Top 500 Daniel Kahneman Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “The mind that makes up narratives about the past is a sense-making organ. When an unpredicted event occurs, we immediately adjust our view of the world to accommodate the surprise.”

— Daniel Kahneman

404. “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

405. “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

406. “Restoring the level of available sugar in the brain had prevented the deterioration of performance.”

— Daniel Kahneman

407. “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

408. “The most important development in the field since Meehl’s original work is Robyn Dawes’s famous article “The Robust Beauty of Improper Linear Models in Decision Making.”

— Daniel Kahneman

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

413. “Michotte had a different idea: he argued that we see causality, just as directly as we see color.”

— Daniel Kahneman

414. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

416. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

418. “When you feel strained, you are more likely to be vigilant and suspicious, invest more effort in what you are doing, feel less comfortable, and make fewer errors, but you also are less intuitive and less creative than usual.”

— Daniel Kahneman

419. “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

420. “Adaptation to a new situation, whether good or bad, consists in large part of thinking less and less about it.”

— Daniel Kahneman

421. “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

422. “Adam switches from a gas-guzzler of 12 mpg to a slightly less voracious guzzler that runs at 14 mpg. The environmentally virtuous Beth switches from a 30 mpg car to one that runs at 40 mpg.”

— Daniel Kahneman

423. “Self-control and deliberate thought apparently draw on the same limited budget of effort.”

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

425. “Close your eyes.”

— Daniel Kahneman

426. “The executive’s decision would today be described as an example of the affect heuristic, where judgments and decisions are guided directly by feelings of liking and disliking, with little deliberation or reasoning.”

— Daniel Kahneman

427. “Reciprocal priming effects tend to produce a coherent reaction: if you were primed to think of old age, you would tend to act old, and acting old would reinforce the thought of old age.”

— Daniel Kahneman

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

431. “It is difficult to accept changes for the worse.”

— Daniel Kahneman

432. “The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of the industry. Facts that challenge such basic assumptions – and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem – are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them.”

— Daniel Kahneman

433. “Our understanding of cognitive ease and associative coherence locates subjective confidence firmly in System 1.”

— Daniel Kahneman

434. “To be a good diagnostician, a physician needs to acquire a large set of labels for diseases, each of which binds an idea of the illness and its symptoms, possible antecedents and causes, possible developments and consequences, and possible interventions to cure or mitigate the illness.”

— Daniel Kahneman

435. “The objective of policy should be to reduce human suffering. We aim for a lower U-index in society. Dealing with depression and extreme poverty should be a priority.” “The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time. Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?” “Beyond the satiation level of income, you can buy more pleasurable experiences, but you will lose some of your ability to enjoy the less expensive ones.”

— Daniel Kahneman

436. “All too often a company afflicted by sunk costs drives into the blizzard, throwing good money after bad rather than accepting the humiliation of closing the account of a costly failure.”

— Daniel Kahneman

437. “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

438. “It is tempting to explain entrepreneurial optimism by wishful thinking, but emotion is only part of the story. Cognitive biases play an important role, notably the System 1 feature WYSIATI.”

— Daniel Kahneman

439. “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.”

— Daniel Kahneman

440. “If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I.”

— Daniel Kahneman

441. “It is difficult to imagine people lining up at airport bookstores to buy a book that enthusiastically describes the practices of business leaders who, on average, do somewhat better than chance. Consumers have a hunger for a clear message about the determinants of success and failure in business, and they need stories that offer a sense of understanding, however illusory.”

— Daniel Kahneman

442. “His ego was depleted after a long day of meetings. So he just turned to standard operating procedures instead of thinking through the problem.”

— Daniel Kahneman

443. “Hindsight is especially unkind to decision makers who act as agents for others – physicians, financial advisers, third-base coaches, CEOs, social workers, diplomats, politicians. We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appear obvious only after the fact. There is a clear outcome bias. When.”

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

445. “The comparison of firms that have been more or less successful is to a significant extent a comparison between firms that have been more or less lucky.”

— Daniel Kahneman

446. “Bad weather is associated with improved memory; judicial sentences tend to be more severe when it is hot outside; and stock market performance is affected by sunshine.”

— Daniel Kahneman

447. “We have defined noise as undesirable variability in judgments of the same problem. Since singular problems are never exactly repeated, this definition does not apply to them. After all, history is only run once. You will never be able to compare Obama’s decision to send.”

— Daniel Kahneman

448. “Matters of judgment, including professional judgments, occupy a space between questions of fact or computation on the one hand and matters of taste or opinion on the other. They are defined by the expectation of bounded disagreement.”

— Daniel Kahneman

449. “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

450. “A simple rule can help: before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position. This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of knowledge and opinion in the group. The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of those who speak early and assertively, causing others to line up behind them.”

— Daniel Kahneman