Top 500 Daniel Kahneman Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “People don’t choose between things, they choose between descriptions of things.”

— Daniel Kahneman

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “After a crisis we tell ourselves we understand why it happened and maintain the illusion that the world is understandable. In fact, we should accept the world is incomprehensible much of the time.”

— Daniel Kahneman

207. “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

208. “We were sufficiently similar to understand each other easily, and sufficiently different to surprise each other. We.”

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

210. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

212. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

214. “The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future. These illusions are comforting. They reduce the anxiety that we would experience if we allowed ourselves to fully acknowledge the uncertainties of existence.”

— Daniel Kahneman

215. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

218. “Groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.”

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

220. “We know that people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers.”

— Daniel Kahneman

221. “You should expect little or nothing from Wall Street stock pickers who hope to be more accurate than the market in predicting the future of prices. And you should not expect much from pundits making long-term forecasts.”

— Daniel Kahneman

222. “System 1 is gullible and biased to believe, System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy.”

— Daniel Kahneman

223. “Adaptation seems to be, to a substantial extent, a process of reallocating your attention.”

— Daniel Kahneman

224. “The classic experiment I describe next shows that people will not draw from base-rate information an inference that conflicts with other beliefs. It also supports the uncomfortable conclusion that teaching psychology is mostly a waste of time.”

— Daniel Kahneman

225. “The pleasure we found in working together made us exceptionally patient; it is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored.”

— Daniel Kahneman

226. “As in many other games, moving first is an advantage in single-issue negotiations – for example, when price is the only issue to be settled between a buyer and a seller. As you may have experienced when negotiating for the first time in a bazaar, the initial anchor has a powerful effect. My.”

— Daniel Kahneman

227. “The emotional tail wags the rational dog.” The affect heuristic simplifies our lives by creating a world that is much tidier than reality.”

— Daniel Kahneman

228. “It’s very easy for trusted companies to mislead naive customers, and life insurance companies are trusted.”

— Daniel Kahneman

229. “We must be inclined to believe it because it has been repeated so often, but let’s think it through again.”

— Daniel Kahneman

230. “Many ideas happen to us. We have intuition, we have feeling, we have emotion, all of that happens, we don’t decide to do it. We don’t control it.”

— Daniel Kahneman

231. “Remember this rule: intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.”

— Daniel Kahneman

232. “The experiments showed further that the mean filial regression towards mediocrity was directly proportional to the parental deviation from it.”

— Daniel Kahneman

233. “The remembering self’s neglect of duration, its exaggerated emphasis on peaks and ends, and its susceptibility to hindsight combine to yield distorted reflections of our actual experience.”

— Daniel Kahneman

234. “Judgment can therefore be described as measurement in which the instrument is a human mind.”

— Daniel Kahneman

235. “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

236. “Prospect theory turned out to be the most significant work we ever did, and our article is among the most often cited in the social sciences.”

— Daniel Kahneman

237. “Alternative descriptions of the same reality evoke different emotions and different associations.”

— Daniel Kahneman

238. “Our predilection for causal thinking exposes us to serious mistakes in evaluating the randomness of truly random events.”

— Daniel Kahneman

239. “People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory – and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness.”

— Daniel Kahneman

240. “The neglect of duration combined with the peak-end rule causes a bias that favors a short period of intense joy over a long period of moderate happiness.”

— Daniel Kahneman

241. “Policy makers, like most people, normally feel that they already know all the psychology and all the sociology they are likely to need for their decisions. I don’t think they are right, but that’s the way it is.”

— Daniel Kahneman

242. “Widespread fears, even if they are unreasonable, should not be ignored by policy makers. Rational or not, fear is painful and debilitating, and policy makers must endeavor to protect the public from fear, not only from real dangers.”

— Daniel Kahneman

243. “You build the best possible story from the information available to you, and if it is a good story, you believe it. Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”

— Daniel Kahneman

244. “The effort invested in ‘getting it right’ should be commensurate with the importance of the decision.”

— Daniel Kahneman

245. “A large portion of the weekend effects is explained by differences in the amount of time spent with friends or family between weekends and weekdays.”

— Daniel Kahneman

246. “This should not come as a surprise: overly optimistic forecasts of the outcome of projects are found everywhere. Amos and I coined the term planning fallacy to describe plans and forecasts that are unrealistically close to best-case scenarios could be improved by consulting the statistics of similar cases Examples of the planning fallacy abound in the experiences of individuals, governments, and businesses.”

— Daniel Kahneman

247. “Errors in the initial budget are not always innocent. The authors of unrealistic plans are often driven by the desire to get the plan approved – whether by their superiors or by a client – supported by the knowledge that projects are rarely abandoned unfinished merely because of overruns in costs or completion times. In.”

— Daniel Kahneman

248. “The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future. These illusions are comforting. They reduce the anxiety that we would experience if we allowed ourselves to fully acknowledge the uncertainties of existence. We all have a need for the reassuring message that actions have appropriate consequences, and that success will reward wisdom and courage. Many business books are tailor-made to satisfy this need.”

— Daniel Kahneman

249. “One study found that people who just thought about watching their favorite movie actually raised their endorphin levels by 27 percent.”

— Daniel Kahneman

250. “Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs. A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact. But.”

— Daniel Kahneman