450 Quotes by 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.

It's very easy for trusted companies to mislead naive customers, and life insurance companies are trusted.

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

Alternative descriptions of the same reality evoke different emotions and different associations.

The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.

Most successful pundits are selected for being opinionated, because it's interesting, and the penalties for incorrect predictions are negligible. You can make predictions, and a year later people won't remember them.

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.

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.

A person who has not made peace with his losses is likely to accept gambles that would be unacceptable to him otherwise.