Quotes from Daniel Kahneman

In another experiment, people are first depleted by a task in which they eat virtuous foods such as radishes and celery while resisting the temptation to indulge in chocolate and rich cookies. Later, these people will give up earlier than normal when faced with a difficult cognitive task.

The most coherent stories are not necessarily the most probable, but they are plausible, and the notions of coherence, plausibility, and probability are easily confused by the unwary.

I'm in a very good mood today, and my System 2 is weaker than usual. I should be extra careful.

Much like the electricity meter outside your house or apartment, the pupils offer an index of the current rate at which mental energy is used.

we humans constantly fool ourselves by constructing flimsy accounts of the past and believing they are true.

economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.

We soon knew that we had overcome a serious case of theory-induced blindness, because the idea we had rejected now seemed not only false but absurd.

prepared for the future as you could be. An odd feature of what happened is that your System 1 treated the mere conjunction of

When you are in a state of cognitive ease, you are probably in a good mood, like what you see, believe what you hear, trust your intuitions, and feel that the current situation is comfortably familiar.

book titled Rationality and the Reflective Mind

Optimism is normal, but some fortunate people are more optimistic than the rest of us. If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias, you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person—you already feel fortunate. An optimistic attitude is largely inherited, and it is part of a general disposition for well-being, which may also include a preference for seeing the bright side of everything.

the frame that has traditionally been used in the United States—miles per gallon—provides very poor guidance to the decisions of both individuals and policy makers.

Good stories provide a simple and coherent account of people's actions and intentions.

But our focus is on judgments in which variability is undesirable. System noise is a problem of systems, which are organizations, not markets.

Consistent overweighting of improbable outcomes—a feature of intuitive decision making—eventually leads to inferior outcomes.

The neglect of duration combined with the peak-end rule causes a bias that favors a short period of intense joy over a long period of moderate happiness.

This remarkable priming phenomenon—the influencing of an action by the idea—is known as the ideomotor effect.

anyone who ignores base rates and the quality of evidence in probability assessments will certainly make mistakes.

Unfortunately, she tends to say the first thing that comes into her mind. She probably also has trouble delaying gratification. Weak System 2.

Intuitive errors are normally much more frequent among ego-depleted people, and the drinkers of Splenda showed the expected depletion effect. On the other hand, the glucose drinkers were not depleted. Restoring the level of available sugar in the brain had prevented the deterioration of performance.

manipulations that increase cognitive ease (priming, a clear font, pre-exposing words) all increase the tendency to see the words as linked.

Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public's mind. It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media.

We were not the first to notice that people become risk seeking when all their options are bad, but theory-induced blindness had prevailed. Because the dominant theory did not provide a plausible way to accommodate different attitudes to risk for gains and losses, the fact that the attitudes differed had to be ignored.

A simple rule can help: before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position. This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of knowledge and opinion in the group.