Daniel Kahneman Quotes

45 Sourced Quotes

If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.

Daniel Kahneman
The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.

Daniel Kahneman
You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.

Daniel Kahneman
Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.

Daniel Kahneman
The confidence we experience as we make a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that it is right. Confidence is a feeling, one determined mostly by the coherence of the story and by the ease with which it comes to mind, even when the evidence for the story is sparse and unreliable. The bias toward coherence favors overconfidence. An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true.

Daniel Kahneman
This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

Daniel Kahneman
When action is needed, optimism, even of the mildly delusional variety, may be a good thing.

Daniel Kahneman
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
Although professionals are able to extract a considerable amount of wealth from amateurs, few stock pickers, if any, have the skill needed to beat the market consistently, year after year.

Daniel Kahneman
The psychologist, Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.

Daniel Kahneman
The most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast.

Daniel Kahneman
Survival prospects are poor for an animal that is not suspicious of novelty.

Daniel Kahneman
The concept of loss aversion is certainly the most significant contribution of psychology to behavioral economics.

Daniel Kahneman
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.

Daniel Kahneman
We often interact with professionals who exercise their judgment with evident confidence, sometimes priding themselves on the power of their intuition. In a world rife with illusions of validity and skill, can we trust them? How do we distinguish the justified confidence of experts from the sincere overconfidence of professionals who do not know they are out of their depth? We can believe an expert who admits uncertainty but cannot take expressions of high confidence at face value. As I first learned on the obstacle field, people come up with coherent stories and confident predictions even when they know little or nothing. Overconfidence arises because people are often blind to their own blindness.

Daniel Kahneman