The 55 best phrases of Daniel Kahneman
daniel kahnemann He is a famous Israeli psychologist born in the well-known city of Tel Aviv during the year 1934.
During his childhood Kahneman lived in Paris, France. This notable psychologist survived, together with his family, the Second World War and persecution by the Nazis to the Jewish people, a feat that, unfortunately, many others failed to accomplish with success.
During the year 2002 together with his friend and colleague Vernon Smith, Kahneman was awarded the so-called Nobel Prize in Economics.. An award that this celebrity won as a psychologist and not as an economist, something that many people failed to understand at the time.
- It may interest you: "Steven Pinker's 30 Best Famous Quotes"
Famous Phrases and Quotes by Daniel Kahneman
Would you like to know the most relevant phrases of this great figure of the modern economy?
Below you can discover the 55 best phrases of Daniel Kahneman, a person who taught us the importance of psychology in the economic sphere.
1. This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one, usually without noticing the substitution.
Our mind has really amazing mechanisms, we can always learn new things about how it works.
2. The trust that people experience is determined by the coherence of the story they try to build from the information they have.
The information we have can give us a false sense of security.
3. Most of our impressions and thoughts arise in our conscious experience without our knowing how.
We can control our emotions and thoughts in a certain way, with our initial predisposition towards a previously studied conclusion.
4. Intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.
Our intuition may not be right, blindly trusting it can be very expensive.
5. Our innate willingness to separate physical causation from intentionality explains the near universality of religious belief.
Many coincidences that we can find in our day to day, have been the result of manipulation by third parties.
6. All variants of cognitive, emotional, or physical voluntary effort make use, at least in part, of a shared pool of mental energy.
Our mind is the initial motor of any act that we carry out in life, be it a physical, mental or emotional action.
7. The only perspective we can adopt when we think about our lives is that of memory.
Through our memories, we all create in our minds what, for us, is the movie of our lives.
8. Tastes and decisions are shaped by memories, and memories can be false.
Memories often show us a biased vision and from our particular point of view, of something that happened in a different way in the past.
9. People tend to assess the relative importance of certain issues based on the ease with which they are brought up. memory, and this is, to a large extent, determined by the degree of coverage found in the media.
When we have photos or videos of a specific moment in the past, that moment will be much more easily remembered by us than any other.
10. Why is it so difficult for us to think statistically? We think associatively, we think metaphorically, and we think causally with ease, but doing so statistically requires thinking about many things at once.
Undoubtedly, human beings do not usually think statistically, we use many other procedures to explain something that are usually easier for us to understand.
11. We are prone to overestimate our understanding of the world and underestimate the role of chance in events.
Our perception gives us a vision of the world in which we live, in which we believe that we can even perceive what will happen. This fact does not stop being a simple illusion not in accordance with reality.
12. The spontaneous search for an intuitive solution sometimes fails: neither an expert solution nor a heuristic answer comes to mind. In these cases, it is common for us to switch to a slower, more meditated and effortful way of thinking.
In most cases, we will need to meditate slowly in order to find the solution to a serious problem. Great solutions don't come easily.
13. Nothing is as serious as it seems when you think about it.
Taking distance and being objective, the problems may not be so serious.
14. We can be blind to the obvious, and blind to our blindness.
Ignorance does not allow us to be aware of its possession. This is a downright curious fact about how ignorance works.
15. We focus on what we know and ignore what we don't know, making us overconfident in our beliefs.
Certainly we tend to think that we know everything; something that, without a doubt, seriously harms us in our decisions.
16. If you're concerned about making your message seem believable and intelligent, don't use complicated language when simple language would suffice.
Using simple language will make it easier for our words to sink into the mind of a third person.
17. A general limitation of the human mind is its insufficient ability to recognize past states of knowledge or beliefs that have changed. Once we adopt a new view of the world (or a part of it), we immediately lose good part of our ability to remember what we used to believe before our thinking switch to.
The human being adapts to the moment in which he lives, changing his ways of thinking and banishing old beliefs from his mind.
18. My ideas about the definition of “wellness” changed. The goals that individuals set out to achieve are so important to what they do and what they feel that focusing exclusively on experienced well-being is not sustainable. We cannot maintain a concept of well-being that ignores what people want.
Our desires influence our particular concept of well-being, causing us great dissatisfaction when we do not achieve them.
19. Often our brain rationalizes automatic thoughts and presents them as the result of elaborate reasoning. But they are stories that we make up to justify decisions that are actually the result of our prejudices. It is a way to deceive us.
The brain, as this phrase tells us, can deceive ourselves. Many of our beliefs are often based on mere assumptions and prejudices.
20. People are very sensitive to pressures and the immediate consequences they may have. The long-term effects are more abstract and harder to take into account. For example, global warming: when the threat materializes in time, it will be too late to react.
We tend to think that those things that are supposed to happen in the future will never come, we are wrong.
21. It's the halo effect: if you do something right, it seems like you'll do everything right. If I talk to you about a leader and I tell you: he is a smart and fighting leader and... Corrupt! The third adjective already arrives late, when you already have a favorable judgment about that leader, emanating from the halo effect of the two previous positive adjectives.
We form false opinions about certain people or situations. Many of us do not carefully believe our own opinion.
22. We concentrate on what we want and can do, regardless of the plans and abilities of others.
The actions of others influence ours, being able to increase their effectiveness or cancel them completely.
23. It is hard for us to admit mistakes, because that means giving up the security that these simplifying assumptions provide us.
We must admit our own mistakes, in this way we will be able to correct them as soon as possible.
24. To be useful, our beliefs must submit to the logic of probability.
The probability can destroy any belief we have, we must not leave our future in the hands of chance.
25. When you are making a commitment that may have consequences in the future, it is necessary to know if you are going to like those results, or if you like to stay as you are now.
What we do today can bring us a series of advantages or disadvantages in the future. Are we sure that it is what we want?
26. When I bought my house, I made a joint budget for the house and furniture. This is how I avoided the poverty effect that means that, after paying a fortune for a house, you then buy furniture that is too cheap, because you feel poor.
This is something that many people usually do, buy a house and furniture at the same time. A psychological trick that can change our own perception of what we do.
27. In explaining the past and predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of fitness and ignore the role of luck. Hence, we easily fall into the illusion of control.
The illusion that we have control over our future is something that we all have, luck is a determining factor in the life of any person.
28. We are incapable of unraveling the complexity of the world, so we tell ourselves a simplifying story to be able to decide and reduce the anxiety that we believe that it is incomprehensible and unpredictable.
This is how our perception works, it focuses simply on what we can understand, discarding what we cannot understand.
29. A sure way to make people believe falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguishable from truth.
As Goebbels would say, a lie told a thousand times can become a truth.
30. The expectation of happiness before marriage grows until the wedding day to drop dramatically in successive years...
Marriage becomes, for many people, a trap. Not all of us feel comfortable in this particular situation.
31. Intelligence is not just the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and focus attention when needed.
Thanks to our intelligence we learn from our mistakes and from the data we receive from others.
32. The one who achieves that collective confidence in long-term decisions prevails over short-term uncertainty.
We must not let ourselves be carried away by the group or by society, we must be able to impose our own opinion.
33. Joy, emotion or satisfaction are more important in the West than in the East, where calm is more appreciated.
In the countries of the East, being able to live a peaceful life is the ultimate goal of many people.
34. Whether professionals have the opportunity to develop intuitive abilities from experience depends essentially on the quality and speed of this feedback, as well as the sufficiency of opportunities practices.
Professionals are often not as valued as they should be, their experiences can be very uplifting for us.
35. Complex thinking requires effort and when choosing between two paths, our brain usually chooses the simpler one. Mental effort has a cost and the brain tends to save it.
Opting for the easy path is something that many of us tend to do, since the effort to value the difficult path as it deserves may seem like an exercise that is not worth it.
36. Often we are not aware of how little information we have, and if we are not aware of this, then we have the phenomenon of overconfidence. Trust is not a judgment, it is a feeling.
The lack of risk perception can give us a false sense of security, even leading us to commit many crazy things in life.
37. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost limitless ability to ignore our ignorance.
Being aware of our ignorance is the first step to overcome it, knowledge is something essential in our lives.
38. We tend to be very confident in judgments we make based on very little information. It is one of the most important aspects of cognition. We are able to generate very fast interpretations; that is wonderful, because it allows us to act quickly, but on the other hand we are not aware of what we do not know.
Our limited perception allows us to act quickly, but it does not allow us to act correctly.
39. Taking things seriously involves an emotional element. Emotions are evoked more quickly and with greater intensity by immediate things. Democracies work like this, for example. People are forced to think short term. It is one of the great problems of democracies, but systems that are not democratic... They have other problems.
Thinking through the problems carefully will give us the opportunity to find the correct answer.
40. Politicians and advertisers turn to System 1 (emotional, not rational). They plan things effectively for their purposes. System 1 generates the best story among those possible with the information available to it, a story with internal coherence. The bad thing is that it is difficult for us to accept new information that is incompatible with the story that one has formed.
Appealing to emotions will always be the easy way to convince someone, emotions can give us a false sense of truth.
41. I have always believed that scientific research is another domain in which a form of optimism is essential for success: I am still looking for a scientist who is unable to exaggerate the importance of what he is doing, and I think someone who has no illusions about its importance it would languish in the repetition of the experience of its many small failures and rare successes, which is the fate of most researchers.
Convincing ourselves is a fundamental factor to be able to start any great task, we must believe ourselves capable of achieving our goal.
42. Nothing in life is as important as we think when we think about it.
We must think carefully about the problems, perhaps they are not as serious as they seemed to us at the beginning.
43. As absurd as it may seem, I am the "me" that remembers, being the "me" that experiences, the "me" that gives content to my life, a stranger to me.
The mind is wonderful and has complex mechanisms that are often unknown to us.
44. Quick thinking includes both varieties of intuitive thinking—expert and heuristic—as well as the purely automatic mental activities of perception and memory.
Moving through our memory can be extremely easy for us. Our memories and thoughts are only a tenth of a second away. The mind can be very efficient in its work.
45. A general law of least effort applies to both cognitive and physical activity. The law states that if there are multiple ways to achieve the same goal, the individual will ultimately gravitate toward the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is determined by the balance of costs and benefits. Laziness is deeply ingrained in our nature.
Undoubtedly, man tends to think as little as possible, since even mental effort is an exercise that we often do not want to do.
46. Poor people think like merchants, but here the dynamics are quite different. Unlike merchants, the poor are not indifferent to the differences between winning and losing. His problem is that all his choices are between losses. The money spent on one good means the loss of another good that could have been purchased instead of the first. For the poor, the costs are losses.
A very particular way of understanding poverty, it is true that money calls money and the absence of it can also bring us the reverse situation.
47. The acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice it and rapid, unambiguous feedback so that thoughts and actions are the correct. When these conditions are met, the ability develops, and the intuitive judgments and choices that the mind immediately produces are almost always the right ones.
It is true that in order to acquire skills, the environment and situation must be just right for this to happen.
48. The idea that the future is unpredictable is weakened every day by the ease with which we explain the past.
We tend to think that the future will follow certain ideas that seem to be clear to us, this does not have to be true or faithful to reality.
49. Learning from surprises is undoubtedly reasonable; but it can have some dangerous consequences.
We can learn from those situations that have surprised us, but this should not be our main learning option. In the long run it will undoubtedly be counterproductive.
50. Situations are constantly evaluated as good or bad, which advise flight or allow the approach.
All the situations we encounter are quickly evaluated by our brain, instantly cataloging them as positive or negative for us.
51. The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.
Our limited perception gives us a distorted vision of reality that we believe to be true.
52. The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize the mistakes of others than our own.
Whether from our own mistakes or those of others, the important thing is to never stop learning.
53. The psychological learning test seeks to know if our understanding of situations we encounter has changed, not if we have learned a new fact.
The information we receive changes our way of thinking, and also usually changes our own opinion about it.
54. A better understanding of these heuristics, and the biases they lead to, could improve judgments and decisions in situations of uncertainty.
Understanding better how we act in a certain situation can help us find the right solution for it. Knowledge will always be positive for us.
55. People can maintain unwavering faith in a claim, however absurd, when they feel supported by a community of like-minded believers.
The opinions of those around us influence our own opinion, these opinions can generate doubts in us that we do not know how to answer. We tend to think that the opinion of the group will possibly be the correct one.