Daniel Kahneman Quotes

When like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts towards extreme versions of their common beliefs.

When everybody in a group is susceptible to similar biases, groups are inferior to individuals, because groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.

The thing that can happen in a TV room is you can get 'teamthink': you can all go down a crazy path together.

As soon as you put men together, they somehow sink, corporatively, below the level of the worst of the individuals composing it. Collect scholars on a club committee, or men of science on a jury; all their virtues vanish, and their vices pop out, reinforced by the self-confidence which the power of numbers is bound to bestow.

The psychology of committees is a special case of the psychology of mobs.

The crowd may be influenced easily, largely because it is a crowd.

It is an accepted commonplace in psychology that the spiritual level of people acting as a crowd is far lower than the mean of each individual's intelligence or morality.

None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world.

I think better of our behaviour as individuals than I do when we see ourselves as members of a group. It's when people start forming groups that we have to watch our backs.

When like-minded people, talking mostly with one another, end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk... If you put a bunch of rebels in a room and ask them to discuss rebellion, they'll get more extreme.

But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions, and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, and unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think.

Conformity is inevitable when folks huddle together in rebellion.

The individual is not a killer, but the group is, and by identifying with it the individual is transformed into a killer.

Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups.

A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them pertains to thought.

… when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an Assembly can a perfect production be expected?

The aggregate of everybody's emotion, it's such a powerful thing. You can see it in the Trump rallies, where people - I just know, in their living rooms, would be better people - are driven to the worst possibilities by the bloodlust in a crowd. It just gets ginned up, and they're outside of themselves.

People with the same information often make the same decisions.

Trends suck you in, anywhere in the world, patterns you don't even see. It's so easy. Look at Wall Street - look at any sports team in the world - there are trends. Look at exercising. Nothing but patterns and trends, and that's what I started to see. Like a flock of birds all flying in one direction.

An audience can become a mob very easily.

My favorite Asimov works were the 'Foundation' books because the concept, at the time, was crazy, but psycho-history has now turned out to be an actual real thing. You can predict the actions of large groups of people once you understand, for lack of a better way to put it, their way of existing and their prejudices.

Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.

The important thing about groupthink is that it works not so much by censoring dissent as by making dissent seem somehow improbable.

Who decides when the applause should die down? It seems like it's a group decision; everyone begins to say to themselves at the same time, "Well, okay, that's enough of that."

Conformity is the ape of harmony.