Daniel Kahneman Quotes

45 Sourced Quotes

You should expect little or nothing from Wall Street stock pickers who hope to be more accurate than the market in predicting the future of prices. And you should not expect much from pundits making long-term forecasts.

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

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

Daniel Kahneman
The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.

Daniel Kahneman
The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.

Daniel Kahneman
The mystery is how a conception that is vulnerable to such obvious counterexamples survived for so long. I can explain it only by a weakness of the scholarly mind that I have often observed in myself. I call it theory-induced blindness: Once you have accepted a theory, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. As the psychologist Daniel Gilbert has observed, disbelieving is hard work.

Daniel Kahneman
Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.

Daniel Kahneman
Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

Daniel Kahneman
It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.

Daniel Kahneman
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. Optimistic people play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are inventors, entrepreneurs, political and military leaders — not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks. They are talented and they have been lucky, almost certainly luckier than they acknowledge.

Daniel Kahneman
Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be. We also tend to exaggerate our ability to forecast the future, which fosters overconfidence. In terms of its consequences for decisions, the optimistic bias may well be the most significant cognitive bias. Because optimistic bias is both a blessing and a risk, you should be both happy and wary if you are temperamentally optimistic.

Daniel Kahneman
When people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.

Daniel Kahneman
A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world (or any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.

Daniel Kahneman
The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than your own.

Daniel Kahneman
There is general agreement among researchers that nearly all stock pickers, whether they know it or not-and few of them do-are playing a game of chance.

Daniel Kahneman
We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

Daniel Kahneman
The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved.

Daniel Kahneman
Unfortunately, skill in evaluating the business prospects of a firm is not sufficient for successful stock trading, where the key question is whether the information about the firm is already incorporated in the price of the stock. Traders apparently lackthe skill to answer this crucial question, but they appear to be ignorant of their ignorance.

Daniel Kahneman
The conclusion is straightforward : self-control requires attention and effort.

Daniel Kahneman
Knowing the importance of luck, you should be particularly suspicious when highly consistent patterns emerge from the comparison of successful and less successful firms. In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages.

Daniel Kahneman
You know you have made a theoretical advance when you can no longer reconstruct why you failed for so long to see the obvious.

Daniel Kahneman
We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.

Daniel Kahneman
The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of the [investment management] industry.

Daniel Kahneman
Negotiations over a shrinking pie are especially difficult because they require an allocation of losses. People tend to be much more easygoing when they bargain over an expanding pie.

Daniel Kahneman
We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.

Daniel Kahneman
A general law of least effort applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.

Daniel Kahneman
A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.

Daniel Kahneman
People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations.

Daniel Kahneman
Caring for people often takes the form of concern for the quality of their stories, not for their feelings. Indeed, we can be deeply moved even by events that change the stories of people already dead. We feel pity for a man who died believing in his wife's love for him when we hear that she had a lover for many years and stayed with her husband only for his money. We pity the husband although he had lived a happy life. We feel the humiliation of a scientist who made a discovery that was proved false after she died, although she did not feel the humiliation. Most important, we all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero.

Daniel Kahneman
Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.

Daniel Kahneman