Daniel Kahneman Quotes

The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.

...the characters are useful because of some quirks of our minds, yours and mine. A sentence is understood more easily if it describes what an agent (system 2) does than if it describes what something is, what properties it has.

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

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.

There is no evidence that risk takers in the economic domain have an unusual appetite for gambles on high stakes; they are merely less aware of risks than more timid people are.

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.

The often-used phrase “pay attention” is apt: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail.

You can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and undemanding.

If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.

There is at least one source of occasion noise that we have all noticed: mood.

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

An inability to be guided by a “healthy fear” of bad consequences is a disastrous flaw.

Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.

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.

The mystery is how a conception that is vulnerable to such obvious counterexamples survived for so long. I can explain it only by a weakness of the scholarly mind that I have often observed in myself. I call it theory-induced blindness: Once you have accepted a theory, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. As the psychologist Daniel Gilbert has observed, disbelieving is hard work.