Daniel Kahneman Quotes

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

Hindsight bias makes surprises vanish.

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.

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

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

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

Most things that couples disagree upon aren't worth more than a day's combat.

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

Negotiations over a shrinking pie are especially difficult because they require an allocation of losses. People tend to be much more easygoing when they bargain over an expanding pie.

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

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

Groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.

When people think of the outcomes of their decisions, they think much more short term than that. They think in terms of gains and losses.

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

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

In essence, the optimistic style involves taking credit for successes but little blame for failures.

Laziness is built deep into our nature.

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

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

The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of the [investment management] industry.

When you are under time pressure for a decision, you need to follow intuition.

I would be wary of experts' intuition, except when they deal with something that they have dealt with a lot in the past.

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.

All of us roughly know what memory is. I mean, memory is sort of the storage of the past. It's the storage of our personal experiences. It's a very big deal.

Most of the time, we think fast. And most of the time we're really expert at what we're doing, and most of the time, what we do is right.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Employers who violate rules of fairness are punished by reduced productivity, and merchants who follow unfair pricing policies can expect to lose sales.

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.

Endlessly amused by people's minds.

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

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.

Question: So investors shouldn't delude themselves about beating the market? Answer: "They're just not going to do it. It's just not going to happen."

The concept of happiness has to be reorganised.

Lucky risk takers use hindsight to reinforce their feeling that their gut is very wise. Hindsight also reinforces others' trust in that individual's gut.

It was always assumed I would be a professor. I grew up thinking it.

There's a tendency to look at investments in isolation. Investors focus on the risk of individual securities.

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.

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.

An executive might have a very strong intuition that a given product has promise, without considering the probability that a rival is already ahead in developing the same product.

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.

My impression is that the elimination of memories greatly reduces the value of the experience.

Banks are run by executives, and executives protect themselves, and that does not always mean that banks are going to behave rationally.

There are some conditions where you have to trust your intuition.

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.

People talk of the new economy and of reinventing themselves in the workplace, and in that sense most of us are less secure.