Daniel Kahneman Quotes

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.

Laziness is built deep into our nature.

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.

The brains of humans contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.

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."

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

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

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.

One of the problems with expertise is that people have it in some domains and not in others.

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.

Each additional day together is a gift. The end of the day means the end of hostilities, the recognition that the underlying shared values and commitment to the relationship trump the need for one last dig or self-righteous justification.

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.

Optimism is normal, but some fortunate people are more optimistic than the rest of us. If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias, you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person - you already feel fortunate.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Political columnists and sports pundits are rewarded for being overconfident.

If people can construct a simple and coherent story, they will feel confident regardless of how well grounded it is in reality.

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.

Finally, the illusions of validity and skill are supported by a powerful professional culture. We know that people can maintain an unshakeable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers. Given the professional culture of the financial community, it is not surprising that large numbers of individuals in that world believe themselves to be among the chosen few who can do what they believe others cannot.

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.

Unfortunately, skill in evaluating the business prospects of a firm is not sufficient for successful stock trading, where the key question is whether the information about the firm is already incorporated in the price of the stock. Traders apparently lackthe skill to answer this crucial question, but they appear to be ignorant of their ignorance.

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.

It doesn't take many observations to think you've spotted a trend, and it's probably not a trend at all.

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

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

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

Endlessly amused by people's minds.

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

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

The concept of happiness has to be reorganised.

The amount of success it takes for leaders to become overconfident isn't terribly large.

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

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

We were required to predict a soldier's performance in officer training and in combat, but we did so by evaluating his behavior over one hour in an artificial situation. This was a perfect instance of a general rule that I call WYSIATI, "What you see is all there is." We had made up a story from the little we knew but had no way to allow for what we did not know about the individual's future, which was almost everything that would actually matter. When you know as little as we did, you should not make extreme predictions like "He will be a star."

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.

Establish a closing ritual. Know when to stop working. Try to end each work day the same way, too. Straighten up your desk. Back up your computer. Make a list of what you need to do tomorrow.

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.

People who face a difficult question often answer an easier one instead, without realizing it.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.