniel Kahneman

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. — Daniel Kahneman

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. — Daniel Kahneman

Experienced radiologists who evaluate chest X-rays as "normal" or "abnormal" contradict themselves 20% of the time when they see the same picture on separate occasions. — Daniel Kahneman

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

Adam switches from a gas-guzzler of 12 mpg to a slightly less voracious guzzler that runs at 14 mpg. The environmentally virtuous Beth switches from a 30 mpg car to one that runs at 40 mpg. — 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

Because it is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label the mistakes of others than to recognize our own. Questioning what we believe and want is difficult at the — Daniel Kahneman

Once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. — Daniel Kahneman

There is general agreement among researchers that nearly all stock pickers, whether they know it or not-and few of them do-are playing a game of chance. — Daniel Kahneman

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

We were told that a strong attraction to a patient with a repeated history of failed treatment is a danger sign - like the fins on the parallel lines. It is an illusion - a cognitive illusion - and I (System 2) was taught how to recognize it and advised not to believe it or act on it. The question that is most often asked — Daniel Kahneman

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. — Daniel Kahneman

People are very good [at] thinking about agents. The mind is set really beautifully to think about agents. Agents have traits. Agents have behaviors. We understand agents. We form global impression of their personalities. We are really not very good at remembering sentences where the subject of the sentence is an abstract notion. — Daniel Kahneman

It's nonsense to say money doesn't buy happiness, but people exaggerate the extent to which more money can buy more happiness. — Daniel Kahneman

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

A compelling narrative fosters an illusion of inevitability. — Daniel Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman is one of the most original and interesting thinkers of our time. — Daniel Kahneman

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

You can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and undemanding. — Daniel Kahneman

puzzling limitation of our mind: our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in. We — Daniel Kahneman

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

We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are. — 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

You should expect little or nothing from Wall Street stock pickers who hope to be more accurate than the market in predicting the future of prices. And you should not expect much from pundits making long-term forecasts. — Daniel Kahneman

People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations. — Daniel Kahneman

Risk" does not exist "out there," independent of our minds and culture, waiting to be measured. Human beings have invented the concept of "risk" to help them understand and cope with the dangers and uncertainties of life. Although these dangers are real, there is no such thing as "real risk" or "objective risk. — 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

System 1 represents sets by averages, norms, and prototypes, not by sums. Each — Daniel Kahneman

Changing one's mind about human nature is hard work, and changing one's mind for the worse about oneself is even harder. Nisbett — Daniel Kahneman

The bold implication of this idea is that the effects of ego depletion could be undone by ingesting glucose, and Baumeister and his colleagues have confirmed this hypothesis in several experiments. — Daniel Kahneman

A recurrent theme of this book is that luck plays a large role in every story of success; — Daniel Kahneman

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 ... — Daniel Kahneman

Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality. Statistics — Daniel Kahneman

Those who avoid the sin of intellectual sloth could be called "engaged." They are more alert, more intellectually active, less willing to be satisfied with superficially attractive answers, more skeptical about their intuitions. — Daniel Kahneman

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. — Daniel Kahneman

The main function of System 1 is to maintain and update a model of your personal world, which represents what is normal in it. The model is constructed by associations that link ideas of circumstances, events, actions, and outcomes that co-occur with some regularity, either at the same time or within a relatively short interval. As these links are formed and strengthened, the pattern of associated ideas comes to represent the structure of events in your life, and it determines your interpretation of the present as well as your expectations of the future. — 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

I don't try to be clever at all. The idea that I could see what no one else can is an illusion. — Daniel Kahneman

The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self. — Daniel Kahneman

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. — 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

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. — Daniel Kahneman

It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. — 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

When experts and the public disagree on their priorities, he says, Each side must respect the insights and intelligence of the other. — 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

Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it. — Daniel Kahneman

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. — Daniel Kahneman

The testers found that training attention not only improved executive control; scores on nonverbal tests of intelligence also improved and the improvement was maintained for several months. — Daniel Kahneman

Hindsight bias makes surprises vanish. — Daniel Kahneman

Amos and I called our first joint article "Belief in the Law of Small Numbers." We explained, tongue-in-cheek, that "intuitions about random sampling appear to satisfy the law of small numbers, which asserts that the law of large numbers applies to small numbers as well." We also included a strongly worded recommendation that researchers regard their "statistical intuitions with proper suspicion and replace impression formation by computation whenever possible. — Daniel Kahneman

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

The rules of the betting are intelligent: recent events and the current context have the most weight in determining an interpretation. When no recent event comes to mind, more distant memories govern. — 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

A crucial capability of System 2 is the adoption of "task sets": it can program memory to obey an instruction that overrides habitual responses. Consider the following: Count all occurrences of the letter f in this page. This is not a task you have ever performed before and it will not come naturally to you, but your System 2 can take it on. It will be effortful to set yourself up for this exercise, and effortful to carry it out, though you will surely improve with practice. Psychologists speak of "executive control" to describe the adoption and termination of task sets, and neuroscientists have identified the main regions of the brain that serve the executive function. One of these regions is involved whenever a conflict must be resolved. Another is the prefrontal area of the brain, a region that is substantially more developed in humans than in other primates, and is involved in operations that we associate with intelligence. — Daniel Kahneman

To think clearly about the future, we need to clean up the language that we use in labeling the beliefs we had in the past. — Daniel Kahneman

Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true. — Daniel Kahneman

Now suppose that at the end of the page you get another instruction: count all the commas in the next page. This will be harder, because you will have to overcome the newly acquired tendency to focus attention on the letter f. — Daniel Kahneman

And how long an activity lasts seems to have little influence on our recollections at all - two weeks of vacation, Kahneman noted in a 2010 TED lecture, won't be recalled with much more fondness or intensity than one week, because that extra week probably won't add much new material to the original memory. (Never mind that the experiencing self might really enjoy that extra week of vacation.) — Jennifer Senior

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

We focus on our goal, anchor on our plan, and neglect relevant base rates, exposing ourselves to the planning fallacy. We focus on what we want to do and can do, neglecting the plans and skills of others. Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck. We are therefore prone to an illusion of control. We focus on what we know and neglect what we do not know, which makes us overly confident in our beliefs. — Daniel Kahneman

We're generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments. — Daniel Kahneman