Quotes from Daniel Kahneman

We know that people can maintain an unshakeable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers.

common gestures can also unconsciously influence our thoughts and feelings.

Facts that challenge basic assumptions-and thereby threaten people's livelihood and self-esteem-are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them.

and near victims are very concerned after a disaster. After each significant earthquake, Californians are for a while diligent in purchasing insurance and adopting measures of protection and mitigation. They tie down their boiler to reduce quake damage, seal their basement doors against floods, and maintain emergency supplies in good order. However

What makes some cognitive operations more demanding and effortful than others? What outcomes must we purchase in the currency of attention? What can System 2 do that System 1 cannot? We now have tentative answers to these questions.

Indeed, we pay people quite well to provide interesting explanations of regression effects.

When asked how much they will pay to get overnight delivery of a book they have ordered, the low scorers on the Cognitive Reflection Test are willing to pay twice as much as the high scorers.

I propose a simple account of how we generate intuitive opinions on complex matters. If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another substitution. I also adopt the following terms:

The aphorisms were judged more insightful when they rhymed than when they did not. Finally, if you quote a source, choose one with a name that is easy to pronounce.

System 1 is much better at dealing with individuals than categories.

you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern. WYSIATI facilitates the achievement of coherence and of the cognitive ease that causes us to accept a statement as true.

Framing effects: Different ways of presenting the same information often evoke different emotions. The statement that "the odds of survival one month after surgery are 90%" is more reassuring than the equivalent statement that "mortality within one month of surgery is 10%." Similarly, cold

Facing a choice, we gave up rationality rather than give up the enterprise.

The mental work that produces impressions, intuitions, and many decisions goes on in silence in our mind.

The principle of independent judgments (and decorrelated errors) has immediate applications for the conduct of meetings, an activity in which executives in organizations spend a great deal of their working days.

As we noted in chapter 12, our normal way of thinking is causal. We naturally attend to the particular, following and creating causally coherent stories about individual cases, in which failures are often attributed to errors, and errors to biases. The ease with which bad judgments can be explained leaves no space for noise in our accounts of errors.

Hindsight bias has pernicious effects on the evaluations of decision makers. It leads observers to assess the quality of a decision not by whether the process was sound but by whether its outcome was good or bad.

We were forecasting based on the information in front of us—WYSIATI—but the chapters we wrote first were probably easier than others, and our commitment to the project was probably then at its peak. But the main problem was that we failed to allow for what Donald Rumsfeld famously called the "unknown unknowns.

Once you adopt a new view of the world (or of any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.

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

While writing the article that reported these findings, Amos and I discovered that we enjoyed working together.

success = talent + luck great success = a little more talent + a lot of luck

The halo effect helps keep explanatory narratives simple and coherent by exaggerating the consistency of evaluations: good people do only good things and bad people are all bad.

continuous vigilance is not necessarily good, and it is certainly impractical. Constantly questioning our own thinking would be impossibly tedious, and System 2 is much too slow and inefficient to serve as a substitute for System 1 in making routine decisions. The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.