Daniel Kahneman Quotes

I have always believed that scientific research is another domain where a form of optimism is essential to success: I have yet to meet a successful scientist who lacks the ability to exaggerate the importance of what he or she is doing, and I believe that someone who lacks a delusional sense of significance will wilt in the face of repeated experiences of multiple small failures and rare successes, the fate of most researchers.

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

The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.

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

Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.
These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.

The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.

Familiarity breeds liking.

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.

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

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

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

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. Frequently
mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from
awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their
view of what is currently on the public’s mind. It is no accident that
authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media.
Because public interest is most easily aroused by dramatic events and by
celebrities, media feeding frenzies are common

Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty.

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

The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own.