Daniel Kahneman Quotes

"No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story. Michael Lewis. "The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World". Penguin, 2016 (ISBN 9780141983035)."

"A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Ch. 5, "Cognitive ease" p. 62."

"Unless there is an obvious reason to do otherwise, most of us passively accept decision problems as they are framed and therefore rarely have an opportunity to discover the extent to which our preferences are frame-bound rather than reality-bound. Ch. 34, "Frames and reality", p. 367."

"He's taking an inside view. He should forget about his own case and look for what happened in other cases. Ch. 23, "The outside view" p. 254."

"There is a deep gap between our thinking about statistics and our thinking about individual cases. Ch. 15, "Causes trump statistics" p. 174."

"Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it. Ch. 38, "Thinking about life" p. 402."

"Subjective confidence in a judgement is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that this judgement is correct. Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true. Ch. 20, "The illusion of validity" p. 212."

"And there is something else, which is very important, I think. Which is that almost all psychological hypotheses are true, that is, in the sense that, you know, directionally, if you have a hypothesis that A really causes B, that it's not true that A causes the opposite [of] B. Maybe A just has very little effect, but hypotheses are true mostly, except mostly they're very weak, they're much weaker than you think... Lex Fridman podcast, 1:04:10. 14 January 2020."

"It took Francis Galton several years to figure out that correlation and regression are not two concepts – they are different perspectives on the same concept. The general rule is straightforward but has surprising consequences: whenever the correlation between two scores is imperfect, there will be regression to the mean. Ch. 17, "Regression to the mean" p. 181."

"Although humans are not irrational, they often need help to make more accurate judgements and better decisions. [...] [They] also need protection from others who deliberately exploit their weaknesses [...]. Conclusions, pp. 411-413."

"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. Ch. 7, "A machine for jumping to conclusions" p. 87."

"You should inform your gut and then trust it. Discussion at Harvard - Dec 3, 2021[1][2]"

"There is no evidence that risk takers in the economic domain have an unusual appetite for gambles on high stakes; they are merely less aware of risks than more timid people are. Ch. 24, "The engine of capitalism" p. 263."

"He weights losses about twice as much as gains, which is normal. Ch. 26, "Prospect theory" p. 288."

"Many unfortunate human situations unfold [...] where people who face very bad options take desperate gambles, accepting a high probability of making things worse in exchange for a small hope of avoiding a large loss. Risk taking of this kind often turns manageable failures into disasters. Ch. 29, "The fourfold pattern" pp. 318-319."

"Note: page numbers are (ISBN 9780141033570) unless otherwise noted."

"Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance. Ch. 19, "The illusion of understanding" p. 201."

"Experienced well-being is on average unaffected by marriage, not because marriage makes no difference to happiness, but because it changes some aspects of life for the better and others for the worse. Ch. 38, "Thinking about life" pp. 400-401."

"A rare event will be overweighted if it specifically attracts attention. [...] And when there is no overweighting, there will be neglect. Ch. 30, "Rare events" p. 333."

"A recurrent theme of this book is that luck plays a large role in every story of success; it is almost always easy to identify a small change in the story that would have turned a remarkable achievement into a mediocre outcome. Introduction, p. 9."

"Discussion at Harvard - Dec 3, 2021[3]"