Quotes from Daniel Kahneman

The similarity was reassuring: the pupil was a good measure of the physical arousal that accompanies mental effort, and we could go ahead and use it to understand how the mind works.

There are distinctive patterns in the errors people make. Systematic errors are known as biases, and they recur predictably in particular circumstances.... The availability of a diagnostic label for this bias--the halo effect--makes it easier to anticipate, recognize, and understand.

The evidence presents a profound challenge to the idea that humans have consistent preferences and know how to maximize them, a cornerstone of the rational-agent model. An inconsistency is built into the design of our minds.

On another occasion, Amos and I wondered about the rate of divorce among professors in our university. We noticed that the question triggered a search of memory for divorced professors we knew or knew about, and that we judged the size of categories by the ease with which instances came to mind. We called this reliance on the ease of memory search the availability heuristic.

The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own.

Speaking of Singular Decisions "The way you approach this unusual opportunity exposes you to noise." "Remember: a singular decision is a recurrent decision that is made only once." "The personal experiences that made you who you are are not truly relevant to this decision.

Social scientists in the 1970s broadly accepted two ideas about human nature. First, people are generally rational, and their thinking is normally sound. Second, emotions such as fear, affection, and hatred explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality. Our article challenged both assumptions without discussing them directly.

System 1 runs automatically and System 2 is normally in a comfortable low-effort mode, in which only a fraction of its capacity is engaged. System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions. When

You could not compute the product of 17 × 24 while making a left turn into dense traffic, and you certainly should not try. You

For example, I recently came to doubt my long-held impression that adultery is more common among politicians than among physicians or lawyers.

Many individual investors lose consistently by trading, an achievement that a dart-throwing chimp could not match.

When the top prize is very large, ticket buyers appear indifferent to the fact that their chance of winning is minuscule. A lottery ticket is the ultimate example of the possibility effect. Without a ticket you cannot win, with a ticket you have a chance, and whether the chance is tiny or merely small matters little. Of course, what people acquire with a ticket is more than a chance to win; it is the right to dream pleasantly of winning.

Although Humans are not irrational, they often need help to make more accurate judgments and better decisions, and in some cases policies and institutions can provide that help.

Social scientists in the 1970s broadly accepted two ideas about human nature. First, people are generally rational, and their thinking is normally sound. Second, emotions such as fear, affection, and hatred explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality.

la confianza viene determinada por la coherencia de la mejor historia que podamos contar partiendo de la evidencia.

To a psychologist, it is self-evident that people are neither fully rational nor completely selfish, and that their tastes are anything but stable. Our two disciplines seemed to be studying different species, which the behavioral economist Richard Thaler later dubbed Econs and Humans.

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media.

the weighted average of its possible dollar outcomes; it is the average of the utilities of these outcomes, each weighted by its probability.

recent events and the current context have the most weight in determining an interpretation.

Most of us, most of the time, live with the unquestioned belief that the world looks as it does because that's the way it is.

He weighs losses about twice as much as gains, which is normal.

When you feel strained, you are more likely to be vigilant and suspicious, invest more effort in what you are doing, feel less comfortable, and make fewer errors, but you also are less intuitive and less creative than usual.

framing effects: the large changes of preferences that are sometimes caused by inconsequential variations in the wording of a choice problem.

He had no idea what was wrong, but he knew something was wrong. It turned out that the heart of the fire had not been in the kitchen but in the basement beneath where the men had stood.