Top 500 Daniel Kahneman Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “People are asked for a prediction but they substitute an evaluation of the evidence, without noticing that the question they answer is not the one they were asked. This process is guaranteed to generate predictions that are systematically biased; they completely ignore regression to the mean.”

— Daniel Kahneman

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 “An individual has been described by a neighbor as follows: “Steve is very shy and withdrawn, invariably helpful but with little interest in people or in the world of reality.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

404. “As we navigate our lives, we normally allow ourselves to be guided by impressions and feelings, and the confidence we have in our intuitive beliefs and preferences is usually justified. But not always. We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are.”

— Daniel Kahneman

405. “System 1 is not prone to doubt. It suppresses ambiguity and spontaneously constructs stories that are as coherent as possible. Unless the message is immediately negated, the associations that it evokes will spread as if the message were true.”

— Daniel Kahneman

406. “The initial enthusiasm for the idea in the Ministry of Education had waned by the time the text was delivered and it was never used.”

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

408. “The errors of a theory are rarely found in what it asserts explicitly; they hide in what it ignores or tacitly assumes.”

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

412. “The remembering self is the one that answers the question: “How was it, on the whole?” Memories are all we get to keep from our experience of living, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self.”

— Daniel Kahneman

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

417. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

419. “When forecasting the outcomes of risky projects, executives too easily fall victim to the planning fallacy. In its grip, they make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than on a rational weighting of gains, losses, and probabilities. They overestimate benefits and underestimate costs. They spin scenarios of success while overlooking the potential for mistakes and miscalculations.”

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

421. “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

422. “We found that people, when engaged in a mental sprint, may become effectively blind. The authors of The Invisible Gorilla had made the gorilla “invisible” by keeping the observers intensely busy counting passes.”

— Daniel Kahneman

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

430. “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

431. “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

432. “An adjuster is assigned to the claim – just as the underwriter was assigned, because she happens to be available. The adjuster gathers the facts of the case and provides an estimate of its ultimate cost to the company. The same adjuster then takes charge of negotiating with the claimant’s representative to ensure that the claimant receives the benefits promised in the policy while also protecting the company from making excessive payments.”

— Daniel Kahneman

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

437. “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

438. “The core of the illusion is that we believe we understand the past, which implies that the future also should be knowable, but in fact we understand the past less than we believe we do. Know is not the only word that fosters this illusion. In common usage, the words intuition and premonition also are reserved for past thoughts that turned out to be true.”

— Daniel Kahneman

439. “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

440. “Money-primed people become more independent than they would be without the associative trigger. They persevered almost twice as long in trying to solve a very difficult problem before they asked the experimenter for help, a crisp demonstration of increased self-reliance. Money-primed people are also more selfish: they were much less willing to spend time helping another student who pretended to be confused about an experimental task.”

— Daniel Kahneman

441. “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

442. “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

443. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

445. “When the top prize is very large, ticket buyers appear indifferent to the fact that their chance of winning is minuscule. A lottery ticket is the ultimate example of the possibility effect. Without a ticket you cannot win, with a ticket you have a chance, and whether the chance is tiny or merely small matters little. Of course, what people acquire with a ticket is more than a chance to win; it is the right to dream pleasantly of winning.”

— Daniel Kahneman

446. “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

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. “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. “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

450. “Overconfidence is another manifestation of WYSIATI: when we estimate a quantity, we rely on information that comes to mind and construct a coherent story in which the estimate makes sense. Allowing for the information that does not come to mind – perhaps because one never knew it – is impossible.”

— Daniel Kahneman