Intuitive diagnosis is reliable when people have a lot of relevant feedback. But people are very often willing to make intuitive diagnoses even when they’re very likely to be wrong. – Daniel Kahneman
When you analyze happiness, it turns out that the way you spend your time is extremely important. – Daniel Kahneman
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. – Daniel Kahneman
When people talk of the economy being strong, they don’t seem to feel that they, too, are better off. – Daniel Kahneman
There’s a very good reason for why economics developed the way it did, and that is that in many situations, the assumption that people will exploit the opportunities available to them is very plausible, and it simplifies the analysis of how markets will behave. – Daniel Kahneman
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. – Daniel Kahneman
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. – Daniel Kahneman
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. – Daniel Kahneman
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. – Daniel Kahneman
Nobody would say, ‘I’m voting for this guy because he’s got the stronger chin,’ but that, in fact, is partly what happens. – Daniel Kahneman
Employers who violate rules of fairness are punished by reduced productivity, and merchants who follow unfair pricing policies can expect to lose sales. – Daniel Kahneman
By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases, and that is true for both humans and artificial intelligence, but the heuristics of AI are not necessarily the human ones. – Daniel Kahneman
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. – Daniel Kahneman
People talk of the new economy and of reinventing themselves in the workplace, and in that sense most of us are less secure. – Daniel Kahneman
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. – Daniel Kahneman
I enjoy being active, but I look forward to the day when I can retire to the Internet. – Daniel Kahneman
If owning stocks is a long-term project for you, following their changes constantly is a very, very bad idea. It’s the worst possible thing you can do, because people are so sensitive to short-term losses. If you count your money every day, you’ll be miserable. – Daniel Kahneman
Suppose you like someone very much. Then, by a familiar halo effect, you will also be prone to believe many good things about that person – you will be biased in their favor. Most of us like ourselves very much, and that suffices to explain self-assessments that are biased in a particular direction. – Daniel Kahneman
I would not advise people to buy a car or house without making a list. You will probably improve your intuitions by making a list and then sleeping on it. – Daniel Kahneman
We are very influenced by completely automatic things that we have no control over, and we don’t know we’re doing it. – Daniel Kahneman
I think one of the major results of the psychology of decision making is that people’s attitudes and feelings about losses and gains are really not symmetric. So we really feel more pain when we lose $10,000 than we feel pleasure when we get $10,000. – Daniel Kahneman
Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion. – Daniel Kahneman
There’s a tendency to look at investments in isolation. Investors focus on the risk of individual securities. – Daniel Kahneman
Most successful pundits are selected for being opinionated, because it’s interesting, and the penalties for incorrect predictions are negligible. You can make predictions, and a year later people won’t remember them. – Daniel Kahneman
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. – Daniel Kahneman
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. – Daniel Kahneman
If individuals are rational, there is no need to protect them against their own choices. – Daniel Kahneman