Quotes from Daniel Kahneman

People just hate the idea of losing. Any loss, even a small one, is just so terrible to contemplate that they compensate by buying insurance, including totally absurd policies like air travel.

We have associations to things. We have, you know, we have associations to tables and to - and to dogs and to cats and to Harvard professors, and that's the way the mind works. It's an association machine.

Organizations may be better able to tame optimism than individuals are.

We associate leadership with decisiveness. That perception of leadership pushes people to make decisions fairly quickly, lest they be seen as dithering and indecisive.

It's clear that policymakers and economists are going to be interested in the measurement of well-being primarily as it correlates with health; they also want to know whether researchers can validate subjective responses with physiological indices.

When you look at the books about well-being, you see one word - it's happiness. People do not distinguish.

People should be conscious of the large contribution made by anything that gets people together easily in the reduction of loneliness and emotional well-being.

My interest in well-being evolved from my interest in decision making - from raising the question of whether people know what they will want in the future and whether the things that people want for themselves will make them happy.

Alternative descriptions of the same reality evoke different emotions and different associations.

Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it.

We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.

Optimistic people play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are inventors, entrepreneurs, political and military leaders - not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks.

The brains of humans contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.

It's not a case of: 'Read this book and then you'll think differently. I've written this book, and I don't think differently.

We're beautiful devices. The devices work well; we're all experts in what we do. But when the mechanism fails, those failures can tell you a lot about how the mind works.

We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories, our memory tells us stories. That is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.

Clearly, the decision-making that we rely on in society is fallible. It's highly fallible, and we should know that.

The experiencing self lives its life continuously. It has moments of experience, one after the other.

I used to hold a unitary view, in which I proposed that only experienced happiness matters, and that life satisfaction is a fallible estimate of true happiness.

It's very easy for trusted companies to mislead naive customers, and life insurance companies are trusted.

It was always assumed I would be a professor. I grew up thinking it.

Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.

Banks are run by executives, and executives protect themselves, and that does not always mean that banks are going to behave rationally.

In a rising market, enough of your bad ideas will pay off so that you'll never learn that you should have fewer ideas.