Top 500 Daniel Kahneman Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “Henry Faulds, a Scottish physician, published the first scientific paper suggesting the use of fingerprints as an identification technique.”

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

353. “This is the essence of the focusing illusion, which can be described in a single sentence: Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.”

— Daniel Kahneman

354. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

356. “However, the ability to control attention is not simply a measure of intelligence; measures of efficiency in the control of attention predict performance of air traffic controllers and of Israeli Air Force pilots beyond the effects of intelligence.”

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

363. “The main benefit of optimism is resilience in the face of setbacks.”

— Daniel Kahneman

364. “An individual has been described by a neighbor as follows: “Steve is very shy and withdrawn, invariably helpful but with little interest in people or in the world of reality.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

365. “As Nassim Taleb has argued, inadequate appreciation of the uncertainty of the environment inevitably leads economic agents to take risks they should avoid. However, optimism is highly valued, socially and in the market; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers.”

— Daniel Kahneman

366. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

374. “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

375. “Any aspect of life to which attention is directed will loom large in a global evaluation. This is the essence of the focusing illusion, which can be described in a single sentence: Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.”

— Daniel Kahneman

376. “Two different mechanisms produce anchoring effects – one for each system. There is a form of anchoring that occurs in a deliberate process of adjustment, an operation of System 2. And there is anchoring that occurs by a priming effect, an automatic manifestation of System 1.”

— Daniel Kahneman

377. “Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck. We are therefore prone to an illusion of control.”

— Daniel Kahneman

378. “The premortem has two main advantages: it overcomes the groupthink that affects many teams once a decision appears to have been made, and it unleashes the imagination of knowledgeable individuals in a much-needed direction.”

— Daniel Kahneman

379. “In a paper titled “Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth,” they showed that, on average, the most active traders had the poorest results, while the investors who traded the least earned the highest returns.”

— Daniel Kahneman

380. “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

381. “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

382. “Many of us spontaneously anticipate how friends and colleagues will evaluate our choices; the quality and content of these anticipated judgments therefore matters. The expectation of intelligent gossip is a powerful motive for serious self-criticism.”

— Daniel Kahneman

383. “For the insurance company, the illusion of agreement was shattered only by the noise audit. How had the leaders of the company remained unaware of their noise problem? There are several possible answers here, but one that seems to play a large role in many settings is simply the discomfort of disagreement.”

— Daniel Kahneman

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “Familiarity breeds liking. This is a mere exposure effect.”

— Daniel Kahneman

388. “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

389. “System noise is inconsistency, and inconsistency damages the credibility of the system.”

— Daniel Kahneman

390. “The psychologist Paul Slovic has proposed an affect heuristic in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world.”

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

392. “Plans are best-case scenarios. Let’s avoid anchoring on plans when we forecast actual outcomes. Thinking about ways the plan could go wrong is one way to do it.”

— Daniel Kahneman

393. “Close your eyes.”

— Daniel Kahneman

394. “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

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

— 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. “Statistical results with a causal interpretation have a stronger effect on our thinking than non-causal information. But even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience.”

— Daniel Kahneman

398. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman