Daniel Kahneman > Quotes

“We focus on our goal, anchor on our plan, and neglect relevant base rates, exposing ourselves to the planning fallacy. We focus on what we want to do and can do, neglecting the plans and skills of others. Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck. We are therefore prone to an illusion of control. We focus on what we know and neglect what we do not know, which makes us overly confident in our beliefs.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appear obvious only after the fact.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Experts who acknowledge the full extent of their ignorance may expect to be replaced by more confident competitors, who are better able to gain the trust of clients. An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality—but it is not what people and organizations want.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“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.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“a stable relationship requires that good interactions outnumber bad interactions by at least 5 to 1.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“higher income is associated with a reduced ability to enjoy the small pleasures of life.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“A simple rule can help: before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position. This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of knowledge and opinion in the group. The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of those who speak early and assertively, causing others to line up behind them.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Remember this rule: intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“We have all heard such stories of expert intuition: the chess master who walks past a street game and announces “White mates in three” without stopping, or the physician who makes a complex diagnosis after a single glance at a patient. Expert intuition strikes us as magical, but it is not. Indeed, each of us performs feats of intuitive expertise many times each day. Most of us are pitch-perfect in detecting anger in the first word of a telephone call, recognize as we enter a room that we were the subject of the conversation, and quickly react to subtle signs that the driver of the car in the next lane is dangerous. Our everyday intuitive abilities are no less marvelous than the striking insights of an experienced firefighter or physician—only more common. The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic. Perhaps the best short statement of it is by the great Herbert Simon, who studied chess masters and showed that after thousands of hours of practice they come to see the pieces on the board differently from the rest of us. You can feel Simon’s impatience with the mythologizing of expert intuition when he writes: “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Jonathan Haidt said in another context, “The emotional tail wags the rational dog.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“To derive the most useful information from multiple sources of evidence, you should always try to make these sources independent of each other.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“You can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and undemanding.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking of it.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The worse the consequence, the greater the hindsight bias.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“However, optimism is highly valued, socially and in the market; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers. One of the lessons of the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession is that there are periods in which competition, among experts and among organizations, creates powerful forces that favor a collective blindness to risk and uncertainty.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do. My Princeton colleague Danny Oppenheimer refuted a myth prevalent among undergraduates about the vocabulary that professors find most impressive. In an article titled "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly," he showed that couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. If you come upon an observation that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly good explanation that you are somehow missing.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high and there is no time to collect more information.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“To be useful, your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“it is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Those who avoid the sin of intellectual sloth could be called “engaged.” They are more alert, more intellectually active, less willing to be satisfied with superficially attractive answers, more skeptical about their intuitions.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“In a state of flow, however, maintaining focused attention on these absorbing activities requires no exertion of self-control, thereby freeing resources to be directed to the task at hand.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow