44 Quotes & Sayings By Daniel Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and professor emeritus at Princeton University. He is the author of books such as Thinking, Fast and Slow, and has been named one of the most influential people in the world by Time magazine.

Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money...
1
Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery. Daniel Kahneman
2
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
We all care intensely for the narrative of our own...
3
We all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero. Daniel Kahneman
4
The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works. Daniel Kahneman
5
...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
6
The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own. Daniel Kahneman
7
Characteristics of System 1: - generates impressions, feelings, and inclinations; when endorsed by System 2 these become beliefs, attitudes, and intentions - operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort, and no sense of voluntary control - can be programmed by System 2 to mobilize attention when a particular pattern is detected (search) - executes skilled responses and generates skilled intuitions, after adequate training - creates a coherent pattern of activated ideas in associative memory - links a sense of cognitive ease to illusions of truth, pleasant feelings, and reduced vigilance - distinguishes the surprising from the normal - infers and invents causes and intentions - neglects ambiguity and suppresses doubt - is biased to believe and confirm - exaggerates emotional consistency (halo effect) - focuses on existing evidence and ignores absent evidence (WYSIATI)- generates a limited set of basic assessments - represents sets by norms and prototypes, does not integrate- matches intensities across scales (e.g., size to loudness) - computes more than intended (mental shotgun) - sometimes substitutes an easier question for a difficult one (heuristics) - is more sensitive to changes than to states (prospect theory)* - overweights low probabilities* - shows diminishing sensitivity to quantity (psychophysics)* - responds more strongly to losses than to gains (loss aversion)* - frames decision problems narrowly, in isolation from one another* . Daniel Kahneman
8
You think with your body, not with your brain. Daniel Kahneman
9
If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do. My Princeton colleague Danny Oppenheimer refuted a myth prevalent among undergraduates about the vocabulary that professors find most impressive. 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
10
The law (of least effort) 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
11
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
12
The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact. Daniel Kahneman
13
The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained. Daniel Kahneman
14
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
15
The 'Instagram Generation' now experiences the present as an anticipated memory. Daniel Kahneman
16
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
17
Most important, of course, we all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero. Daniel Kahneman
18
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it. Daniel Kahneman
19
At work here is that powerful WYSIATI ("what you see is all there is") rule. You cannot help dealing with the limited information you have as if it were all there is to know. You build the best possible story from the information available to you, and if it is a good story, you believe it. Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance. Daniel Kahneman
20
Many parents have discovered, perhaps with some guilt, that they can read a story to a child while thinking of something else. Daniel Kahneman
21
Some experimenters have reported that an angry face “pops out” of a crowd of happy faces, but a single happy face does not stand out in an angry crowd. The brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news. Daniel Kahneman
22
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
23
There's a lot of randomness in the decisions that people make. Daniel Kahneman
24
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking of it. Daniel Kahneman
25
The amount of evidence and its quality do not count for much, because poor evidence can make a very good story. For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs. Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous - and it is also essential. Daniel Kahneman
26
Dawes observed that the complex statistical algorithm adds little or no value. One can do just as well by selecting a set of scores that have some validity for predicting the outcome and adjusting the values to make them comparable (by using standard scores or ranks). A formula that combines these predictors with equal weights is likely to be just as accurate in predicting new cases as the multiple-regression formula that was optimal in the original sample. More recent research went further: formulas that assign equal weights to all the predictors are often superior, because they are not affected by accidents of sampling. . Daniel Kahneman
27
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
28
However, attention can be moved away from an unwanted focus, primarily by focusing intently on another target. Daniel Kahneman
29
The expectation of intelligent gossip is a powerful motive for serious self-criticism, more powerful than New Year resolutions to improve one's decision making at work and at home. Daniel Kahneman
30
An investment said to have an 80% chance of success sounds far more attractive than one with a 20% chance of failure. The mind can't easily recognize that they are the same. Daniel Kahneman
31
Political columnists and sports pundits are rewarded for being overconfident. Daniel Kahneman
32
When you analyze happiness, it turns out that the way you spend your time is extremely important. Daniel Kahneman
33
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
34
Happiness is determined by factors like your health, your family relationships and friendships, and above all by feeling that you are in control of how you spend your time. Daniel Kahneman
35
By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases, and that is true for both humans and artificial intelligence, but the heuristics of AI are not necessarily the human ones. Daniel Kahneman
36
True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes. Daniel Kahneman
37
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
38
It's clear that policymakers and economists are going to be interested in the measurement of well-being primarily as it correlates with health they also want to know whether researchers can validate subjective responses with physiological indices. Daniel Kahneman
39
People just hate the idea of losing. Any loss, even a small one, is just so terrible to contemplate that they compensate by buying insurance, including totally absurd policies like air travel. Daniel Kahneman
40
It's a wonderful thing to be optimistic. It keeps you healthy and it keeps you resilient. Daniel Kahneman
41
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. Daniel Kahneman
42
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
43
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