Quotes from Daniel Kahneman

Those who avoid the sin of intellectual sloth could be called "engaged." They are more alert, more intellectually active, less willing to be satisfied with superficially attractive answers, more skeptical about their intuitions.

If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another substitution.

People who are poor think like traders, but the dynamics are quite different. Unlike traders, the poor are not indifferent to the differences between gaining and giving up. Their problem is that all their choices are between losses. Money that is spent on one good is the loss of another good that could have been purchased instead. For the poor, costs are losses.

Highly intelligent women tend to marry men who are less intelligent than they are.

Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.

In a state of flow, however, maintaining focused attention on these absorbing activities requires no exertion of self-control, thereby freeing resources to be directed to the task at hand.

The evidence of priming studies suggests that reminding people of their mortality increases the appeal of authoritarian ideas, which may become reassuring in the context of the terror of death.

As cognitive scientists have emphasized in recent years, cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain.

An inability to be guided by a "healthy fear" of bad consequences is a disastrous flaw.

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.

In essence, the optimistic style involves taking credit for successes but little blame for failures.

luck plays a large role in every story of success; it is almost always easy to identify a small change in the story that would have turned a remarkable achievement into a mediocre outcome.

The gorilla study illustrates two important facts about our minds: we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

Finally, the illusions of validity and skill are supported by a powerful professional culture. We know that people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers. Given the professional culture of the financial community, it is not surprising that large numbers of individuals in that world believe themselves to be among the chosen few who can do what they believe others cannot.

A compelling narrative fosters an illusion of inevitability.

declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.

the proper way to elicit information from a group is not by starting with a public discussion but by confidentially collecting each person's judgment. This procedure makes better use of the knowledge available to members of the group than the common practice of open discussion.

The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the body, and effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the currency of glucose.

Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good. The

You have no compelling moral intuitions to guide you in solving that problem. Your moral feelings are attached to frames, to descriptions of reality rather than to reality itself.

A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world (or of any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.

It is useful to remember, however, that neglecting valid stereotypes inevitably results in suboptimal judgments. Resistance to stereotyping is a laudable moral position, but the simplistic idea that the resistance is costless is wrong. The costs are worth paying to achieve a better society, but denying that the costs exist, while satisfying to the soul and politically correct, is not scientifically defensible.

Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality.

People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations.