Quotes from Daniel Kahneman

The phenomenon we were studying is so common and so important in the everyday world that you should know its name: it is an anchoring effect. It occurs when people consider a particular value for an unknown quantity before estimating that quantity. What happens is one of the most reliable and robust results of experimental psychology: the estimates stay close to the number that people considered—hence the image of an anchor.

The Alar tale illustrates a basic limitation in the ability of our mind to deal with small risks: we either ignore them altogether or give them far too much weight—nothing in between

Uri Simonsohn showed that college admissions officers pay more attention to the academic attributes of candidates on cloudier days and are more sensitive to nonacademic attributes on sunnier days. The title of the article in which he reported these findings is memorable enough: "Clouds Make Nerds Look Good.

when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.

Simple, common gestures can also unconsciously influence our thoughts and feelings.

the illusion of valid prediction remains intact, a fact that is exploited by people whose business is prediction—not only financial experts but pundits in business and politics, too.

predictive judgments that provide input—for instance, how a candidate will perform in her first year, how the stock market will respond to a given strategic move, or how quickly the epidemic will spread if left unchecked. But the final decisions entail trade-offs between the pros and cons of various options, and these trade-offs are resolved by evaluative judgments.

But the main problem was that we failed to allow for what Donald Rumsfeld famously called the "unknown unknowns

Overconfidence: As the WYSIATI rule implies, neither the quantity nor the quality of the evidence counts for much in subjective confidence.

Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs.

It is hard to think of the history of the twentieth century, including its large social movements, without bringing in the role of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Zedong. But there was a moment in time, just before an egg was fertilized, when there was a fifty-fifty chance that the embryo that became Hitler could have been a female. Compounding

Inconsistencies reduce the ease of our thoughts and the clarity of our feelings.

whenever the correlation between two scores is imperfect, there will be regression to the mean.

Statistical results with a causal interpretation have a stronger effect on our thinking than non-causal information. But even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience.

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

Amos and I enjoyed the extraordinary good fortune of a shared mind that was superior to our individual minds and of a relationship that made our work fun as well as productive.

people who spend their time, and earn their living, studying a particular topic produce poorer predictions than dart-throwing monkeys who would have distributed their choices evenly over the options. Even in the region they knew best, experts were not significantly better than nonspecialists.

The automatic processes of the mental shotgun and intensity matching often make available one or more answers to easy questions that could be mapped onto the target question.

He had noticed that the pupils are sensitive indicators of mental effort—they dilate substantially when people multiply two-digit numbers, and they dilate more if the problems are hard than if they are easy. His observations indicated that the response to mental effort is distinct from emotional arousal.

How large is occasion noise relative to total system noise?

Indeed, we pay people quite well to provide interesting explanations of regression effects. A business commentator who correctly announces that "the business did better this year because it had done poorly last year" is likely to have a short tenure on the air.

The evidence of priming studies suggests that reminding people of their mortality increases the appeal of authoritarian ideas, which may become reassuring in the context of the terror of death. Other

System 1 runs ahead of the facts in constructing a rich image on the basis of scraps of evidence.

The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen.