Top 500 Daniel Kahneman Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “An individual has been described by a neighbor as follows: “Steve is very shy and withdrawn, invariably helpful but with little interest in people or in the world of reality. A meek and tidy soul, he has a need for order and structure, and a passion for detail.” Is Steve more likely to be a librarian or a farmer?”

— Daniel Kahneman

352. “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

353. “A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed.”

— Daniel Kahneman

354. “The wide confidence interval is a confession of ignorance, which is not socially acceptable for someone who is paid to be knowledgeable in financial matters. Even if they knew how little they know, the executives would be penalized for admitting it.”

— Daniel Kahneman

355. “Regression to the mean was discovered and named late in the nineteenth century by Sir Francis Galton, a half cousin of Charles Darwin and a renowned polymath.”

— Daniel Kahneman

356. “I had stumbled onto a significant fact of the human condition: the feedback to which life exposes us is perverse. Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty.”

— Daniel Kahneman

357. “A correlation of .30 implies that you would find the stronger CEO leading the stronger firm in about 60% of the pairs – an improvement of a mere 10 percentage points over random guessing, hardly grist for the hero worship of CEOs we so often witness.”

— Daniel Kahneman

358. “It was always assumed I would be a professor. I grew up thinking it.”

— Daniel Kahneman

359. “I was telling them about an important principle of skill training: rewards for improved performance work better than punishment of mistakes.”

— Daniel Kahneman

360. “In the absence of a competing intuition, logic prevails.”

— Daniel Kahneman

361. “In the unlikely event of this book being made into a film, System 2 would be a supporting character who believes herself to be the hero.”

— Daniel Kahneman

362. “Indeed, the mere exposure effect is actually stronger for stimuli that the individual never consciously sees.”

— Daniel Kahneman

363. “The agent of economic theory is rational, selfish, and his tastes do not change.”

— Daniel Kahneman

364. “Sentencing a felon is not a prediction. It is an evaluative judgment that seeks to match the sentence to the severity of the crime.”

— Daniel Kahneman

365. “I found in the collaboration was that Amos frequently saw the point of my vague ideas much more clearly than I did.”

— Daniel Kahneman

366. “Charge the loss to your mental account of ‘general revenue’ – you will feel better!”

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

368. “The suppression of doubt contributes to overconfidence in a group where only supporters of the decision have a voice.”

— Daniel Kahneman

369. “To the untrained eye,” Feller remarks, “randomness appears as regularity or tendency to cluster.”

— Daniel Kahneman

370. “Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it.”

— Daniel Kahneman

371. “In terms of noise, psychiatry is an extreme case.”

— Daniel Kahneman

372. “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

373. “They keep making the same mistake: predicting rare events from weak evidence. When the evidence is weak, one should stick with the base rates.”

— Daniel Kahneman

374. “In terms of its consequences for decisions, the optimistic bias may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases. Because optimistic bias can be both a blessing and a risk, you should be both happy and wary if you are temperamentally optimistic.”

— Daniel Kahneman

375. “Nick Epley and Tom Gilovich found evidence that adjustment is a deliberate attempt to find reasons to move away from the anchor:.”

— Daniel Kahneman

376. “For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs. Considering.”

— Daniel Kahneman

377. “Cognitive ease is both a cause and a consequence of a pleasant feeling.”

— Daniel Kahneman

378. “Organizations that take the word of overconfident experts can expect costly consequences.”

— Daniel Kahneman

379. “If an event that was assigned a probability of 90% fails to happen, the judgment of probability was not necessarily a bad one. After all, outcomes that are just 10% likely to happen end up happening 10% of the time. The Gambardi exercise is an example of a nonverifiable predictive judgment, for two separate reasons: Gambardi is fictitious and the answer is probabilistic.”

— Daniel Kahneman

380. “Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to Disagree.”

— Daniel Kahneman

381. “From the perspective of noise reduction, a singular decision is a recurrent decision that happens only once. Whether you make a decision only once or a hundred times, your goal should be to make it in a way that reduces both bias and noise. And practices that reduce error should be just as effective in your one-of-a-kind decisions as in your repeated ones.”

— Daniel Kahneman

382. “The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen.”

— Daniel Kahneman

383. “Two Systems This book has described the workings of the mind as an uneasy interaction between two fictitious characters: the automatic System 1 and the effortful System 2. You are now quite familiar with the personalities of the two systems and able to anticipate how they might respond in different situations.”

— Daniel Kahneman

384. “A budget reserve is to contractors as red meat is to lions, and they will devour it.”

— Daniel Kahneman

385. “The normal state of your mind is that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way. You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel that an enterprise is bound to succeed without analyzing.”

— Daniel Kahneman

386. “In such cases, the greatest responsibility for avoiding the planning fallacy lies with the decision makers who approve the plan. If they do not recognize the need for an outside view, they commit a planning fallacy.”

— Daniel Kahneman

387. “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

388. “The observation that “90% of drivers believe they are better than average” is a well-established psychological finding that has become part of the culture, and it often comes up as a prime example of a more general above-average effect.”

— Daniel Kahneman

389. “The sequence in which we observe characteristics of a person is often determined by chance. Sequence matters, however, because the halo effect increases the weight of first impressions, sometimes to the point that subsequent information is mostly wasted.”

— Daniel Kahneman

390. “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

391. “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

392. “This example highlights two aspects of choice that the standard model of indifference curves does not predict. First, tastes are not fixed; they vary with the reference point. Second, the disadvantages of a change loom larger than its advantages, inducing a bias that favors the status quo.”

— Daniel Kahneman

393. “Most of us, most of the time, live with the unquestioned belief that the world looks as it does because that’s the way it is.”

— Daniel Kahneman

394. “Ultimately, a richer language is essential to the skill of constructive criticism.”

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

396. “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.”

— Daniel Kahneman

397. “Noise is mostly a by-product of our uniqueness, of our “judgment personality.”

— Daniel Kahneman

398. “The important conclusion from this research is that an algorithm that is constructed on the back of an envelope is often good enough to compete with an optimally weighted formula, and certainly good enough to outdo expert judgment.”

— Daniel Kahneman

399. “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

400. “Consistent overweighting of improbable outcomes – a feature of intuitive decision making – eventually leads to inferior outcomes.”

— Daniel Kahneman