Top 500 Daniel Kahneman Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

354. “You know you have made a theoretical advance when you can no longer reconstruct why you failed for so long to see the obvious. Still, it took us years to explore the implications of thinking about outcomes as gains and losses.”

— Daniel Kahneman

355. “The sense-making machinery of System 1 makes us see the world as more tidy, simple, predictable, and coherent than it really is. The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future.”

— Daniel Kahneman

356. “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

357. “Unlike cognitive load, ego depletion is at least in part a loss of motivation. After exerting self-control in one task, you do not feel like making an effort in another, although you could do it if you really had to. In.”

— Daniel Kahneman

358. “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

359. “This remarkable priming phenomenon – the influencing of an action by the idea – is known as the ideomotor effect.”

— Daniel Kahneman

360. “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

361. “For example, I recently came to doubt my long-held impression that adultery is more common among politicians than among physicians or lawyers.”

— Daniel Kahneman

362. “As you become skilled in a task, its demand for energy diminishes. Studies of the brain have shown that the pattern of activity associated with an action changes as skill increases, with fewer brain regions involved. Talent has similar effects. Highly intelligent individuals need less effort to solve the same problems, as indicated by both pupil size and brain activity.”

— Daniel Kahneman

363. “In most situations, a direct comparison makes people more careful and more logical. But not always. Sometimes intuition beats logic even when the correct answer stares you in the face.”

— Daniel Kahneman

364. “Close your eyes.”

— Daniel Kahneman

365. “We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events. Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight.”

— Daniel Kahneman

366. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

371. “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

372. “The strong bias toward believing that small samples closely resemble the population from which they are drawn is also part of a larger story: we are prone to exaggerate the consistency and coherence of what we see.”

— Daniel Kahneman

373. “I never met Meehl, but he was one of my heroes from the time I read his Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence.”

— Daniel Kahneman

374. “Religious participation also has relatively greater favorable impact on both positive affect and stress reduction than on life evaluation. Surprisingly, however, religion provides no reduction of feelings of depression or worry.”

— Daniel Kahneman

375. “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

376. “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

377. “A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.”

— Daniel Kahneman

378. “This remarkable priming phenomenon – the influencing of an action by the idea – is known as the ideomotor effect. Although you surely were not aware of it, reading this paragraph primed you as well. If you had needed to stand up to get a glass of water, you would have been slightly slower than usual to rise from your chair – unless you happen to dislike the elderly, in which case research suggests that you might have been slightly faster than usual!”

— Daniel Kahneman

379. “She says experience has taught her that criticism is more effective than praise. What she doesn’t understand is that it’s all due to regression to the mean.”

— Daniel Kahneman

380. “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

381. “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

382. “If it is the only one that comes to mind, it may be subjectively undistinguishable from valid judgments that you make with expert confidence. This is why subjective confidence is not a good diagnostic of accuracy: judgments that answer the wrong question can also be made with high confidence.”

— Daniel Kahneman

383. “The halo effect helps keep explanatory narratives simple and coherent by exaggerating the consistency of evaluations: good people do only good things and bad people are all bad.”

— Daniel Kahneman

384. “As you consider the next question, please assume that Steve was selected at random from a representative sample:.”

— Daniel Kahneman

385. “A few lucky gambles can crown a reckless leader with a halo of prescience and boldness.”

— Daniel Kahneman

386. “The lesson is clear: estimates of causes of death are warped by media coverage. The coverage is itself biased toward novelty and poignancy. The media do not just shape what the public is interested.”

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

388. “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

389. “The explanation is a simple availability bias: both spouses remember their own individual efforts and contributions much more clearly than those of the other, and the difference in availability leads to a difference in judged frequency. The bias is not necessarily self-serving: spouses also overestimated their contribution to causing quarrels, although to a smaller extent than their contributions to more desirable outcomes. The.”

— Daniel Kahneman

390. “Meehl discovered that clinicians and other professionals are distressingly weak in what they often see as their unique strength: the ability to integrate information.”

— Daniel Kahneman

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

395. “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

396. “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

397. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

399. “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

400. “Very little repetition is needed for a new experience to feel normal!”

— Daniel Kahneman