Thinking, Fast and Slow Quotes

“We must be inclined to believe it because it has been repeated so often, but let’s think it through again.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“I don’t spend a lot of time taking polls around the world to tell me what I think is the right way to act. I’ve just got to know how I feel” (George W. Bush, November 2002).”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Compare two commitments that will change some aspects of your life: buying a comfortable new car and joining a group that meets weekly, perhaps a poker or book club. Both experiences will be novel and exciting at the start. The crucial difference is that you will eventually pay little attention to the car as you drive it, but you will always attend to the social interaction to which you committed yourself. By WYSIATI (it's an acronym explained at the beginning of the book to explain how we only take into account minimal information of the type that we can most readily access e.g. how we're feeling right at this moment to answer how we feel about our lives in general) you are likely to exaggerate the long-term benefits of the car, but you are not likely to make the same mistake for a social gathering or for inherently attention-demanding activities such as playing tennis or learning to play the cello. The focusing illusion (your focus on something makes it feel more important than it actually is at that moment in time when you're focussing on it) creates a bias in favour of goods and experiences that are initially exciting, even if they will eventually lose their appeal. Time is neglected, causing experiences that will retain their attention value in the long term to be appreciated less than they deserve to be.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The evidence suggests that optimism is widespread, stubborn, and costly.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Simple equally weighted formulas based on existing statistics or on common sense are often very good predictors of significant outcomes. In a memorable example, Dawes showed that marital stability is well predicted by a formula: frequency of lovemaking minus frequency of quarrels You don’t want your result to be a negative number.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“We found that people, when engaged in a mental sprint, may become effectively blind. The authors of The Invisible Gorilla had made the gorilla “invisible” by keeping the observers intensely busy counting passes.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“I was surprised to see that the pupil remained small and did not noticeably dilate as she talked and listened. Unlike the tasks that we were studying, the mundane conversation apparently demanded little or no effort—no more than retaining two or three digits.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Why did you stop working just now?” The answer from inside the lab was often, “How did you know?” to which we would reply, “We have a window to your soul.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“During a mental multiplication, the pupil normally dilated to a large size within a few seconds and stayed large as long as the individual kept working on the problem; it contracted immediately when she found a solution or gave up.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“the pupils are sensitive indicators of mental effort—they dilate substantially when people multiply two-digit numbers,”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“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.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Dawes showed that marital stability is well predicted by a formula: frequency of lovemaking minus frequency of quarrels”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“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, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“In an article titled “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly,” he showed that couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Good stories provide a simple and coherent account of people’s actions and intentions. You are always ready to interpret behavior as a manifestation of general propensities and personality traits—causes that you can readily match to effects. The halo effect discussed earlier contributes to coherence, because it inclines us to match our view of all the qualities of a person to our judgment of one attribute that is particularly significant.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“One of the best-known studies of availability suggests that awareness of your own biases can contribute to peace in marriages, and probably in other joint projects. In a famous study, spouses were asked, “How large was your personal contribution to keeping the place tidy, in percentages?” They also answered similar questions about “taking out the garbage,” “initiating social engagements,” etc. Would the self-estimated contributions add up to 100%, or more, or less? As expected, the self-assessed contributions added up to more than 100%. The explanation is a simple availability bias: both spouses remember their own individual efforts and contributions much more clearly than those of the other, and the difference in availability leads to a difference in judged frequency.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous—and it is also essential.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The technical definition of heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions. The word comes from the same root as eureka.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“In normal circumstances, however, we draw pleasure and pain from what is happening at the moment, if we attend to it. To get pleasure from eating, for example, you must notice that you are doing it. We found that French and American women spent about the same amount of time eating, but for Frenchwomen, eating was twice as likely to be focal as it was for American women. The Americans were far more prone to combine eating with other activities, and their pleasure from eating was correspondingly diluted.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Put your ideas in verse if you can; they will be more likely to be taken as truth.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“When you are in a state of cognitive ease, you are probably in a good mood, like what you see, believe what you hear, trust your intuitions, and feel that the current situation is comfortably familiar. You are also likely to be relatively casual and superficial in your thinking. When you feel strained, you are more likely to be vigilant and suspicious, invest more effort in what you are doing, feel less comfortable, and make fewer errors, but you also are less intuitive and less creative than usual.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Rational or not, fear is painful and debilitating, and policy makers must endeavor to protect the public from fear, not only from real dangers.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The testers found that training attention not only improved executive control; scores on nonverbal tests of intelligence also improved and the improvement was maintained for several months.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“One of the main functions of System 2 is to monitor and control thoughts and actions “suggested” by System 1,”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“all variants of voluntary effort—cognitive, emotional, or physical—draw at least partly on a shared pool of mental energy.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“controlling thoughts and behaviors is one of the tasks that System 2 performs.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Flow neatly separates the two forms of effort: concentration on the task and the deliberate control of attention.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced six-cent-mihaly) has done more than anyone else to study this state of effortless attending, and the name he proposed for it, flow, has become part of the language. People who experience flow describe it as “a state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems,”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“It is normally easy and actually quite pleasant to walk and think at the same time, but at the extremes these activities appear to compete for the limited resources of System 2. You can confirm this claim by a simple experiment. While walking comfortably with a friend, ask him to compute 23 × 78 in his head, and to do so immediately. He will almost certainly stop in his tracks.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Much like the electricity meter outside your house or apartment, the pupils offer an index of the current rate at which mental energy is used. The analogy goes deep. Your use of electricity depends on what you choose to do, whether to light a room or toast a piece of bread. When you turn on a bulb or a toaster, it draws the energy it needs but no more. Similarly, we decide what to do, but we have limited control over the effort of doing it.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow