Thinking, Fast and Slow Quotes

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

“Amos and I introduced the idea of a conjunction fallacy, which people commit when they judge a conjunction of two events (here, bank teller and feminist) to be more probable than one of the events (bank teller) in a direct comparison.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The mistake that people make in the focusing illusion involves attention to selected moments and neglect of what happens at other times. The mind is good with stories, but it does not appear to be well designed for the processing of time. During the last ten years we have learned many new facts about happiness. But we have also learned that the word happiness does not have a simple meaning and should not be used as if it does. Sometimes scientific progress leaves us more puzzled than we were before.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The ultimate test of an explanation is whether it would have made the event predictable in advance. No story of Google’s unlikely success will meet that test, because no story can include the myriad of events that would have caused a different outcome. The human mind does not deal well with nonevents.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and the quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Our mind has a useful capability to focus spontaneously on whatever is odd, different, or unusual.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Ultimately, a richer language is essential to the skill of constructive criticism.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Too much concern about how well one is doing in a task sometimes disrupts performance by loading short-term memory with pointless anxious thoughts”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“When you pay attention to a threat, you worry—and the decision weights reflect how much you worry. Because of the possibility effect, the worry is not proportional to the probability of the threat. Reducing or mitigating the risk is not adequate; to eliminate the worry the probability must be brought
down to zero.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“It is wrong to blame anyone for failing to forecast accurately in an unpredictable world. However, it seems fair to blame professionals for believing they can succeed in an impossible task.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“When the question is difficult and a skilled solution is not available, intuition still has a shot: an answer may come to mind quickly—but it is not an answer to the original question. The question that the executive faced (should I invest in Ford stock?) was difficult, but the answer to an easier and related question (do I like Ford cars?) came readily to his mind and determined his choice. This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“frequency of lovemaking minus frequency of quarrels”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Loss aversion refers to the relative strength of two motives: we are driven more strongly to avoid losses than to achieve gains. A reference point is sometimes the status quo, but it can also be a goal in the future: not achieving a goal is a loss, exceeding the goal is a gain. As we might expect from negativity dominance, the two motives are not equally powerful. The aversion to the failure of not reaching the goal is much stronger than the desire to exceed it. People often adopt short-term goals that they strive to achieve but not necessarily to exceed. They are likely to reduce their efforts when they have reached an immediate goal, with results that sometimes violate economic logic. New York cabdrivers, for example, may have a target income for the month or the year, but the goal that controls their effort is typically a daily target of earnings. Of course, the daily goal is much easier to achieve (and exceed) on some days than on others. On rainy days, a New York cab never remains free for long, and the driver quickly achieves his target; not so in pleasant weather, when cabs often waste time cruising the streets looking for fares. Economic logic implies that cabdrivers should work many hours on rainy days and treat themselves to some leisure on mild days, when they can “buy” leisure at a lower price. The logic of loss aversion suggests the opposite: drivers who have a fixed daily target will work many more hours when the pickings are slim and go home early when rain-drenched customers are begging to be taken somewhere.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Half the participants were told to nod their head up and down while others were told to shake it side to side. The messages they heard were radio editorials. Those who nodded (a yes gesture) tended to accept the message they heard, but those who shook their head tended to reject it. Again, there was no awareness, just a habitual connection between an attitude of rejection or acceptance and its common physical expression. You can see why the common admonition to “act calm and kind regardless of how you feel” is very good advice: you are likely to be rewarded by actually feeling calm and kind.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future. These illusions are comforting. They reduce the anxiety that we would experience if we allowed ourselves to fully acknowledge the uncertainties of existence.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“You just like winning and dislike losing—and you almost certainly dislike losing more than you like winning.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs. 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. But”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“What you see is all there is”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Whether professionals have a chance to develop intuitive expertise depends essentially on the quality and speed of feedback, as well as on sufficient opportunity to practice.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“More advice: if your message is to be printed, use high-quality paper to maximize the contrast between characters and their background. If you use color, you are more likely to be believed if your text is printed in bright blue or red than in middling shades of green, yellow, or pale blue.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“our mind is strongly biased toward causal explanations and does not deal well with “mere statistics.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“A story is about significant events and memorable moments, not about time passing.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The often-used phrase “pay attention” is apt: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“You know you have made a theoretical advance when you can no longer reconstruct why you failed for so long to see the obvious.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Experienced radiologists who evaluate chest X-rays as “normal” or “abnormal” contradict themselves 20% of the time when they see the same picture on separate occasions.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“his pupils widening as he watched beautiful nature pictures, and it ends with two striking pictures of the same good-looking woman, who somehow appears much more attractive in one than in the other. There is only one difference: the pupils of the eyes appear dilated in the attractive picture and constricted in the other.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Claims for correct intuitions in an unpredictable situation are self-delusional at best, sometimes worse.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow