Quotes from Daniel Kahneman

Our predilection for causal thinking exposes us to serious mistakes in evaluating the randomness of truly random events.

and want is difficult at the best of times, and especially difficult when we most need to do it, but we can benefit

We will not learn to understand regression from experience. Even when a regression is identified, as we saw in the story of the flight instructors, it will be given a causal interpretation that is almost always wrong.

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

act calm and kind regardless of how you feel

Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, explored these so-called expert predictions in a landmark twenty-year study, which he published in his 2005 book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?

The initial enthusiasm for the idea in the Ministry of Education had waned by the time the text was delivered and it was never used.

fairness concerns are economically significant, a fact we had suspected but did not prove. Employers who violate rules of fairness are punished by reduced productivity, and merchants who follow unfair pricing policies can expect to lose sales. People who learned from a new catalog that the merchant was now charging less for a product that they had recently bought at a higher price reduced their future purchases from that supplier by 15%, an average loss of $90 per customer.

people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers.

Systematic errors are known as biases, and they recur predictably in particular circumstances.

To teach students any psychology they did not know before, you must surprise them. But which surprise will do? Nisbett and Borgida found that when they presented their students with a surprising statistical fact, the students managed to learn nothing at all. But when the students were surprised by individual cases—two nice people who had not helped—they immediately made the generalization and inferred that helping is more difficult than they had thought.

The defining feature of System 2, in this story, is that its operations are effortful, and one of its main characteristics is laziness, a reluctance to invest more effort than is strictly necessary. As a consequence, the thoughts and actions that System 2 believes it has chosen are often

Two men, neither of whom had a criminal record, were convicted for cashing counterfeit checks in the amounts of $58.40 and $35.20, respectively. The first man was sentenced to fifteen years, the second to 30 days.

counties are different from other counties for a reason, that there must be a cause that explains this difference. As we shall see, however

and want is difficult at the best of times, and especially

Errors are bound to occur when a judgment of similarity is substituted for a judgment of probability

effort of will or self-control is tiring; if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around.

To get pleasure from eating, for example, you must notice that you are doing it. We found that French and American women spent about the same amount of time eating, but for Frenchwomen, eating was twice as likely to be focal as it was for American women. The Americans were far more prone to combine eating with other activities, and their pleasure from eating was correspondingly diluted.

The main obstacle is that subjective confidence is determined by the coherence of the story one has constructed, not by the quality and amount of the information that supports it.

For embezzlement actions that were similar to one another, one man was sentenced to 117 days in prison, while another was sentenced to 20 years.

Venn diagrams apply only to probability, not to similarity. Hence the predictable logical error that many people make.

They keep making the same mistake: predicting rare events from weak evidence. When the evidence is weak, one should stick with the base rates.

The psychologist Paul Slovic has proposed an affect heuristic in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world.

The question we face is whether this candidate can succeed. The question we seem to answer is whether she interviews well. Let's not substitute.