Daniel Kahneman: We are prone to an Illusion of Control

“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, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“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, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Well-Being: Foundations of Hedonic Psychology

“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, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“I have always believed that scientific research is another domain where a form of optimism is essential to success: I have yet to meet a successful scientist who lacks the ability to exaggerate the importance of what he or she is doing, and I believe that someone who lacks a delusional sense of significance will wilt in the face of repeated experiences of multiple small failures and rare successes, the fate of most researchers.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“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, Thinking, Fast and Slow

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

“This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.
These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“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.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“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, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“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, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“We focus on our goal, anchor on our plan, and neglect relevant base rates, exposing ourselves to the planning fallacy. We focus on what we want to do and can do, neglecting the plans and skills of others. Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck. We are therefore prone to an illusion of control. We focus on what we know and neglect what we do not know, which makes us overly confident in our beliefs.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Familiarity breeds liking.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appear obvious only after the fact.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“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, Thinking, Fast and Slow