Daniel Kahneman Quotes

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

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

You should not take your intuitions at face value.

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.

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

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

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.

We're not aware of changing our minds even when we do change our minds. And most people, after they change their minds, reconstruct their past opinion - they believe they always thought that.

We have a very narrow view of what is going on.

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

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

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

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

Being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things and more time doing compulsory things and feeling stressed.

People assign much higher probability to the truth of their opinions than is warranted.

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

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

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

It's a wonderful thing to be optimistic. It keeps you healthy and it keeps you resilient.

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.

One of the major biases in risky decision making is optimism. Optimism is a source of high-risk thinking.

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

Adaptation seems to be, to a substantial extent, a process of reallocating your attention.

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

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

Alternative descriptions of the same reality evoke different emotions and different associations.

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

I have always emphasized the willingness to discard.

I'm not a great believer in self-help.

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.

Nobody would say, 'I'm voting for this guy because he's got the stronger chin,' but that, in fact, is partly what happens.

Mental effort, I would argue, is relatively rare. Most of the time we coast.

The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.

Intuitive diagnosis is reliable when people have a lot of relevant feedback. But people are very often willing to make intuitive diagnoses even when they're very likely to be wrong.

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.

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.

The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved.

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

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

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

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

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.

Managers think of themselves as captains of a ship on a stormy sea. Risk for them is danger, but they are fighting it, very controlled.

Political columnists and sports pundits are rewarded for being overconfident.

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

Slow thinking has the feeling of something you do. It's deliberate.

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

Most people are highly optimistic most of the time.

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

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