Quotes from Daniel Kahneman

Surprise then activates and orients your attention: you will stare, and you will search your memory for a story that makes sense of the surprising event.

La gente que está cognitivamente ocupada3 es más probable que haga elecciones egoístas, use un lenguaje sexista y emita juicios superficiales en situaciones sociales.

Too much concern about how well one is doing in a task sometimes disrupts performance by loading short-term memory with pointless anxious thoughts.

The procedure I adopted to tame the halo effect conforms to a general principle: decorrelate error!

The exaggerated faith in small samples is only one example of a more general illusion—we pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability, and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than the data justify. Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality.

every human being has had the experience of not telling someone to go to hell. One

The "Florida effect" involves two stages of priming. First, the set of words primes thoughts of old age, though the word old is never mentioned; second, these thoughts prime a behavior, walking slowly, which is associated with old age. All this happens without any awareness.

more intelligent individuals are more likely than others to have rich representations of most things.

The conclusion is that the ease with which instances come to mind is a System 1 heuristic, which is replaced by a focus on content when System 2 is more engaged. Multiple lines of evidence converge on the conclusion that people who let themselves be guided by System 1 are more strongly susceptible to availability biases than others who are in a state of higher vigilance. The

She's suing him for alimony. She would actually like to settle, but he prefers to go to court. That's not surprising—she can only gain, so she's risk averse. He, on the other hand, faces options that are all bad, so he'd rather take the risk.

Statistics produce many observations that appear to beg for causal explanations but do not lend themselves to such explanations. Many facts of the world are due to chance, including accidents of sampling. Causal explanations of chance events are inevitably wrong.

We called this reliance on the ease of memory search the availability heuristic.

anything that occupies your working memory reduces your ability to think.

Most of us are pitch-perfect in detecting anger in the first word of a telephone call, recognize as we enter a room that we were the subject of the conversation, and quickly react to subtle signs that the driver of the car in the next lane is dangerous. Our everyday intuitive abilities are no less marvelous than the striking insights of an experienced firefighter or physician—only more common.

SPEAKING OF COGNITIVE EASE "Let's not dismiss their business plan just because the font makes it hard to read." "We must be inclined to believe it because it has been repeated so often, but let's think it through again." "Familiarity breeds liking. This is a mere exposure effect." "I'm in a very good mood today, and my System 2 is weaker than usual. I should be extra careful.

The rules of the betting are intelligent: recent events and the current context have the most weight in determining an interpretation. When no recent event comes to mind, more distant memories govern.

We proposed that they used resemblance as a simplifying heuristic (roughly, a rule of thumb) to make a difficult judgment. The reliance on the heuristic caused predictable biases (systematic errors) in their predictions.

More advice: if your message is to be printed, use high-quality paper to maximize the contrast between characters and their background. If you use color, you are more likely to be believed if your text is printed in bright blue or red than

We have strong preferences about the duration of our experiences of pain and pleasure. We want pain to be brief and pleasure to last. But our memory, a function of System 1, has evolved to represent the most intense moment of an episode of pain or pleasure (the peak) and the feelings when the episode was at its end. A memory that neglects duration will not serve our preference for long pleasure and short pains.

Poignancy (a close cousin of regret) is a counterfactual feeling, which

One recipe for a dissatisfied adulthood is setting goals that are especially difficult to attain. Measured by life satisfaction 20 years later, the least promising goal that a young person could have was "becoming accomplished in a performing art

We can live comfortably with colleagues without ever noticing that they actually do not see the world as we do.

When a venture capitalist looks for "the next big thing," the risk of missing the next Google or Facebook is far more important than the risk of making a modest investment in a start-up that ultimately fails.

you think with your body, not only with your brain.