Daniel Kahneman Quotes
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People just hate the idea of losing. Any loss, even a small one, is just so terrible to contemplate that they compensate by buying insurance, including totally absurd policies like air travel.
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People should be conscious of the large contribution made by anything that gets people together easily in the reduction of loneliness and emotional well-being.
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It's very easy for trusted companies to mislead naive customers, and life insurance companies are trusted.
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It doesn't take many observations to think you've spotted a trend, and it's probably not a trend at all.
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Alternative descriptions of the same reality evoke different emotions and different associations.
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When people talk of the economy being strong, they don't seem to feel that they, too, are better off.
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All of us would be better investors if we just made fewer decisions.
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If you think in terms of major losses, because losses loom much larger than gains - that's a very well-established finding - you tend to be very risk-averse. When you think in terms of wealth, you tend to be much less risk-averse.
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We have associations to things. We have, you know, we have associations to tables and to - and to dogs and to cats and to Harvard professors, and that's the way the mind works. It's an association machine.
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Friends are sometimes a big help when they share your feelings. In the context of decisions, the friends who will serve you best are those who understand your feelings but are not overly impressed by them.
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The planning fallacy is that you make a plan, which is usually a best-case scenario. Then you assume that the outcome will follow your plan, even when you should know better.
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Policy makers, like most people, normally feel that they already know all the psychology and all the sociology they are likely to need for their decisions. I don't think they are right, but that's the way it is.
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The idea that you can ask one question and it makes the point - well, that wasn't how psychology was done at the time.
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True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.
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Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.
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We don't see very far in the future, we are very focused on one idea at a time, one problem at a time, and all these are incompatible with rationality as economic theory assumes it.
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Divorced women, compared to married women, are less satisfied with their lives, which is not surprising. But they're actually more cheerful, when you look at the average mood they're in in the course of the day.
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Many unfortunate human situations unfold ... where people who face very bad options take desperate gambles, accepting a high probability of making things worse in exchange for a small hope of avoiding a large loss. Risk taking of this king often turns manageable failures into disasters.
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We're generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments.
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People talk of the new economy and of reinventing themselves in the workplace, and in that sense most of us are less secure.
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We have no reason to expect the quality of intuition to improve with the importance of the problem. Perhaps the contrary: high-stake problems are likely to involve powerful emotions and strong impulses to action.
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We think, each of us, that we're much more rational than we are. And we think that we make our decisions because we have good reasons to make them. Even when it's the other way around. We believe in the reasons, because we've already made the decision.
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Nobody would say, 'I'm voting for this guy because he's got the stronger chin,' but that, in fact, is partly what happens.
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Unless there is an obvious reason to do otherwise, most of use passively accept decision problems as they are framed and therefore rarely have an opportunity to discover the extent to which our preferences are frame-bound rather than reality-bound.