Top 500 Daniel Kahneman Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “I quoted Herbert Simon’s definition of intuition in the introduction, but it will make more sense when I repeat it now: “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.”

— Daniel Kahneman

452. “His ego was depleted after a long day of meetings. So he just turned to standard operating procedures instead of thinking through the problem.”

— Daniel Kahneman

453. “The comparison of firms that have been more or less successful is to a significant extent a comparison between firms that have been more or less lucky.”

— Daniel Kahneman

454. “Consumers have a hunger for a clear message about the determinants of success and failure in business, and they need stories that offer a sense of understanding, however illusory.”

— Daniel Kahneman

455. “We soon knew that we had overcome a serious case of theory-induced blindness, because the idea we had rejected now seemed not only false but absurd.”

— Daniel Kahneman

456. “Amos and I enjoyed the extraordinary good fortune of a shared mind that was superior to our individual minds and of a relationship that made our work fun as well as productive.”

— Daniel Kahneman

457. “In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages.”

— Daniel Kahneman

458. “The widespread misunderstanding of randomness sometimes has significant consequences.”

— Daniel Kahneman

459. “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

460. “Failures of detection followed the same inverted-V pattern as the dilating pupil. The similarity was reassuring: the pupil was a good measure of the physical arousal that accompanies mental effort, and we could go ahead and use it to understand how the mind works.”

— Daniel Kahneman

461. “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

462. “An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality.”

— Daniel Kahneman

463. “In the standard rational model of economics, people take risks because the odds are favorable – they accept some probability of a costly failure because the probability of success is sufficient.”

— Daniel Kahneman

464. “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

465. “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

466. “Reciprocal priming effects tend to produce a coherent reaction: if you were primed to think of old age, you would tend to act old, and acting old would reinforce the thought of old age.”

— Daniel Kahneman

467. “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

468. “What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.”

— Daniel Kahneman

469. “Statistics produce many observations that appear to beg for causal explanations but do not lend themselves to such explanations.”

— Daniel Kahneman

470. “Overconfidence: As the WYSIATI rule implies, neither the quantity nor the quality of the evidence counts for much in subjective confidence.”

— Daniel Kahneman

471. “Michotte had a different idea: he argued that we see causality, just as directly as we see color.”

— Daniel Kahneman

472. “When you feel strained, you are more likely to be vigilant and suspicious, invest more effort in what you are doing, feel less comfortable, and make fewer errors, but you also are less intuitive and less creative than usual.”

— Daniel Kahneman

473. “But your subjective experience consists largely of the story that your System 2 tells itself about what is going on. Priming phenomena arise in System 1, and you have no conscious access to them.”

— Daniel Kahneman

474. “Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable, and if the jump saves much time and effort. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high, and there is no time to collect more information. These are the circumstances in which intuitive errors are probable, which may be prevented by a deliberate intervention of System 2.”

— Daniel Kahneman

475. “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. If.”

— Daniel Kahneman

476. “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

477. “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

478. “The idea of old age had not come to their conscious awareness, but their actions had changed nevertheless. This remarkable priming phenomenon – the influencing of an action by the idea – is known as the ideomotor effect.”

— Daniel Kahneman

479. “It might seem odd to emphasize this point, since we noted in the previous chapter that aggregating the judgments of multiple individuals reduces noise. But because of group dynamics, groups can add noise, too. There are “wise crowds,” whose mean judgment is close to the correct answer, but there are also crowds that follow tyrants, that fuel market bubbles, that believe in magic, or that are under the sway of a shared illusion.”

— Daniel Kahneman

480. “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

481. “Because of the halo effect, we get the causal relationship backward: we are prone to believe that the firm fails because its CEO is rigid, when the truth is that the CEO appears to be rigid because the firm is failing. This is how illusions of understanding are born.”

— Daniel Kahneman

482. “Most organizations prefer consensus and harmony over dissent and conflict. The procedures in place often seem expressly designed to minimize the frequency of exposure to actual disagreements and, when such disagreements happen, to explain them away.”

— Daniel Kahneman

483. “Matters of judgment, including professional judgments, occupy a space between questions of fact or computation on the one hand and matters of taste or opinion on the other. They are defined by the expectation of bounded disagreement.”

— Daniel Kahneman

484. “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

485. “The essential feature of this internal signal is that the sense of coherence is part of the experience of judgment. It is not contingent on a real outcome. As a result, the internal signal is just as available for nonverifiable judgments as it is for real, verifiable ones. This explains why making a judgment about a fictitious character like Gambardi feels very much the same as does making a judgment about the real world.”

— Daniel Kahneman

486. “But those with the most knowledge are often less reliable. The reason is that the person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident. “We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns.”

— Daniel Kahneman

487. “The aphorisms were judged more insightful when they rhymed than when they did not. Finally, if you quote a source, choose one with a name that is easy to pronounce.”

— Daniel Kahneman

488. “Hindsight is especially unkind to decision makers who act as agents for others – physicians, financial advisers, third-base coaches, CEOs, social workers, diplomats, politicians. We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appear obvious only after the fact. There is a clear outcome bias. When.”

— Daniel Kahneman

489. “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

490. “The essence of the focusing illusion is WYSIATI, giving too much weight to the climate, too little to all the other determinants of well-being.”

— Daniel Kahneman

491. “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

492. “Henry Faulds, a Scottish physician, published the first scientific paper suggesting the use of fingerprints as an identification technique.”

— Daniel Kahneman

493. “When you say ‘quite clever,’ which reference group do you have in mind?”

— Daniel Kahneman

494. “The explanation is a simple availability bias: both spouses remember their own individual efforts and contributions much more clearly than those of the other, and the difference in availability leads to a difference in judged frequency. The.”

— Daniel Kahneman

495. “Scientists in diverse disciplines were quick to adopt the least squares method. Over two centuries later, it remains the standard way to evaluate errors wherever achieving accuracy is the goal.”

— Daniel Kahneman

496. “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

497. “Bad weather is associated with improved memory; judicial sentences tend to be more severe when it is hot outside; and stock market performance is affected by sunshine.”

— Daniel Kahneman

498. “In the absence of valid cues, intuitive “hits” are due either to luck or to lies. If you find this conclusion surprising, you still have a lingering belief that intuition is magic. Remember this rule: intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.”

— Daniel Kahneman

499. “The combination of probability neglect with the social mechanisms of availability cascades inevitably leads to gross exaggeration of minor threats, sometimes with important consequences.”

— Daniel Kahneman

500. “System 1 has more influence on behavior when System 2 is busy, and it has a sweet tooth. People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations. Memorizing and repeating digits loosens the hold of System 2 on behavior, but of course cognitive load is not the only cause of weakened self-control.”

— Daniel Kahneman