42 Quotes from Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman, the father of modern behavioural science, graced this world with his wonderful mind for 90 years.
Awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002, Daniel Kahneman profoundly altered our understanding of human decision-making. His groundbreaking book, 'Thinking, Fast and Slow,' played a major role in debunking the traditional economic theory that humans are rational agents who only pursue their self-interest.
His work with Amos Tversky, particularly their 1973 paper "Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases," introduced the concept of anchoring, and in 2015, The Economist ranked him as the seventh most influential economist in the world.
Sadly, Daniel Kahneman passed away on 27 March 2024, and to honour the vast variety of his thoughts, we have collected 42 of his quotes. We hope you find them delightful and enlightening.
"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."
"Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it."
"If there is time to reflect, slowing down is likely to be a good idea."
"We're blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know."
"We're generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments."
"True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes."
"If people are failing, they look inept. If people are succeeding, they look strong and good and competent."
"We think, each of us, that we're much more rational than we are."
"By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases."
"So your emotional state really has a lot to do with what you're thinking about and what you're paying attention to."
"Courage is willingness to take the risk once you know the odds."
"People are very complex. And for a psychologist, you get fascinated by the complexity of human beings."
"Negotiations over a shrinking pie are especially difficult because they require an allocation of losses."
"There's a lot of randomness in the decisions that people make."
"An investment said to have an 80% chance of success sounds far more attractive than one with a 20% chance of failure."
"If owning stocks is a long-term project for you, following their changes constantly is a very bad idea."
"Experienced happiness refers to your feelings, to how happy you are as you live your life."
"Slow thinking has the feeling of something you do. It's deliberate."
"People just hate the idea of losing. Any loss, even a small one, is just so terrible to contemplate."
"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."
"The planning fallacy is that you make a plan, which is usually a best-case scenario."
"All of us would be better investors if we just made fewer decisions."
"For many people, commuting is the worst part of the day."
"It's nonsense to say money doesn't buy happiness, but people exaggerate the extent to which more money can buy more happiness."
"One thing we have lost, that we had in the past, is a sense of progress."
"People are really happier with friends than they are with their families or their spouse or their child."
"When you analyze happiness, it turns out that the way you spend your time is extremely important."
"It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness."
"If you think in terms of major losses, you tend to be very risk-averse."
"Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion."
"Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers."
"Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do."
"Policy makers, like most people, feel that they already know all the psychology they need for their decisions."
"Optimism is normal, but some fortunate people are more optimistic than the rest of us."
"If individuals are rational, there is no need to protect them against their own choices."
"We don't see very far in the future, we are very focused on one idea at a time."
"We think of our future as anticipated memories."
"In essence, the optimistic style involves taking credit for successes but little blame for failures."
"The average investor's return is significantly lower than market indices due primarily to market timing."
"People's mood is really determined primarily by their genetic make-up and personality."
"Nobody would say, 'I'm voting for this guy because he's got the stronger chin,' but that, in fact, is partly what happens."
"It's a wonderful thing to be optimistic. It keeps you healthy and it keeps you resilient."
