Top 80 Daniel Kahneman Quotes

We have associations to things. We have, you know, we have associations to tables and to – and to dogs and to cats and to Harvard professors, and that’s the way the mind works. It’s an association machine.

If owning stocks is a long-term project for you, following their changes constantly is a very, very bad idea. It’s the worst possible thing you can do, because people are so sensitive to short-term losses. If you count your money every day, you’ll be miserable.

Political columnists and sports pundits are rewarded for being overconfident.

It’s a wonderful thing to be optimistic. It keeps you healthy and it keeps you resilient.

Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.

We’re blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We’re not designed to know how little we know.

We don’t see very far in the future, we are very focused on one idea at a time, one problem at a time, and all these are incompatible with rationality as economic theory assumes it.

My impression is that the elimination of memories greatly reduces the value of the experience.

Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness. A policy to reduce the loneliness of the elderly would certainly reduce suffering.

Alternative descriptions of the same reality evoke different emotions and different associations.

I think one of the major results of the psychology of decision making is that people’s attitudes and feelings about losses and gains are really not symmetric. So we really feel more pain when we lose $10,000 than we feel pleasure when we get $10,000.

All of us roughly know what memory is. I mean, memory is sort of the storage of the past. It’s the storage of our personal experiences. It’s a very big deal.

After a crisis we tell ourselves we understand why it happened and maintain the illusion that the world is understandable. In fact, we should accept the world is incomprehensible much of the time.

I would not advise people to buy a car or house without making a list. You will probably improve your intuitions by making a list and then sleeping on it.

Experienced happiness refers to your feelings, to how happy you are as you live your life. In contrast, the satisfaction of the remembering self refers to your feelings when you think about your life.

Adaptation seems to be, to a substantial extent, a process of reallocating your attention.

We’re generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments.

People like leaders who look like they are dominant, optimistic, friendly to their friends, and quick on the trigger when it comes to enemies. They like boldness and despise the appearance of timidity and protracted doubt.

We have no reason to expect the quality of intuition to improve with the importance of the problem. Perhaps the contrary: high-stake problems are likely to involve powerful emotions and strong impulses to action.

Banks are run by executives, and executives protect themselves, and that does not always mean that banks are going to behave rationally.

Mental effort, I would argue, is relatively rare. Most of the time we coast.

When you analyze happiness, it turns out that the way you spend your time is extremely important.

Divorced women, compared to married women, are less satisfied with their lives, which is not surprising. But they’re actually more cheerful, when you look at the average mood they’re in in the course of the day.

I have always emphasized the willingness to discard.

There’s a very good reason for why economics developed the way it did, and that is that in many situations, the assumption that people will exploit the opportunities available to them is very plausible, and it simplifies the analysis of how markets will behave.

Nobody would say, ‘I’m voting for this guy because he’s got the stronger chin,’ but that, in fact, is partly what happens.

The idea that you can ask one question and it makes the point – well, that wasn’t how psychology was done at the time.

There’s a lot of randomness in the decisions that people make.

I used to hold a unitary view, in which I proposed that only experienced happiness matters, and that life satisfaction is a fallible estimate of true happiness.

We have a very narrow view of what is going on.

Optimism is normal, but some fortunate people are more optimistic than the rest of us. If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias, you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person – you already feel fortunate.

If individuals are rational, there is no need to protect them against their own choices.

People talk of the new economy and of reinventing themselves in the workplace, and in that sense most of us are less secure.

By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases, and that is true for both humans and artificial intelligence, but the heuristics of AI are not necessarily the human ones.

It’s not a case of: ‘Read this book and then you’ll think differently. I’ve written this book, and I don’t think differently.

We know that the French are very different from the Americans in their satisfaction with life. They’re much less satisfied. Americans are pretty high up there, while the French are quite low – the world champions in life satisfaction are actually the Danes.

It’s nonsense to say money doesn’t buy happiness, but people exaggerate the extent to which more money can buy more happiness.

So your emotional state really has a lot to do with what you’re thinking about and what you’re paying attention to.

Employers who violate rules of fairness are punished by reduced productivity, and merchants who follow unfair pricing policies can expect to lose sales.

Yes, there is a burden of financial insecurity. I don’t think you find it in mood. Income is correlated with life satisfaction, so maybe you do find it in life satisfaction. You don’t find it in mood, and I think it is very important.

Organizations may be better able to tame optimism than individuals are.

The average investor’s return is significantly lower than market indices due primarily to market timing.

If you’re going to be unreligious, it’s likely going to be due to reflecting on it and finding some things that are hard to believe.

If you think in terms of major losses, because losses loom much larger than gains – that’s a very well-established finding – you tend to be very risk-averse. When you think in terms of wealth, you tend to be much less risk-averse.

Friends are sometimes a big help when they share your feelings. In the context of decisions, the friends who will serve you best are those who understand your feelings but are not overly impressed by them.

People should be conscious of the large contribution made by anything that gets people together easily in the reduction of loneliness and emotional well-being.

The brains of humans contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.

There is a huge wave of interest in happiness among researchers. There is a lot of happiness coaching. Everybody would like to make people happier.

The planning fallacy is that you make a plan, which is usually a best-case scenario. Then you assume that the outcome will follow your plan, even when you should know better.

Suppose you like someone very much. Then, by a familiar halo effect, you will also be prone to believe many good things about that person – you will be biased in their favor. Most of us like ourselves very much, and that suffices to explain self-assessments that are biased in a particular direction.

When you look at the books about well-being, you see one word – it’s happiness. People do not distinguish.

In essence, the optimistic style involves taking credit for successes but little blame for failures.

We think, each of us, that we’re much more rational than we are. And we think that we make our decisions because we have good reasons to make them. Even when it’s the other way around. We believe in the reasons, because we’ve already made the decision.

In a rising market, enough of your bad ideas will pay off so that you’ll never learn that you should have fewer ideas.

We think of our future as anticipated memories.

When people talk of the economy being strong, they don’t seem to feel that they, too, are better off.

Most of the moments of our life – and I calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long; that means that, you know, in a life there are about 600 million of them; in a month, there are about 600,000 – most of them don’t leave a trace.

I’m not a great believer in self-help.

We don’t only tell stories when we set out to tell stories, our memory tells us stories. That is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.

Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.

Psychologists really aim to be scientists, white-coat stuff, with elaborate statistics, running experiments.