Daniel Kahneman Quotes

If there is time to reflect, slowing down is likely to be a good idea.

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.

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

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.

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.

It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.

If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.

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

To know whether you can trust a particular intuitive judgment, there are two questions you should ask: Is the environment in which the judgment is made sufficiently regular to enable predictions from the available evidence? The answer is yes for diagnosticians, no for stock pickers. Do the professionals have an adequate opportunity to learn the cues and the regularities? The answer here depends on the professionals' experience and on the quality and speed with which they discover their mistakes.

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

There are domains in which expertise is not possible. Stock picking is a good example. And in long-term political strategic forecasting, it's been shown that experts are just not better than a dice-throwing monkey.

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

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

To better avoid errors, you should talk to people who disagree with you and you should talk to people who are not in the same emotional situation you are.

People have little idea, by and large, of the investment world. They are convinced they have an advantage.

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

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.

You should not take your intuitions at face value.

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

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

Overconfidence is a powerful source of illusions, primarily determined by the quality and coherence of the story that you can construct, not by its validity.

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.

Knowing the importance of luck, you should be particularly suspicious when highly consistent patterns emerge from the comparison of successful and less successful firms. In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages.

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.

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.

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.

The evidence is unequivocal, there's a great deal more luck than skill in people getting very rich.

Policy makers, like most people, normally feel that they already know all the psychology and all the sociology they are likely to need for their decisions. I don't think they are right, but that's the way it is.

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.

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

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

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

Some achieve a reputation for great successes when in fact all they have done is take chances that reasonable people wouldn't take.

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

If you're going to be unreligious, it's likely going to be due to reflecting on it and finding some things that are hard to believe.

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

The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than your own.

Psychologists really aim to be scientists, white-coat stuff, with elaborate statistics, running experiments.

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

A person who has not made peace with his losses is likely to accept gambles that would be unacceptable to him otherwise.

I have always emphasized the willingness to discard.

In a rising market, enough of your bad ideas will pay off so that you'll never learn that you should have fewer ideas.

We have no reason to expect the quality of intuition to improve with the importance of the problem. Perhaps the contrary: high-stake problems are likely to involve powerful emotions and strong impulses to action.

Mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions

So your emotional state really has a lot to do with what you're thinking about and what you're paying attention to.

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

Ten minutes of a smartphone in front of your nose is about the equivalent of an hour long walk in bright daylight. Imagine going for an hour long walk in bright daylight and then thinking, "Now I'll get some sleep." It ain't going to happen.

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.