Quotes from Daniel Kahneman

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. Learning medicine consists in part of learning the language of medicine.

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

One of the best-known studies of availability suggests that awareness of your own biases can contribute to peace in marriages, and probably in other joint projects.

Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.

Furthermore, merely thinking about stabbing a coworker in the back leaves people more inclined to buy soap, disinfectant, or detergent than batteries, juice, or candy bars.

The moral is significant: 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.

Your political preference determines the arguments that you find compelling. If you like the current health policy, you believe its benefits are substantial and its costs more manageable than the costs of alternatives. If you are a hawk in your attitude toward other nations, you probably think they are relatively weak and likely to submit to your country's will.

Substituting one question for another can be a good strategy for solving difficult problems, and George Pólya included substitution in his classic How to Solve It: "If you can't solve a problem, then there is an easier problem you can solve: find it." P

Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following images: Image on page 19 courtesy of Paul Ekman Group.

The halo effect adds the final touches, lending an aura of invincibility to the heroes of the story.

But the cadet was probably just lucky on that particular attempt and therefore likely to deteriorate regardless of whether or not he was praised. Similarly, the instructor would shout into a cadet's earphones only when the cadet's performance was unusually bad and therefore likely to improve regardless of what the instructor did. The instructor had attached a causal interpretation to the inevitable fluctuations of a random process.

many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions. They apparently find cognitive effort at least mildly unpleasant and avoid it as much as possible.

coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it.

Damasio and his colleagues have observed that people who do not display the appropriate emotions before they decide, sometimes because of brain damage, also have an impaired ability to make good decisions.

The general tendency to overestimate the probability of conjunctive events leads to unwarranted optimism in the evaluation of the likelihood that a plan will succeed or that a project will be completed on time.

I smiled and said nothing. But I thought, "Well, I took it away from you this morning. If your success was due mostly to chance, how much credit are you entitled to take for it?

System 1 generates an impression of similarity without intending to do so. The representativeness heuristic is involved when someone says "She will win the election; you can see she is a winner" or "He won't go far as an academic; too many tattoos.

Now suppose that at the end of the page you get another instruction: count all the commas in the next page. This will be harder, because you will have to overcome the newly acquired tendency to focus attention on the letter f.

These were my offerings: success = talent + luck great success = a little more talent + a lot of luck

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.

Decision makers tend to prefer the sure thing over the gamble (they are risk averse) when the outcomes are good. They tend to reject the sure thing and accept the gamble (they are risk seeking) when both outcomes are negative.

Peak-end rule: The global retrospective rating was well predicted by the average of the level of pain reported at the worst moment of the experience and at its end. Duration neglect: The duration of the procedure had no effect whatsoever on the ratings of total pain.

Some of us may need the security of distorted estimates to avoid paralysis. If you choose to delude yourself by accepting extreme predictions...you will do well to remain aware of your self-indulgence.