Daniel Kahneman Quotes
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The brains of humans contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.
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Many ideas happen to us. We have intuition, we have feeling, we have emotion, all of that happens, we don't decide to do it. We don't control it.
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One thing we have lost, that we had in the past, is a sense of progress, that things are getting better. There is a sense of volatility, but not of progress.
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It's a wonderful thing to be optimistic. It keeps you healthy and it keeps you resilient.
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Optimistic people play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are inventors, entrepreneurs, political and military leaders - not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks.
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Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.
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Doubting what you see is a very odd experience. And doubting what you remember is a little less odd than doubting what you see. But it's also a pretty odd experience, because some memories come with a very compelling sense of truth about them, and that happens to be the case even for memories that are not true.
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People are really happier with friends than they are with their families or their spouse or their child.
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Experienced happiness refers to your feelings, to how happy you are as you live your life. In contrast, the satisfaction of the remembering self refers to your feelings when you think about your life.
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There's a lot of randomness in the decisions that people make.
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Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.
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Experienced well-being is on average unaffected by marriage, not because marriage makes no difference to happiness, but because it changes some aspects of life for the better and others for the worse.
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Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers. It would be useful for us to acknowledge that fact.
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If individuals are rational, there is no need to protect them against their own choices.
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A rare event will be overweighted if it specifically attracts attention. ... And when there is no overweighting, there will be neglect.
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I'm not a great believer in self-help.
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Most of the time, we think fast. And most of the time we're really expert at what we're doing, and most of the time, what we do is right.
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I used to hold a unitary view, in which I proposed that only experienced happiness matters, and that life satisfaction is a fallible estimate of true happiness.
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It's nonsense to say money doesn't buy happiness, but people exaggerate the extent to which more money can buy more happiness.
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When you analyze happiness, it turns out that the way you spend your time is extremely important.
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Courage is willingness to take the risk once you know the odds. Optimistic overconfidence means you are taking the risk because you don't know the odds. It's a big difference.
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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.
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There are domains in which expertise is not possible. Stock picking is a good example. And in long-term political strategic forecasting, it's been shown that experts are just not better than a dice-throwing monkey.
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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.