Quotes from Daniel Kahneman

The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own.

Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers. It would be useful for us to acknowledge that fact.

We have no reason to expect the quality of intuition to improve with the importance of the problem. Perhaps the contrary: high-stake problems are likely to involve powerful emotions and strong impulses to action.

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.

We're generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments.

Friends are sometimes a big help when they share your feelings. In the context of decisions, the friends who will serve you best are those who understand your feelings but are not overly impressed by them.

The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved.

Hindsight bias makes surprises vanish.

Adaptation seems to be, to a substantial extent, a process of reallocating your attention.

Managers think of themselves as captains of a ship on a stormy sea. Risk for them is danger, but they are fighting it, very controlled.

I would not advise people to buy a car or house without making a list. You will probably improve your intuitions by making a list and then sleeping on it.

We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.

We're blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We're not designed to know how little we know.

People are very complex. And for a psychologist, you get fascinated by the complexity of human beings, and that is what I have lived with, you know, in my career all of my life, is the complexity of human beings.

We have a very narrow view of what is going on.

There is general agreement among researchers that nearly all stock pickers, whether they know it or not-and few of them do-are playing a game of chance.

The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.

The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.

An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true.

People exaggerate their confidence in their plans - something we call the planning fallacy... The existence of the plan tends to induce overconfidence.

We don't choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. Even when we think about the future, we don't think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories.

Below an income of … $60,000 a year, people are unhappy, and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get. Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. … Money does not buy you experiential happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.

Experienced happiness refers to your feelings, to how happy you are as you live your life. In contrast, the satisfaction of the remembering self refers to your feelings when you think about your life.

When you analyze happiness, it turns out that the way you spend your time is extremely important.