Daniel Kahneman Quotes

Bias and noise — systematic deviation and random scatter — are different components of error.

The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time. Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?

The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact.

There is a deep gap between our thinking about statistics and our thinking about individual cases.

The sunk-cost fallacy keeps people for too long in poor jobs, unhappy marriages, and unpromising research projects.

Subjective confidence in a judgement is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that this judgement is correct. Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.

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.

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.

My advice to students when I taught negotiations was that if you think the other side has made an outrageous proposal, you should not come back with an equally outrageous counteroffer, creating a gap that will be difficult to bridge in further negotiations. Instead you should make a scene, storm out or threaten to do so, and make it clear — to yourself as well as to the other side — that you will not continue the negotiation with that number on the table.

The idea that large historical events are determined by luck is profoundly shocking, although it is demonstrably true.

a stable relationship requires that good interactions outnumber bad interactions by at least 5 to 1.

I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.

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.

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.

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.