Daniel Kahneman Quotes

People who face a difficult question often answer an easier one instead, without realizing it.

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.

Mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions

Such being the nature of mental life, the business of psychology is primarily to describe in detail the various forms which attention or conation assumes upon the different levels of that life.

People negotiate their way around how a human mind works and find blind points. That's how people steal effectively.

The systematic experimental study of reproducible errors of human reasoning, and what these errors reveal about underlying mental processes, is known as the heuristics and biases program in cognitive psychology. This program has made discoveries highly relevant to assessors of global catastrophic risks.

Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?

When the mind is full of any one subject, that subject seems to recur with extraordinary frequency - it appears to pursue or to meet us at every turn: in every conversation that we hear in every book we open, in every newspaper we take up, the reigning idea recurs; and then we are surprised, and exclaim at these wonderful coincidences.

When you are thinking something, you have the feeling that the thoughts do nothing except inform you the way things are and then you choose to do something and you do it. That's what people generally assume. But actually, the way you think determines the way you're going to do things. Then you don't notice a result comes back, or you don't see it as a result of what you've done, or even less do you see it as a result of how you were thinking. Is that clear?

They arose in my mind as 'given' things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew. An absorbing, though continually interrupted labour (especially, even apart from the necessities of life, since the mind would wing to the other pole and spread itself on the linguistics): yet always I had the sense of recording what was already 'there', somewhere: not of 'inventing'.

The mind is the cutting edge of the evolving event system.

How you think determines how you act. How you act in turn determines how others react to you.

But time has a way of stealthily deciding a person’s mind without her conscious knowledge, and as she studied and procrastinated, Poison found one day that she had come to know her choice.

All your behavior results from the thoughts that precede it.

Problems exist only in the human mind.

The mind is an enchanting thing is an enchanted thing, like the glaze on a katydid-wing subdivided by sun till the nettings are legion.

The only way to study the mind is to get at facts, and then intellect will arrange them and deduce the principles.

Subconscious minds are no less fallible than the objective mind.

What you do comes from what you think.

I would suggest that today, we know about as much concerning the human mind as we knew about the galaxy in 1300.

Paradigms power perceptions, perceptions power emotions.

Thought rules mankind.

Even intellectuals should have learned by now that objective rationality is not the default position of the human mind, much less the bedrock of human affairs.

The errors of the observer come from the qualities of the human mind.