Daniel Kahneman Thinking Quotations

Policy makers, like most people, normally feel that they already know all the psychology and all the sociology they are likely to need for their decisions. I don't think they are right, but that's the way it is.

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

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.

Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.

So your emotional state really has a lot to do with what you're thinking about and what you're paying attention to.

Most of the time, we think fast. And most of the time we're really expert at what we're doing, and most of the time, what we do is right.

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.

The experiencing self lives in the moment; it is the one that answers the question, 'Does it hurt?' or 'What were you thinking about just now?' The remembering self is the one that answers questions about the overall evaluation of episodes or periods of one's life, such as a stay in the hospital or the years since one left college.

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.

It doesn't take many observations to think you've spotted a trend, and it's probably not a trend at all.

Slow thinking has the feeling of something you do. It's deliberate.

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

The most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast.

Ten minutes of a smartphone in front of your nose is about the equivalent of an hour long walk in bright daylight. Imagine going for an hour long walk in bright daylight and then thinking, "Now I'll get some sleep." It ain't going to happen.

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.

One of the major biases in risky decision making is optimism. Optimism is a source of high-risk thinking.

When people think of the outcomes of their decisions, they think much more short term than that. They think in terms of gains and losses.

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.

We deeply want to be led by people who know what they're doing and who don't have to think about it too much.

What happens with fear is that probability doesn't matter very much. That is, once I have raised the possibility that something terrible can happen to your child, even though the possibility is remote, you may find it very difficult to think of anything else. Emotion becomes dominant.

People are very good [at] thinking about agents. The mind is set really beautifully to think about agents. Agents have traits. Agents have behaviors. We understand agents. We form global impression of their personalities. We are really not very good at remembering sentences where the subject of the sentence is an abstract notion.