Quotes from Daniel Kahneman

When you say 'quite clever,' which reference group do you have in mind?

To be a good diagnostician, a physician needs to acquire a large set of labels for diseases, each of which binds an idea of the illness and its symptoms, possible antecedents and causes, possible developments and consequences, and possible interventions to cure or mitigate the illness. Learning medicine consists in part of learning the language of medicine. A deeper understanding of judgments and choices also requires a richer vocabulary than is available in everyday language.

The selective activation of compatible memories explains anchoring: the high and the low numbers activate different sets of ideas in memory. The estimates of annual temperature draw on these biased samples of ideas and are therefore biased as well.

We marvel at the story of the firefighter who has a sudden urge to escape a burning house just before it collapses, because the firefighter knows the danger intuitively, "without knowing how he knows." However, we also do not know how we immediately know that a person we see as we enter a room is our friend Peter.

The unsurprising idea that luck often contributes to success has surprising consequences when we apply it to the first two days of a high-level golf tournament. To keep things simple, assume that on both days the average score of the competitors was at par 72. We focus on a player who did very well on the first day, closing with a score of 66. What can we

The ideal of logical consistency, as this example shows, is not achievable by our limited mind. Because we are susceptible to WYSIATI and averse to mental effort, we tend to make decisions as problems arise, even when we are specifically instructed to consider them jointly. We have neither the inclination nor the mental resources to enforce consistency on our preferences, and our preferences are not magically set to be coherent, as they are in the rational-agent model.

System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective

skill in evaluating the business prospects of a firm is not sufficient for successful stock trading, where the key question is whether the information about the firm is already incorporated in the price of its stock. Traders apparently lack the skill to answer this crucial question, but they appear to be ignorant of their ignorance.

Experiments have shown that six-month-old infants see the sequence of events as a cause-effect scenario, and they indicate surprise when the sequence is altered. We are evidently ready from birth to have impressions of causality, which do not depend on reasoning about patterns of causation.

Memories are all we get to keep from our experience of living, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self.

Unusual events (such as botulism) attract disproportionate attention and are consequently perceived as less unusual than they really are. The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed.

You inability to reconstruct past beliefs will inevitably cause you to underestimate the extent to which you were surprised by past events.

people make judgments and decisions by consulting their emotions: Do I like it? Do I hate it? How strongly do I feel about it? In many domains of life, Slovic said, people form opinions and make choices that directly express their feelings and their basic tendency to approach or avoid, often without knowing that they are doing so.

Words that you have seen before become easier to see again

the accurate intuitions of experts are better explained by the effects of prolonged practice than by heuristics.

The concept of loss aversion is certainly the most significant contribution of psychology to behavioral economics

The thought of accepting the large sure loss is too painful, and the hope of complete relief too enticing, to make the sensible decision that it is time to cut one's losses.

bazaar shoppers who wear dark glasses in order to hide their level of interest from merchants.

Este pequeño ejemplo ilustra una gran historia: los seres humanos esperan tener reacciones emocionales más intensas (el arrepentimiento incluido) frente a un resultado producido por una acción que frente al mismo resultado producido por la inacción.

For the billionaire looking for the extra billion, and indeed for the participant in an experimental economics project looking for the extra dollar, money is a proxy for points on a scale of self-regard and achievement. These rewards and punishments, promises and threats, are all in our heads.

recurrent theme of this book: many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions.

When predictability is poor—which it is in most of the studies reviewed by Meehl and his followers—inconsistency is destructive of any predictive validity.

The reliance on flawed explanations is perhaps inevitable, if the alternative is to give up on understanding our world.

In the unlikely event of this book being made into a film, System 2 would be a supporting character who believes herself to be the hero.