Quotes from Daniel Kahneman

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.

The bold implication of this idea is that the effects of ego depletion could be undone by ingesting glucose, and Baumeister and his colleagues have confirmed this hypothesis in several experiments.

As we navigate our lives, we normally allow ourselves to be guided by impressions and feelings, and the confidence we have in our intuitive beliefs and preferences is usually justified. But not always. We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are.

It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern. WYSIATI

You may believe that you are subtler, more insightful, and more nuanced than the linear caricature of your thinking. But in fact, you are mostly noisier.

Amos liked the idea of an adjust-and-anchor heuristic as a strategy for estimating uncertain quantities: start from an anchoring number, assess whether it is too high or too low, and gradually adjust your estimate by mentally "moving" from the anchor. The adjustment typically ends prematurely, because people stop when they are no longer certain that they should move farther.

It was beyond imagining that bad font influences judgments of truth and improves cognitive performance, or that an emotional response to the cognitive ease of a triad of words mediates impressions of coherence.

The associative machinery seeks causes. The difficulty we have with statistical regularities is that they call for a different approach. Instead of focusing on how the event at hand came to be, the statistical view relates it to what could have happened instead. Nothing in particular caused it to be what it is—chance selected it from among its alternatives. Our predilection for causal thinking exposes us to serious mistakes in evaluating the randomness of truly random events.

The core of his argument is that rationality should be distinguished from intelligence.

The mind that makes up narratives about the past is a sense-making organ. When an unpredicted event occurs, we immediately adjust our view of the world to accommodate the surprise.

If you have recently seen or heard the word EAT, you are temporarily more likely to complete the word fragment SO_P as SOUP than as SOAP. The opposite would happen, of course, if you had just seen WASH. We call this a priming effect and say that the idea of EAT primes the idea of SOUP, and that WASH primes SOAP.

It is tempting to explain entrepreneurial optimism by wishful thinking, but emotion is only part of the story. Cognitive biases play an important role, notably the System 1 feature WYSIATI.

In this view, people often (but not always) take on risky projects because they are overly optimistic about the odds they face. I will return to this idea several times in this book—it probably contributes to an explanation of why people litigate, why they start wars, and why they open small businesses.

His ego was depleted after a long day of meetings. So he just turned to standard operating procedures instead of thinking through the problem.

Modern tests of working memory require the individual to switch repeatedly between two demanding tasks, retaining the results of one operation while performing the other.

The stubbornness of an intelligent person is seen as likely to be justified and may actually evoke respect, but intelligence in an envious and stubborn person makes him more dangerous.

For the insurance company, the illusion of agreement was shattered only by the noise audit. How had the leaders of the company remained unaware of their noise problem? There are several possible answers here, but one that seems to play a large role in many settings is simply the discomfort of disagreement.

Level noise is when judges show different levels of severity. Pattern noise is when they disagree with one another on which defendants deserve more severe or more lenient treatment. And part of pattern noise is occasion noise—when judges disagree with themselves.

We could ask about anything; the only constraint was that the questionnaire should include at least one mention of fish, to make it pertinent to the mission of the department. This went on for many months, and we treated ourselves to an orgy of data collection.

if you follow your intuition, you will more often than not err by misclassifying a random event as systematic. We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.

While your attention is focused on the digits, you are offered a choice between two desserts: a sinful chocolate cake and a virtuous fruit salad. The evidence suggests that you would be more likely to select the tempting chocolate cake when your mind is loaded with digits. System 1 has more influence on behavior when System 2 is busy, and it has a sweet tooth.

many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions.

One of the main functions of System 2 is to monitor and control thoughts and actions "suggested" by System 1, allowing some to be expressed directly in behavior and suppressing or modifying others.

the evidence from more than fifty years of research is conclusive: for a large majority of fund managers, the selection of stocks is more like rolling dice than like playing poker.