Daniel Kahneman Quotes

The expectation of intelligent gossip is a powerful motive for serious self-criticism, more powerful than New Year resolutions to improve one's decision making at work and at home.

The amount of evidence and its quality do not count for much, because poor evidence can make a very good story. For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs. Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous - and it is also essential.

Freedom has a cost, which is borne by individuals who make bad choices, and by a society that feels obligated to help them.

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.tThese findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.

The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.

...the characters are useful because of some quirks of our minds, yours and mine. A sentence is understood more easily if it describes what an agent (system 2) does than if it describes what something is, what properties it has.