Explore Quotes by Daniel Kahneman

Survival prospects are poor for an animal that is not suspicious of novelty.

We don’t choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. Even when we think about the future, we don’t think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories.

Groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.

We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are.

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 cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations.

When action is needed, optimism, even of the mildly delusional variety, may be a good thing.

Individual investors predictably flock to stocks in companies that are in the news.

Many people will admit that they made a mistake [putting money in dot-coms or telecoms at their peak] But that doesn’t mean that they’ve changed their mind about anything in particular. It doesn’t mean that they are now able to avoid that mistake.

A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world (or any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.

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

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.

The most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast.

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

The concept of loss aversion is certainly the most significant contribution of psychology to behavioral economics.

We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.

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

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

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 idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.

This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.