Quotes from Daniel Kahneman

If the content of a screen saver on an irrelevant computer can affect your willingness to help strangers without your being aware of it, how free are you?

Companies with pronounceable names do better than others for the first week after the stock is issued

As in many other games, moving first is an advantage in single-issue negotiations—for example, when price is the only issue to be settled between a buyer and a seller. As you may have experienced when negotiating for the first time in a bazaar, the initial anchor has a powerful effect. My

The question that the executive faced (should I invest in Ford stock?) was difficult, but the answer to an easier and related question (do I like Ford cars?) came readily to his mind and determined his choice. This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

A good mood is a signal that things are generally going well, the environment is safe, and it is all right to let one's guard down. A bad mood indicates that things are not going very well, there may be a threat, and vigilance is required. Cognitive ease is both a cause and a consequence of a pleasant feeling.

Rationality is logical coherence—reasonable or not.

Risk" does not exist "out there," independent of our minds and culture, waiting to be measured. Human beings have invented the concept of "risk" to help them understand and cope with the dangers and uncertainties of life. Although these dangers are real, there is no such thing as "real risk" or "objective risk.

Contrary to the rules of philosophers of science, who advise testing hypotheses by trying to refute them, people (and scientists, quite often) seek data that are likely to be compatible with the beliefs they currently hold. The confirmatory bias of System 1 favors uncritical acceptance of suggestions and exaggeration of the likelihood of extreme and improbable events. If

We all have our genre. Some people live a tragedy, others inhabit a never-ending religious drama, some approach life as if it were an action film, and not a few act as if in a comedy. But in the end, they are all just stories.

Changing one's mind about human nature is hard work, and changing one's mind for the worse about oneself is even harder.

people who make judgments behave as if a true value exists, regardless of whether it does.

The halo effect helps keep explanatory narratives simple and coherent by exaggerating the consistency of evaluations: good people do only good things and bad people are all bad. The statement "Hitler loved dogs and little children" is shocking no matter how many times you hear it, because any trace of kindness in someone so evil violates the expectations set up by the halo effect. Inconsistencies reduce the ease of our thoughts and the clarity of our feelings.

correlation and regression are not two concepts—they are different perspectives on the same concept. The general rule is straightforward but has surprising consequences: whenever the correlation between two scores is imperfect, there will be regression to the mean.

The evidence of priming studies suggests that reminding people of their mortality increases the appeal of authoritarian ideas

cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain.

Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous—and it is also essential.

When physicians are under time pressure, they are apparently more inclined to choose a quick-fix solution, despite its serious downsides.

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.

people form opinions and make choices that directly express their feelings and their basic tendency to approach or avoid, often without knowing that they are doing so. The

only test of rationality is not whether a person's beliefs and preferences are reasonable, but whether they are internally consistent. A rational person can believe in ghosts so long as all her other beliefs are consistent with the existence of ghosts. A rational person can prefer being hated over being loved, so long as his preferences are consistent. Rationality is logical coherence—reasonable or not.

We must be inclined to believe it because it has been repeated so often, but let's think it through again.

Baumeister's group has repeatedly found that an 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. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion. In

Bernoulli observed that most people dislike risk (the chance of receiving the lowest possible outcome), and if they are offered a choice between a gamble and an amount equal to its expected value they will pick the sure thing. In fact a risk-averse decision maker will choose a sure thing that is less than expected value, in effect paying a premium to avoid the uncertainty.

It is normally easy and actually quite pleasant to walk and think at the same time, but at the extremes these activities appear to compete for the limited resources of System 2. You can confirm this claim by a simple experiment. While walking comfortably with a friend, ask him to compute 23 × 78 in his head, and to do so immediately. He will almost certainly stop in his tracks.