Daniel Kahneman Quotes

For example, students of policy have noted that the availability heuristic
helps explain why some issues are highly salient in the public’s mind while
others are neglected. People tend to assess the relative importance of
issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory — and this is
largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.

A rare event will be overweighted if it specifically attracts attention. [...] And when there is no overweighting, there will be neglect.

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.

In a negotiation situation, for instance, good mood helps. People in a good mood are more cooperative and elicit reciprocation. They tend to end up with better results than do unhappy negotiators.

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

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

More advice: if your message is to be printed, use high-quality paper to maximize the contrast between characters and their background. If you use color, you are more likely to be believed if your text is printed in bright blue or red than in middling shades of green, yellow, or pale blue.

We often interact with professionals who exercise their judgment with evident confidence, sometimes priding themselves on the power of their intuition. In a world rife with illusions of validity and skill, can we trust them? How do we distinguish the justified confidence of experts from the sincere overconfidence of professionals who do not know they are out of their depth? We can believe an expert who admits uncertainty but cannot take expressions of high confidence at face value. As I first learned on the obstacle field, people come up with coherent stories and confident predictions even when they know little or nothing. Overconfidence arises because people are often blind to their own blindness.

When forecasting the outcomes of risky projects, executives too easily fall victim to the planning fallacy. In its grip, they make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than on a rational weighting of gains, losses, and probabilities. They overestimate benefits and underestimate costs. They spin scenarios of success while overlooking the potential for mistakes and miscalculations. As a result, they pursue initiatives that are unlikely to come in on budget or on time or to deliver the expected returns — or even to be completed. In this view, people often (but not always) take on risky projects because they are overly optimistic about the odds they face. I will return to this idea several times in this book — it probably contributes to an explanation of why people litigate, why they start wars, and why they open small businesses.

Evaluating people as attractive or not is a basic assessment. You do that automatically whether or not you want to, and it influences you.

He weights losses about twice as much as gains, which is normal.

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

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

First, people are generally rational, and their thinking is normally sound. Second, emotions such as fear, affection, and hatred explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality.