Top 500 Daniel Kahneman Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Systematic errors are known as biases, and they recur predictably in particular circumstances.”

— Daniel Kahneman

152. “Recognize the signs that you are in a cognitive minefield, slow down, and ask for reinforcement of system 2.”

— Daniel Kahneman

153. “The ultimate test of an explanation is whether it would have made the event predictable in advance.”

— Daniel Kahneman

154. “Expert intuition strikes us as magical, but it is not. Indeed, each of us performs feats of intuitive expertise many times each day.”

— Daniel Kahneman

155. “The most coherent stories are not necessarily the most probable, but they are plausible, and the notions of coherence, plausibility, and probability are easily confused by the unwary.”

— Daniel Kahneman

156. “In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.”

— Daniel Kahneman

157. “The associative machine is set to suppress doubt and to evoke ideas and information that are compatible with the currently dominant story. A mind that follows WYSIATI will achieve high confidence much too easily by ignoring what it does not know. It is therefore not surprising that many of us are prone to have high confidence in unfounded intuitions.”

— Daniel Kahneman

158. “But of course the main reason that decision theorists study simple gambles is that this is what other decision theorists do. The field had a theory, expected utility theory, which was the foundation of the rational-agent model and is to this day the most important theory in the social sciences.”

— Daniel Kahneman

159. “The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.”

— Daniel Kahneman

160. “The Robust Beauty of Improper Linear Models in Decision Making.”

— Daniel Kahneman

161. “I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws.”

— Daniel Kahneman

162. “Her favorite position is beside herself, and her favorite sport is jumping to conclusions.”

— Daniel Kahneman

163. “Every author, I suppose, has in mind a setting in which readers of his or her work could benefit from having read it.”

— Daniel Kahneman

164. “It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.”

— Daniel Kahneman

165. “Those who avoid the sin of intellectual sloth could be called “engaged.” They are more alert, more intellectually active, less willing to be satisfied with superficially attractive answers, more skeptical about their intuitions.”

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

167. “Knowing the importance of luck, you should be particularly suspicious when highly consistent patterns emerge from the comparison of successful and less successful firms. In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages.”

— Daniel Kahneman

168. “The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.”

— Daniel Kahneman

169. “Because adherence to standard operating procedures is difficult to second-guess, decision makers who expect to have their decisions scrutinized with hindsight are driven to bureaucratic solutions – and to an extreme reluctance to take risks.”

— Daniel Kahneman

170. “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

171. “An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality – but it is not what people and organizations want. Extreme uncertainty is paralyzing under dangerous circumstances, and the admission that one is merely guessing is especially unacceptable when the stakes are high. Acting on pretended knowledge is often the preferred solution.”

— Daniel Kahneman

172. “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

173. “All roses are flowers. Some flowers fade quickly. Therefore some roses fade quickly. A large majority of college students endorse this syllogism as valid. In fact the argument is flawed, because it is possible that there are no roses among the flowers that fade quickly.”

— Daniel Kahneman

174. “The expectation of intelligent gossip is a powerful motive for serious self-criticism, more powerful than New Year resolutions to improve one’s decision making at work and at home.”

— Daniel Kahneman

175. “You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.”

— Daniel Kahneman

176. “If there was one ubiquitous recommendation about marriage it was this: “Don’t go to bed angry.””

— Daniel Kahneman

177. “People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations.”

— Daniel Kahneman

178. “Loss aversion is a powerful conservative force that favors minimal changes from the status quo.”

— Daniel Kahneman

179. “Because it is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label the mistakes of others than to recognize our own. Questioning what we believe and want is difficult at the.”

— Daniel Kahneman

180. “We are very influenced by completely automatic things that we have no control over, and we don’t know we’re doing it.”

— Daniel Kahneman

181. “When action is needed, optimism, even of the mildly delusional variety, may be a good thing.”

— Daniel Kahneman

182. “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

183. “It is wrong to blame anyone for failing to forecast accurately in an unpredictable world. However, it seems fair to blame professionals for believing they can succeed in an impossible task.”

— Daniel Kahneman

184. “System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and the quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions.”

— Daniel Kahneman

185. “How many animals of each kind did Moses take into the ark?”

— Daniel Kahneman

186. “Experienced radiologists who evaluate chest X-rays as “normal” or “abnormal” contradict themselves 20% of the time when they see the same picture on separate occasions.”

— Daniel Kahneman

187. “The often-used phrase “pay attention” is apt: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail.”

— Daniel Kahneman

188. “We all have our genre. Some people live a tragedy, others inhabit a never-ending religious drama, some approach life as if it were an action film, and not a few act as if in a comedy. But in the end, they are all just stories.”

— Daniel Kahneman

189. “Most of the moments of our life – and I calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long; that means that, you know, in a life there are about 600 million of them; in a month, there are about 600,000 – most of them don’t leave a trace.”

— Daniel Kahneman

190. “People don’t choose between things, they choose between descriptions of things.”

— Daniel Kahneman

191. “The experiencing self lives its life continuously. It has moments of experience, one after the other.”

— Daniel Kahneman

192. “When everybody in a group is susceptible to similar biases, groups are inferior to individuals, because groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.”

— Daniel Kahneman

193. “Intuitive predictions need to be corrected because they are not regressive and therefore are biased.”

— Daniel Kahneman

194. “It was beyond imagining that bad font influences judgments of truth and improves cognitive performance, or that an emotional response to the cognitive ease of a triad of words mediates impressions of coherence. Psychology has come a long way.”

— Daniel Kahneman

195. “Changing one’s mind about human nature is hard work, and changing one’s mind for the worse about oneself is even harder. Nisbett.”

— Daniel Kahneman

196. “Psychologists really aim to be scientists, white-coat stuff, with elaborate statistics, running experiments.”

— Daniel Kahneman

197. “The average investor’s return is significantly lower than market indices due primarily to market timing.”

— Daniel Kahneman

198. “Not all illusions are visual. There are illusions of thought, which we call cognitive illusions.”

— Daniel Kahneman

199. “The effects of high optimism on decision making are, at best, a mixed blessing, but the contribution of optimism to good implementation is certainly positive. The main benefit of optimism is resilience in the face of setbacks.”

— Daniel Kahneman

200. “When the driver of a car is overtaking a truck on a narrow road, for example, adult passengers quite sensibly stop talking.”

— Daniel Kahneman