Quotes from Daniel Kahneman

Intuition adds value even in the justly derided selection interview, but only after a disciplined collection of objective information and disciplined scoring of separate traits.

Sentencing a felon is not a prediction. It is an evaluative judgment that seeks to match the sentence to the severity of the crime.

Failures of detection followed the same inverted-V pattern as the dilating pupil. 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.

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.

When forecasting the outcomes of risky projects, executives too easily fall victim to the planning fallacy. In its grip, they make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than on a rational weighting of gains, losses, and probabilities. They overestimate benefits and underestimate costs. They spin scenarios of success while overlooking the potential for mistakes and miscalculations.

proper way to elicit information from a group is not by starting with a public discussion but by confidentially collecting each person's judgment.

Start with an estimate of average GPA. Determine the GPA that matches your impression of the evidence. Estimate the correlation between your evidence and GPA.

A bat and ball cost $1.10. The bat costs one dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

could have had a skiing accident during adolescence that left her slightly impaired, and so on. Recall that the correlation between two measures—in the present case reading age and GPA—is equal to the proportion of shared factors among their determinants. What is your best guess about that proportion? My most optimistic guess is about 30%.

The more extreme the original score, the more regression we expect, because an extremely good score suggests a very lucky day. The regressive prediction is reasonable, but its accuracy is not guaranteed.

investment decisions. Why be concerned with gossip? Because it is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable

Meehl discovered that clinicians and other professionals are distressingly weak in what they often see as their unique strength: the ability to integrate information.

Relying on causal thinking about a single case is a source of predictable errors. Taking the statistical view, which we will also call the outside view, is a way to avoid these errors.

It is difficult to imagine people lining up at airport bookstores to buy a book that enthusiastically describes the practices of business leaders who, on average, do somewhat better than chance. Consumers have a hunger for a clear message about the determinants of success and failure in business, and they need stories that offer a sense of understanding, however illusory.

We often fail to allow for the possibility that evidence that should be critical to our judgment is missing—what we see is all there is.

As expected, the effect of facial competence on voting is about three times larger for information-poor and TV-prone voters than for others who are better informed and watch less television. Evidently

The perception of intention and emotion is irresistible; only people afflicted by autism do not experience it.

They found that putting the participants in a good mood before the test by having them think happy thoughts more than doubled accuracy. An even more striking result is that unhappy subjects were completely incapable of performing the intuitive task accurately; their guesses were no better than random. Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.

The truth is, as Jacoby and many followers have shown, that the name David Stenbill will look familiar when you see it because you will see it more clearly. Words that you have seen before become easier to see again—you can identify them better than other words when they are shown very briefly or masked by noise, and you will be quicker (by a few hundredths of a second) to read them than to read other words. In

which the experimental participant leaned her head on a chin-and-forehead rest and stared at a camera while listening to prerecorded information and answering questions on the recorded beats of a metronome. The beats triggered an infrared flash every second, causing a

However, attention can be moved away from an unwanted focus, primarily by focusing intently on another target.

the preference for causal thinking also contributes to the neglect of noise as a source of error, because noise is a fundamentally statistical notion.

can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

The technical definition of heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions.