Top 500 Daniel Kahneman Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “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

452. “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

453. “The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of the industry. Facts that challenge such basic assumptions – and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem – are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them.”

— Daniel Kahneman

454. “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

455. “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

456. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

458. “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

459. “The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. 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

460. “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

461. “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

462. “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

463. “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

464. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

466. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

468. “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

469. “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

470. “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

471. “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

472. “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

473. “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

474. “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

475. “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

476. “The ideal of logical consistency, as this example shows, is not achievable by our limited mind. Because we are susceptible to WYSIATI and averse to mental effort, we tend to make decisions as problems arise, even when we are specifically instructed to consider them jointly. We have neither the inclination nor the mental resources to enforce consistency on our preferences, and our preferences are not magically set to be coherent, as they are in the rational-agent model.”

— Daniel Kahneman

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

480. “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

481. “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

482. “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

483. “Amos and I called our first joint article “Belief in the Law of Small Numbers.” We explained, tongue-in-cheek, that “intuitions about random sampling appear to satisfy the law of small numbers, which asserts that the law of large numbers applies to small numbers as well.” We also included a strongly worded recommendation that researchers regard their “statistical intuitions with proper suspicion and replace impression formation by computation whenever possible.”

— Daniel Kahneman

484. “There is good reason to believe that general intelligence is likely to be associated with better judgment. Intelligence is correlated with good performance in virtually all domains. All other things being equal, it is associated not only with higher academic achievement but also with higher job performance.”

— Daniel Kahneman

485. “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

486. “The hot hand is a massive and widespread cognitive illusion.”

— Daniel Kahneman

487. “Experiments have shown that six-month-old infants see the sequence of events as a cause-effect scenario, and they indicate surprise when the sequence is altered. We are evidently ready from birth to have impressions of causality, which do not depend on reasoning about patterns of causation.”

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

489. “When the top prize is very large, ticket buyers appear indifferent to the fact that their chance of winning is minuscule. A lottery ticket is the ultimate example of the possibility effect. Without a ticket you cannot win, with a ticket you have a chance, and whether the chance is tiny or merely small matters little. Of course, what people acquire with a ticket is more than a chance to win; it is the right to dream pleasantly of winning.”

— Daniel Kahneman

490. “Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is, the automatic System 1 is the hero of the book. I describe System 1 as effortlessly originating impressions and feelings that are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2. The.”

— Daniel Kahneman

491. “Mutual funds are run by highly experienced and hardworking professionals who buy and sell stocks to achieve the best possible results for their clients. Nevertheless, the evidence from more than fifty years of research is conclusive: for a large majority of fund managers, the selection of stocks is more like rolling dice than like playing poker. Typically at least two out of every three mutual funds underperform the overall market in any given year.”

— Daniel Kahneman

492. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

494. “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

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. “The errors of a theory are rarely found in what it asserts explicitly; they hide in what it ignores or tacitly assumes.”

— Daniel Kahneman

497. “The initial enthusiasm for the idea in the Ministry of Education had waned by the time the text was delivered and it was never used.”

— Daniel Kahneman

498. “The stories understandably frightened the public, and those fears encouraged more media coverage, the basic mechanism of an availability cascade.”

— Daniel Kahneman

499. “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

500. “The thought of accepting the large sure loss is too painful, and the hope of complete relief too enticing, to make the sensible decision that it is time to cut one’s losses.”

— Daniel Kahneman