Daniel Kahneman Quotes

On the decision that feels like it will define your whole life:

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

On being persuaded by something just because you have heard it before:

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

On admitting you might be wrong about something obvious:

We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

On trusting a five year plan in an unpredictable market:

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

On why a painful ending can overshadow the memory of a good relationship:

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

On answering the easy question instead of the hard one you were actually asked:

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.

On knowing when a decision is important enough to slow down for:

The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.

On judging a past choice by what you know now instead of what you knew then:

A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed.

On why the lazy easy answer feels so convincing:

System 1 is impulsive and intuitive; System 2 is capable of reasoning, and it is cautious, but at least for some people it is also lazy.

On making sense of a setback that was mostly bad luck:

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

Second-guessing a decision that felt obviously right at the time:

Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it.

Noticing why walking away from a bad deal feels harder than it should:

Loss aversion refers to the relative strength of two motives: we are driven more strongly to avoid losses than to achieve gains.

Questioning whether you really understand your own motives in a decision:

When you are asked what you are thinking about, you can normally answer. You believe you know what goes on in your mind.

Checking your optimism before committing to a risky plan:

Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be.

Sorting real risk from what the news has made you fear:

Our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed.

Pressure testing a business plan that looks too clean:

Overconfidence: the sense-making machinery of System 1 makes us see the world as more tidy, simple, predictable, and coherent than it really is.