Daniel Kahneman is an Israeli psychologist and economist notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. His empirical findings challenge the assumption of human rationality prevailing in modern economic theory. These Daniel Kahneman quotes will motivate you.
Best Daniel Kahneman Quotes
- “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “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.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
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“The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “We can’t live in a state of perpetual doubt, so we make up the best story possible and we live as if the story were true.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “Every night for the next week, set aside ten minutes before you go to sleep. Write down three things that went well today and why they went well…Writing about why the positive events in your life happened may seem awkward at first, but please stick with it for one week. It will get easier. The odds are that you will be less depressed, happier, and addicted to this exercise six months from now.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “An investment said to have an 80% chance of success sounds far more attractive than one with a 20% chance of failure. The mind can’t easily recognize that they are the same.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
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“We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “When people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “If owning stocks is a long-term project for you, following their changes constantly is a very, very bad idea. It’s the worst possible thing you can do because people are so sensitive to short-term losses. If you count your money every day, you’ll be miserable.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
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“True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “The concept of loss aversion is certainly the most significant contribution of psychology to behavioral economics.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “If people are failing, they look inept. If people are succeeding, they look strong and good and competent. That’s the ‘halo effect.’ Your first impression of a thing sets up your subsequent beliefs. If the company looks inept to you, you may assume everything else they do is inept.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
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“To better avoid errors, you should talk to people who disagree with you and you should talk to people who are not in the same emotional situation you are.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “If people can construct a simple and coherent story, they will feel confident regardless of how well grounded it is in reality.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “People like leaders who look like they are dominant, optimistic, friendly to their friends, and quick on the trigger when it comes to enemies. They like boldness and despise the appearance of timidity and protracted doubt.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “Happiness is determined by factors like your health, your family relationships and friendships, and above all by feeling that you are in control of how you spend your time.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
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“The evidence is unequivocal, there’s a great deal more luck than skill in people getting very rich.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “The brains of humans contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “Establish a closing ritual. Know when to stop working. Try to end each work day the same way, too. Straighten up your desk. Back up your computer. Make a list of what you need to do tomorrow.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
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“Mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “Spend some effort in figuring out why each decision did or did not pan out. Doing that systematically is key: really try to question the way you make decisions, and improve it.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “When everybody in a group is susceptible to similar biases, groups are inferior to individuals, because groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.” ~ Daniel Kahneman Quotes
- “Overconfidence is a powerful source of illusions, primarily determined by the quality and coherence of the story that you can construct, not by its validity.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
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“The amount of success it takes for leaders to become overconfident isn’t terribly large.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public’s mind. It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media. Because public interest is most easily aroused by dramatic events and by celebrities, media feeding frenzies are common” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “Many ideas happen to us. We have intuition, we have feeling, we have emotion, all of that happens, we don’t decide to do it. We don’t control it.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “We’re not aware of changing our minds even when we do change our minds. And most people, after they change their minds, reconstruct their past opinion – they believe they always thought that.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “It’s nonsense to say money doesn’t buy happiness, but people exaggerate the extent to which more money can buy more happiness.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “Alternative descriptions of the same reality evoke different emotions and different associations.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
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“That’s one of the real dangers of leader selection in many organizations: leaders are selected for overconfidence.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness. A policy to reduce the loneliness of the elderly would certainly reduce suffering.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “After a crisis we tell ourselves we understand why it happened and maintain the illusion that the world is understandable. In fact, we should accept the world is incomprehensible much of the time.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “The ‘Instagram Generation’ now experiences the present as an anticipated memory” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
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“Experts don’t know exactly where the boundaries of their expertise are.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “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.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “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.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “If there is time to reflect, slowing down is likely to be a good idea.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “So your emotional state really has a lot to do with what you’re thinking about and what you’re paying attention to.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
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“Some achieve a reputation for great successes when in fact all they have done is take chances that reasonable people wouldn’t take.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “Facts that challenge basic assumptions-and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem-are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them.” ~ Daniel Kahneman Quotes
- “When you analyze happiness, it turns out that the way you spend your time is extremely important.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “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.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “One of the major biases in risky decision making is optimism. Optimism is a source of high-risk thinking.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
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“Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “The planning fallacy is that you make a plan, which is usually a best-case scenario. Then you assume that the outcome will follow your plan, even when you should know better.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “There are domains in which expertise is not possible. Stock picking is a good example. And in long-term political strategic forecasting, it’s been shown that experts are just not better than a dice-throwing monkey.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
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“People are really happier with friends than they are with their families or their spouse or their child.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “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.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “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.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you’re thinking about it.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
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“People who face a difficult question often answer an easier one instead, without realizing it.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “The psychologist, Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “However, optimism is highly valued, socially and in the market; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth-tellers. One of the lessons of the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession is that there are periods in which competition, among experts and among organizations, creates powerful forces that favor a collective blindness to risk and uncertainty.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “People’s mood is really determined primarily by their genetic make-up and personality, and in the second place by their immediate context, and only in the third and fourth place by worries and concerns and other things like that.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
- “Most of the moments of our life – and I calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long; that means that you know, in a life there are about 600 million of them; in a month, there are about 600,000 – most of them don’t leave a trace.” ~ Daniel Kahneman
