450 Quotes by Daniel Kahneman

You’re surprised by something, but you don’t really know what surprised you; you recognize someone, but you don’t really know what cues cause you to recognize that person.

All of us roughly know what memory is. I mean, memory is sort of the storage of the past. It’s the storage of our personal experiences. It’s a very big deal.

Not all illusions are visual. There are illusions of thought, which we call cognitive illusions.

Subjective confidence in a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that this judgment is correct. Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but 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 sunk-cost fallacy keeps people for too long in poor jobs, unhappy marriages, and unpromising research projects.

Widespread fears, even if they are unreasonable, should not be ignored by policy makers. Rational or not, fear is painful and debilitating, and policy makers must endeavor to protect the public from fear, not only from real dangers.

The only test of rationality is not whether a person’s beliefs and preferences are reasonable, but whether they are internally consistent.

We know that the French are very different from the Americans in their satisfaction with life. They’re much less satisfied. Americans are pretty high up there, while the French are quite low – the world champions in life satisfaction are actually the Danes.

The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time. Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?