Daniel Kahneman Quotes - Page 8

Some memories come with a very compelling sense of truth about them. And that happens to be the case even with memories that are not true.

We are very influenced by completely automatic things that we have no control over, and we don't know we're doing it.

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.

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.

It was always assumed I would be a professor. I grew up thinking it.

Question: So investors shouldn't delude themselves about beating the market? Answer: "They're just not going to do it. It's just not going to happen."

People are very good [at] thinking about agents. The mind is set really beautifully to think about agents. Agents have traits. Agents have behaviors. We understand agents. We form global impression of their personalities. We are really not very good at remembering sentences where the subject of the sentence is an abstract notion.

The concept of happiness has to be reorganised.

Individual investors predictably flock to stocks in companies that are in the news.

There are some conditions where you have to trust your intuition.

An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true.

A large portion of the weekend effects is explained by differences in the amount of time spent with friends or family between weekends and weekdays.

Lucky risk takers use hindsight to reinforce their feeling that their gut is very wise. Hindsight also reinforces others' trust in that individual's gut.

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.

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.

Hindsight bias makes surprises vanish.

Each additional day together is a gift. The end of the day means the end of hostilities, the recognition that the underlying shared values and commitment to the relationship trump the need for one last dig or self-righteous justification.

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

It's clear that policymakers and economists are going to be interested in the measurement of well-being primarily as it correlates with health; they also want to know whether researchers can validate subjective responses with physiological indices.

Endlessly amused by people's minds.

Many people will admit that they made a mistake [putting money in dot-coms or telecoms at their peak] But that doesn’t mean that they’ve changed their mind about anything in particular. It doesn’t mean that they are now able to avoid that mistake.

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

There's a tendency to look at investments in isolation. Investors focus on the risk of individual securities.

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

You can always find an evolutionary quotation for anything. But the question is whether it's functional, which is not the same as being evolutionary.