Daniel Kahneman People Quotations

People's mood is really determined primarily by their genetic make-up and personality, and in the second place by their immediate context, and only in the third and fourth place by worries and concerns and other things like that.

People like leaders who look like they are dominant, optimistic, friendly to their friends, and quick on the trigger when it comes to enemies. They like boldness and despise the appearance of timidity and protracted doubt.

Negotiations over a shrinking pie are especially difficult because they require an allocation of losses. People tend to be much more easygoing when they bargain over an expanding pie.

Intuitive diagnosis is reliable when people have a lot of relevant feedback. But people are very often willing to make intuitive diagnoses even when they're very likely to be wrong.

Policy makers, like most people, normally feel that they already know all the psychology and all the sociology they are likely to need for their decisions. I don't think they are right, but that's the way it is.

If people do not know what is going to make them better off or give them pleasure, then the idea that you can trust people to do what will give them pleasure becomes questionable.

When people evaluate their life, they compare themselves to a standard of what a successful life is, and it turns out that standard tends to be universal: People in Togo and Denmark have the same idea of what a good life is, and a lot of that has to do with money and material prosperity.

If people are failing, they look inept. If people are succeeding, they look strong and good and competent. That's the 'halo effect.' Your first impression of a thing sets up your subsequent beliefs. If the company looks inept to you, you may assume everything else they do is inept.

It's nonsense to say money doesn't buy happiness, but people exaggerate the extent to which more money can buy more happiness.

You know, the standard state for people is 'mildly pleasant.' Negative emotions are quite rare, and extremely positive emotions are rare. But people are mildly pleased most of the time, they're mildly tired a lot of the time, and they wish they were somewhere else a substantial part of the time - but mostly they're mildly pleased.

Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.

People should be conscious of the large contribution made by anything that gets people together easily in the reduction of loneliness and emotional well-being.

When people talk of the economy being strong, they don't seem to feel that they, too, are better off.

There's a lot of randomness in the decisions that people make.

People who know math understand what other mortals understand, but other mortals do not understand them. This asymmetry gives them a presumption of superior ability.

People are very complex. And for a psychologist, you get fascinated by the complexity of human beings, and that is what I have lived with, you know, in my career all of my life, is the complexity of human beings.

My interest in well-being evolved from my interest in decision making - from raising the question of whether people know what they will want in the future and whether the things that people want for themselves will make them happy.

One emphasis of my research has been on the question of how people spend their time. Time is the ultimate finite resource, or course, so the question of how people spend it would seem to be important.

People are really happier with friends than they are with their families or their spouse or their child.

When you look at the books about well-being, you see one word - it's happiness. People do not distinguish.

People talk of the new economy and of reinventing themselves in the workplace, and in that sense most of us are less secure.

I would not advise people to buy a car or house without making a list. You will probably improve your intuitions by making a list and then sleeping on it.

There's a very good reason for why economics developed the way it did, and that is that in many situations, the assumption that people will exploit the opportunities available to them is very plausible, and it simplifies the analysis of how markets will behave.

Optimism is normal, but some fortunate people are more optimistic than the rest of us. If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias, you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person - you already feel fortunate.

Most people are highly optimistic most of the time.

There is a huge wave of interest in happiness among researchers. There is a lot of happiness coaching. Everybody would like to make people happier.

One study found that people who just thought about watching their favorite movie actually raised their endorphin levels by 27 percent.

People assign much higher probability to the truth of their opinions than is warranted.

Facts that challenge basic assumptions-and thereby threaten people's livelihood and self-esteem-are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them.

People exaggerate their confidence in their plans - something we call the planning fallacy... The existence of the plan tends to induce overconfidence.

You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.

People have little idea, by and large, of the investment world. They are convinced they have an advantage.

People are very good [at] thinking about agents. The mind is set really beautifully to think about agents. Agents have traits. Agents have behaviors. We understand agents. We form global impression of their personalities. We are really not very good at remembering sentences where the subject of the sentence is an abstract notion.

To better avoid errors, you should talk to people who disagree with you and you should talk to people who are not in the same emotional situation you are.

The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than your own.

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

Being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things and more time doing compulsory things and feeling stressed.

Many people will admit that they made a mistake [putting money in dot-coms or telecoms at their peak] But that doesn’t mean that they’ve changed their mind about anything in particular. It doesn’t mean that they are now able to avoid that mistake.

When people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.

People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations.

We associate leadership with decisiveness. That perception of leadership pushes people to make decisions fairly quickly, lest they be seen as dithering and indecisive.

The evidence is unequivocal, there's a great deal more luck than skill in people getting very rich.

We deeply want to be led by people who know what they're doing and who don't have to think about it too much.

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.

Some achieve a reputation for great successes when in fact all they have done is take chances that reasonable people wouldn't take.

When people think of the outcomes of their decisions, they think much more short term than that. They think in terms of gains and losses.

Endlessly amused by people's minds.

One of the problems with expertise is that people have it in some domains and not in others.

If people can construct a simple and coherent story, they will feel confident regardless of how well grounded it is in reality.

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.

The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.