Daniel Kahneman famous quotes

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

#Self #Doe #May

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

#Mean #Long #Three

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.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Memories #Thinking #Our Future

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

#Cockroaches #Experts #Wrecks

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.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#People #Diagnosis #Feedback

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

#Memories #Generations #Instagram

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.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Past #Get Better #Progress

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.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Ideas #Feelings #Intuition

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Love You #People #Spending Time

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

#Past #Ideas #Ease

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

#Memories #Stories #Our Memories

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

#Believe #People #Way

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.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#People #Coaching #Wave

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

#Ideas #Assuming #Problem

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

#Selfish #People #Choices

A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world (or any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Believe #Past #Views

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

#Thinking #Important #Life Is

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

#Optimistic #Healthy #Wonderful

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

#Essence #Heuristics #Answers

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.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Law #Skills #People

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

#Ignorance #Comforting #Foundation

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

#Memories #Cases #Compelling

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

#Important #Way #Turns

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.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Strong #People #First Impression

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

#Decision #Feelings #Helping

Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Mind #Culture #Biology

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

#Thinking #Self #Live Your Life

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

#Mistake #Feedback #Expertise

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

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

#Book #People #Looks

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.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Optimistic #Mean #Odds

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.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Thinking #Issues #Age

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.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Average #Cheerful #Looks

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

#Loss #Ideas #Long

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

#Years #Skills #Able

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

#World #Facts #Illusion

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.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Loneliness #Emotional #Elderly

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.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Loneliness #Emotional #People

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.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Memories #Doubt #Littles

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

#Self #Moments

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

#Numbers #Would Be #Facts

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

#Leadership #People #Decision

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

#Thinking #Optimism #Decision

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.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Change #Believe #Past

Managers think of themselves as captains of a ship on a stormy sea. Risk for them is danger, but they are fighting it, very controlled.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Business #Fighting #Thinking

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.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Money #Community #Understanding

If individuals are rational, there is no need to protect them against their own choices.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Choices #Needs #Individual

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

#Self #Helping #Self Help

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

#Looks #Internet #Enjoy

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

#Causes #Persons

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

#Children #People #Spouse

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

#Organization #Optimism #May

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

#Guy #Voting #Stronger

The concept of happiness has to be reorganised.
-- Daniel Kahneman

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

#Truth #People #Opinion

Many people will admit that they made a mistake [putting money in dot-coms or telecoms at their peak] But that doesn’t mean that they’ve changed their mind about anything in particular. It doesn’t mean that they are now able to avoid that mistake.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Mistake #Mean #People

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

#Optimistic #Risk #Definitions

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

#Past #Illusion #Ability

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

#Events #Roles #World

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

#People #Nonsense #More Money

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

#Use #Use Of Time #Way

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

#People #Hearing #Facts

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

#Quality #Stories #Littles

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

#Self Esteem #People #Challenges

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.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Memories #Attention #Reason

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.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Sleep #Car #People

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

#Ideas #People #Giving

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

#Children #Fear #Thinking

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

#Animal #Survival #Novelty

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.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Motivation #Inspiration #Years

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.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#People #Mind #Quality

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

#Believe #People #Support

Slow thinking has the feeling of something you do. It's deliberate.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Thinking #Feelings

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

#Ideas #Psychology #Done

Laziness is built deep into our nature.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Laziness

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

#Blind #Obvious #Blindness

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.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Doubt #Stories #States

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.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Keys #Choices #Effort

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

#Groups #Clubs #Individual

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

#Confidence #People #Planning

Doubts are suppressed by groups... But remember that the internal incentives that shape how the group perceives risks and rewards may be very different from the reality of the risks and rewards in the external marketplace. Those incentives can distort risk perception.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Reality #Risk #Perception

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

#Self #Effort #Attention

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

#Dominance #Emotion #Argument

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

#Belief #Life Is #Rejects

Acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Opportunity #Practice #Skills

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

#Evolution #Quotations

Endlessly amused by people's minds.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#People #Mind

Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition. These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.
-- Daniel Kahneman

#Sadness #Creativity #Errors