Quotes from Daniel Kahneman

when System 2 is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything. System 1 is gullible and biased to believe

reality emerges from the interactions of many different agents and forces, including blind luck, often producing large and unpredictable outcomes.

For one thing, it helps us see the logical consistency of Human preferences for what it is—a hopeless mirage

Organizations face the challenge of controlling the tendency of executives competing for resources to present overly optimistic plans. A well-run organization will reward planners for precise execution and penalize them for failing to anticipate difficulties, and for failing to allow for difficulties that they could not have anticipated—the unknown unknowns.

Even when they are not sure they will succeed, these bold people think their fate is almost entirely in their own hands. They are surely wrong: the outcome of a start-up depends as much on the achievements of its competitors and on changes in the market as on its own efforts.

When System 1 runs into difficulty, it calls on System 2 to support more detailed and specific processing that may solve the problem of the moment. System 2 is mobilized when a question arises for which System 1 does not offer an answer, as probably happened to you when you encountered the multiplication problem 17 × 24. You can also feel a surge of conscious attention whenever you are surprised.

Amos and I called our first joint article "Belief in the Law of Small Numbers." We explained, tongue-in-cheek, that "intuitions about random sampling appear to satisfy the law of small numbers, which asserts that the law of large numbers applies to small numbers as well." We also included a strongly worded recommendation that researchers regard their "statistical intuitions with proper suspicion and replace impression formation by computation whenever possible.

when System 2 is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything. System 1 is gullible and biased to believe, System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy. Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted.

We found that people, when engaged in a mental sprint, may become effectively blind. The authors of The Invisible Gorilla had made the gorilla "invisible" by keeping the observers intensely busy counting passes.

How Groups Amplify Noise

An essential design feature of the associative machine is that it represents only activated ideas. Information that is not retrieved (even unconsciously) from memory might as well not exist.

We have defined noise as undesirable variability in judgments of the same problem. Since singular problems are never exactly repeated, this definition does not apply to them. After all, history is only run once. You will never be able to compare Obama's decision to send

The law of least effort is operating here. He will think as little as possible.

A team of researchers at the University of Oregon explored the link between cognitive control and intelligence in several ways, including an attempt to raise intelligence by improving the control of attention.

Groups can go in all sorts of directions, depending in part on factors that should be irrelevant. Who speaks first, who speaks last, who speaks with confidence, who is wearing black, who is seated next to whom, who smiles or frowns or gestures at the right moment—all these factors, and many more, affect outcomes.

once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws.

We call this a priming effect and say that the idea of EAT primes the idea of SOUP, and that WASH primes SOAP.

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.

It is difficult to reconstruct what it was that took us years, long hours of discussion, endless exchanges of drafts and hundreds of e-mails negotiating over words, and more than once almost giving up. But this is what always happens when a project ends reasonably well: once you understand the main conclusion, it seems it was always obvious.

In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages.

Gruesome images, endlessly repeated in the media, cause everyone to be on edge. As I know from experience, it is difficult to reason oneself into a state of complete calm.

the idea of money primes individualism: a reluctance to be involved with others, to depend on others, or to accept demands from others.

The answer was straightforward: instances of the class will be retrieved from memory, and if retrieval is easy and fluent, the category will be judged to be large. We defined the availability heuristic as the process of judging frequency by "the ease with which instances come to mind.

The mind is good with stories, but it does not appear to be well designed for the processing of time.