Daniel Kahneman Quotes

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.

The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time.

We can't live in a state of perpetual doubt, so we make up the best story possible and we live as if the story were true.

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

The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.

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

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

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

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.

Every night for the next week, set aside ten minutes before you go to sleep. Write down three things that went well today and why they went well...Writing about why the positive events in your life happened may seem awkward at first, but please stick with it for one week. It will get easier. The odds are that you will be less depressed, happier, and addicted to this exercise six months from now.

An investment said to have an 80% chance of success sounds far more attractive than one with a 20% chance of failure. The mind can't easily recognize that they are the same.

Mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions

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

Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it.

Happiness is determined by factors like your health, your family relationships and friendships, and above all by feeling that you are in control of how you spend your time.

True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.

One of the major biases in risky decision making is optimism. Optimism is a source of high-risk thinking.

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.

Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.

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

To better avoid errors, you should talk to people who disagree with you and you should talk to people who are not in the same emotional situation you are.

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.

The 'Instagram Generation' now experiences the present as an anticipated memory

Spend some effort in figuring out why each decision did or did not pan out. Doing that systematically is key: really try to question the way you make decisions, and improve it.

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