You're surprised by something, but you don't really know what surprised you; you recognize someone, but you don't really know what cues cause you to recognize that person.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the complexity of human perception and recognition.
In this quote, Daniel Kahneman highlights the often unconscious processes of our minds that influence our reactions and recognitions. It emphasizes that many of our responses stem from implicit cues that we may not be aware of, suggesting that our understanding of the world is often guided by subconscious influences.
In practice
In a psychology lecture discussing cognitive biases, one may reference Kahneman's quote to illustrate the intricacies of human perception.
We think, each of us, that we're much more rational than we are. And we think that we make our decisions because we have good reasons to make them. Even when it's the other way around. We believe in the reasons, because we've already made the decision.
The average investor's return is significantly lower than market indices due primarily to market timing.
Banks are run by executives, and executives protect themselves, and that does not always mean that banks are going to behave rationally.
Laziness is built deep into our nature.
Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.
You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.
If there is only empty space, with no suns nor planets in it, then space loses its substantiality.
Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.
Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It negates manβs fundamental right-the right to life-and establishes the fundamental principle of statism: that a manβs life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time.
I am God's vessel. But my greatest pain in life is that I will never be able to see myself perform live.
WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish. There is my desert.
When the last red man shall have perished from the earth and his memory among the white men shall have become a myth, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless.
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