Top 500 Daniel Kahneman Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “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

402. “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

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. “The primed ideas have some ability to prime other ideas, although more weakly. Like ripples on a pond, activation spreads through a small part of the vast network of associated ideas.”

— Daniel Kahneman

405. “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

406. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

429. “System 1 constructed a story, and his System 2 believed it. It happens to all of us.”

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

431. “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

432. “For embezzlement actions that were similar to one another, one man was sentenced to 117 days in prison, while another was sentenced to 20 years.”

— Daniel Kahneman

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

437. “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

438. “Leaders who have been lucky are never punished for having taken too much risk. Instead, they are believed to have had the flair and foresight to anticipate success, and the sensible people who doubted them are seen in hindsight as mediocre, timid, and weak.”

— Daniel Kahneman

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

442. “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

443. “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

444. “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

445. “The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved. 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

446. “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

447. “Recall that the correlation between two measures – in the present case reading age and GPA – is equal to the proportion of shared factors among their determinants.”

— Daniel Kahneman

448. “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. Learning medicine consists in part of learning the language of medicine. A deeper understanding of judgments and choices also requires a richer vocabulary than is available in everyday language.”

— Daniel Kahneman

449. “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

450. “The automatic processes of the mental shotgun and intensity matching often make available one or more answers to easy questions that could be mapped onto the target question.”

— Daniel Kahneman