Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

The general theme of these findings is that the idea of money primes individualism: a reluctance to be involved with others, to depend on others, or to accept demands from others.

The evidence of priming studies suggests that reminding people of their mortality increases the appeal of authoritarian ideas,

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.

Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.

What is perverse about the use of know in this context is not that some individuals get credit for prescience that they do not deserve. It is that the language implies that the world is more knowable than it is. It helps perpetuate a pernicious illusion.

To think clearly about the future, we need to clean up the language that we use in labeling the beliefs we had in the past.

The tendency to revise the history of one’s beliefs in light of what actually happened produces a robust cognitive illusion.

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.