Daniel Kahneman Quotes

Do we still remember the question we are trying to answer? Or have we substituted an easier one?

Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion — and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined. 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.

If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism.

In one experience I remember vividly, there was a rich range of shades. It must have been late 1941 or early 1942. Jews were required to wear the Star of David and to obey a 6 p.m. curfew. I had gone to play with a Christian friend and had stayed too late. I turned my brown sweater inside out to walk the few blocks home. As I was walking down an empty street, I saw a German soldier approaching. He was wearing the black uniform that I had been told to fear more than others - the one worn by specially recruited SS soldiers. As I came closer to him, trying to walk fast, I noticed that he was looking at me intently. Then he beckoned me over, picked me up, and hugged me. I was terrified that he would notice the star inside my sweater. He was speaking to me with great emotion, in German. When he put me down, he opened his wallet, showed me a picture of a boy, and gave me some money. I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were endlessly complicated and interesting.

There's literally no difference between a physician recognizing a disease from a "facial expression", and a little child pointing to something and saying "doggie".

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

A divorce is like a symphony with a screeching sound at the end — the fact that it ended badly does not mean it was all bad.

Highly intelligent women tend to marry men who are less intelligent than they are.

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it

You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.

The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future. These illusions are comforting. They reduce the anxiety that we would experience if we allowed ourselves to fully acknowledge the uncertainties of existence.

The worse the consequence, the greater the hindsight bias.

And there is something else, which is very important, I think. Which is that almost all psychological hypotheses are true, that is, in the sense that, you know, directionally, if you have a hypothesis that A really causes B, that it's not true that A causes the opposite [of] B. Maybe A just has very little effect, but hypotheses are true mostly, except mostly they're very weak, they're much weaker than you think...

To understand error in judgment, we must understand both bias and noise.

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.