Top 500 Daniel Kahneman Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “This remarkable priming phenomenon – the influencing of an action by the idea – is known as the ideomotor effect. Although you surely were not aware of it, reading this paragraph primed you as well. If you had needed to stand up to get a glass of water, you would have been slightly slower than usual to rise from your chair – unless you happen to dislike the elderly, in which case research suggests that you might have been slightly faster than usual!”

— Daniel Kahneman

452. “The primed ideas have some ability to prime other ideas, although more weakly. Like ripples on a pond, activation spreads through a small part of the vast network of associated ideas.”

— Daniel Kahneman

453. “For embezzlement actions that were similar to one another, one man was sentenced to 117 days in prison, while another was sentenced to 20 years.”

— Daniel Kahneman

454. “The feelings associated with different activities suggest that another way to improve experience is to switch time from passive leisure, such as TV watching, to more active forms of leisure, including socializing and exercise.”

— Daniel Kahneman

455. “Leaders who have been lucky are never punished for having taken too much risk. Instead, they are believed to have had the flair and foresight to anticipate success, and the sensible people who doubted them are seen in hindsight as mediocre, timid, and weak.”

— Daniel Kahneman

456. “Recall that the correlation between two measures – in the present case reading age and GPA – is equal to the proportion of shared factors among their determinants.”

— Daniel Kahneman

457. “To be a good diagnostician, a physician needs to acquire a large set of labels for diseases, each of which binds an idea of the illness and its symptoms, possible antecedents and causes, possible developments and consequences, and possible interventions to cure or mitigate the illness. Learning medicine consists in part of learning the language of medicine. A deeper understanding of judgments and choices also requires a richer vocabulary than is available in everyday language.”

— Daniel Kahneman

458. “Even in countries that have been targets of intensive terror campaigns, such as Israel, the weekly number of casualties almost never came close to the number of traffic deaths.”

— Daniel Kahneman

459. “They didn’t want more information that might spoil their story. WYSIATI.”

— Daniel Kahneman

460. “In particular, the accurate intuitions of experts are better explained by the effects of prolonged practice than by heuristics. We can now draw a richer and more balanced picture, in which skill and heuristics are alternative sources of intuitive judgments and choices.”

— Daniel Kahneman

461. “The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved. The psychologist Paul Slovic has proposed an affect heuristic in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world.”

— Daniel Kahneman

462. “The automatic processes of the mental shotgun and intensity matching often make available one or more answers to easy questions that could be mapped onto the target question.”

— Daniel Kahneman

463. “But our focus is on judgments in which variability is undesirable. System noise is a problem of systems, which are organizations, not markets.”

— Daniel Kahneman

464. “Level noise is variability in the average level of judgments by different judges. Pattern noise is variability in judges’ responses to particular cases.”

— Daniel Kahneman

465. “Subjective confidence in a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that this judgment is correct. 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.”

— Daniel Kahneman

466. “If you wish to experience your System 2 working at full tilt, the following exercise will do; it should bring you to the limits of your cognitive abilities within 5 seconds. To start, make up several strings of 4 digits, all different, and write each string on an index card.”

— Daniel Kahneman

467. “Most of the time, we think fast. And most of the time we’re really expert at what we’re doing, and most of the time, what we do is right.”

— Daniel Kahneman

468. “Simple equally weighted formulas based on existing statistics or on common sense are often very good predictors of significant outcomes. In a memorable example, Dawes showed that marital stability is well predicted by a formula: frequency of lovemaking minus frequency of quarrels You don’t want your result to be a negative number.”

— Daniel Kahneman

469. “Somos propensos a sobrestimar lo que entendemos del mundo y a subestimar el papel del azar en los acontecimientos.”

— Daniel Kahneman

470. “The amount of evidence and its quality do not count for much, because poor evidence can make a very good story. For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs. Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous – and it is also essential.”

— Daniel Kahneman

471. “As Nassim Taleb pointed out in The Black Swan, our tendency to construct and believe coherent narratives of the past makes it difficult for us to accept the limits of our forecasting ability. Everything makes sense in hindsight, a fact that financial pundits exploit every evening as they offer convincing accounts of the day’s events.”

— Daniel Kahneman

472. “We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly,” Tetlock writes. “In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals – distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on – are any better than journalists or attentive readers of The New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations.” The.”

— Daniel Kahneman

473. “In essence, the optimistic style involves taking credit for successes but little blame for failures.”

— Daniel Kahneman

474. “Stories of how businesses rise and fall strike a chord with readers by offering what the human mind needs: a simple message of triumph and failure that identifies clear causes and ignores the determinative power of luck and the inevitability of regression. These stories induce and maintain an illusion of understanding, imparting lessons of little enduring value to readers who are all too eager to believe them.”

— Daniel Kahneman

475. “It’s clear that policymakers and economists are going to be interested in the measurement of well-being primarily as it correlates with health; they also want to know whether researchers can validate subjective responses with physiological indices.”

— Daniel Kahneman

476. “Loss aversion refers to the relative strength of two motives: we are driven more strongly to avoid losses than to achieve gains. A reference point is sometimes the status quo, but it can also be a goal in the future: not achieving a goal is a loss, exceeding the goal is a gain. As we might expect from negativity dominance, the two motives are not equally powerful. The aversion to the failure of not reaching the goal is much stronger than the desire to exceed it.”

— Daniel Kahneman

477. “System 1 runs automatically and System 2 is normally in a comfortable low-effort mode, in which only a fraction of its capacity is engaged. System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions. When.”

— Daniel Kahneman

478. “SPEAKING OF PRIMING “The sight of all these people in uniforms does not prime creativity.” “The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.” “They were primed to find flaws, and this is exactly what they found.” “His System 1 constructed a story, and his System 2 believed it. It happens to all of us.” “I made myself smile and I’m actually feeling better!”

— Daniel Kahneman

479. “Uri Simonsohn showed that college admissions officers pay more attention to the academic attributes of candidates on cloudier days and are more sensitive to nonacademic attributes on sunnier days. The title of the article in which he reported these findings is memorable enough: “Clouds Make Nerds Look Good.”

— Daniel Kahneman

480. “Expertise is not a single skill; it is a collection of skills, and the same professional may be highly expert in some of the tasks in her domain while remaining a novice in others.”

— Daniel Kahneman

481. “When forecasting the outcomes of risky projects, executives too easily fall victim to the planning fallacy. In its grip, they make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than on a rational weighting of gains, losses, and probabilities. They overestimate benefits and underestimate costs. They spin scenarios of success while overlooking the potential for mistakes and miscalculations.”

— Daniel Kahneman

482. “Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce.”

— Daniel Kahneman

483. “When you take the long view of many similar decisions, you can see that paying a premium to avoid a small risk of a large loss is costly. A similar analysis applies to each of the cells of the fourfold pattern: systematic deviations from expected value are costly in the long run – and this rule applies to both risk aversion and risk seeing. Consistent overweighting of improbable outcomes – a feature of intuitive decision making – eventually leads to inferior outcomes.”

— Daniel Kahneman

484. “An inconsistency is built into the design of our mind.”

— Daniel Kahneman

485. “It is hard to think of the history of the twentieth century, including its large social movements, without bringing in the role of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Zedong. But there was a moment in time, just before an egg was fertilized, when there was a fifty-fifty chance that the embryo that became Hitler could have been a female. Compounding.”

— Daniel Kahneman

486. “System 1 is not prone to doubt. It suppresses ambiguity and spontaneously constructs stories that are as coherent as possible. Unless the message is immediately negated, the associations that it evokes will spread as if the message were true.”

— Daniel Kahneman

487. “The laziness of System 2 is an important fact of life, and the observation that representativeness can block the application of an obvious logical rule is also of some interest.”

— Daniel Kahneman

488. “Simple, common gestures can also unconsciously influence our thoughts and feelings.”

— Daniel Kahneman

489. “There are distinctive patterns in the errors people make. Systematic errors are known as biases, and they recur predictably in particular circumstances... The availability of a diagnostic label for this bias – the halo effect – makes it easier to anticipate, recognize, and understand.”

— Daniel Kahneman

490. “Good stories provide a simple and coherent account of people’s actions and intentions. You are always ready to interpret behavior as a manifestation of general propensities and personality traits – causes that you can readily match to effects. The halo effect discussed earlier contributes to coherence, because it inclines us to match our view of all the qualities of a person to our judgment of one attribute that is particularly significant.”

— Daniel Kahneman

491. “I describe mental life by the metaphor of two agents, called System 1 and System 2, which respectively produce fast and slow thinking. I speak of the features of intuitive and deliberate thought as if they were traits and dispositions of two characters in your mind. In the picture that emerges from recent research, the intuitive System 1 is more influential than your experience tells you, and it is the secret author of many of the choices and judgments you make.”

— Daniel Kahneman

492. “Judgment is not a synonym for thinking, and making accurate judgments is not a synonym for having good judgment.”

— Daniel Kahneman

493. “The mystery is how a conception of the utility of outcomes 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:.”

— Daniel Kahneman

494. “Social scientists in the 1970s broadly accepted two ideas about human nature. First, people are generally rational, and their thinking is normally sound. Second, emotions such as fear, affection, and hatred explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality. Our article challenged both assumptions without discussing them directly.”

— Daniel Kahneman

495. “As we navigate our lives, we normally allow ourselves to be guided by impressions and feelings, and the confidence we have in our intuitive beliefs and preferences is usually justified. But not always. We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are.”

— Daniel Kahneman

496. “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.”

— Daniel Kahneman

497. “During the first five years we spent looking at how people make decisions, we established a dozen facts about choices between risky options. Several of these facts were in flat contradiction to expected utility theory. Some had been observed before, a few were new. Then we constructed a theory that modified expected utility theory just enough to explain our collection of observations. That was prospect theory.”

— Daniel Kahneman

498. “Leaders of large businesses sometimes make huge bets in expensive mergers and acquisitions, acting on the mistaken belief that they can manage the assets of another company better than its current owners do.”

— Daniel Kahneman

499. “The availability heuristic, like other heuristics of judgment, substitutes one question for another: you wish to estimate the size of a category or the frequency of an event, but you report an impression of the ease with which instances come to mind. Substitution of questions inevitably produces systematic errors.”

— Daniel Kahneman

500. “Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world.”

— Daniel Kahneman