Daniel Kahneman Quotes

Researchers who studied a thousand Dutch vacationers concluded that by far the greatest amount of happiness extracted from the vacation is derived from the anticipation period.

Most people are highly optimistic most of the time.

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.

That's one of the real dangers of leader selection in many organizations: leaders are selected for overconfidence.

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

We know that the French are very different from the Americans in their satisfaction with life. They're much less satisfied. Americans are pretty high up there, while the French are quite low - the world champions in life satisfaction are actually the Danes.

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.

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.

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

There's a very good reason for why economics developed the way it did, and that is that in many situations, the assumption that people will exploit the opportunities available to them is very plausible, and it simplifies the analysis of how markets will behave.

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

One study found that people who just thought about watching their favorite movie actually raised their endorphin levels by 27 percent.

you know you have made a theoretical advance when you can no longer reconstruct why you failed for so long to see the obvious.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

In strategic decisions, I'd be really concerned about overconfidence.

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

We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are.

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.

Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.

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

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.

... sometimes when you are asked a question that is difficult, the mind doesn't stay silent if it doesn't have the answer. The mind produces something, and what it produces very characteristically is the answer to an easier but related question.

The average investor's return is significantly lower than market indices due primarily to market timing.

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

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

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.

Clearly, the decision-making that we rely on in society is fallible. It's highly fallible, and we should know that.

The planning fallacy is that you make a plan, which is usually a best-case scenario. Then you assume that the outcome will follow your plan, even when you should know better.

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.

Optimistic people play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are inventors, entrepreneurs, political and military leaders - not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks.

Groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.

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

The experiencing self lives in the moment; it is the one that answers the question, 'Does it hurt?' or 'What were you thinking about just now?' The remembering self is the one that answers questions about the overall evaluation of episodes or periods of one's life, such as a stay in the hospital or the years since one left college.

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.

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.

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.

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

Most successful pundits are selected for being opinionated, because it's interesting, and the penalties for incorrect predictions are negligible. You can make predictions, and a year later people won't remember them.

One emphasis of my research has been on the question of how people spend their time. Time is the ultimate finite resource, or course, so the question of how people spend it would seem to be important.

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.

People's mood is really determined primarily by their genetic make-up and personality, and in the second place by their immediate context, and only in the third and fourth place by worries and concerns and other things like that.