Daniel Kahneman Quotes

The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the body, and effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the currency of glucose.

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.

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

As cognitive scientists have emphasized in recent years, cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain.

The worse the consequence, the greater the hindsight bias.

It took Francis Galton several years to figure out that and regression are not two concepts – they are different perspectives on the same concept. The general rule is straightforward but has surprising consequences: whenever the correlation between two scores is imperfect, there will be regression to the mean.

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.

People who are poor think like traders, but the dynamics are quite different. Unlike traders, the poor are not indifferent to the differences between gaining and giving up. Their problem is that all their choices are between losses. Money that is spent on one good is the loss of another good that could have been purchased instead. For the poor, costs are losses.

To be useful, your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability.

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

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

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

Jonathan Haidt said in another context, “The emotional tail wags the rational dog.

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 a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another substitution.