90 Top Quotes From Thinking Fast And Slow
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman is a groundbreaking exploration of the two cognitive systems that drive human decision-making and thought processes. Kahneman, a Nobel laureate in economics, delves into the realms of behavioral economics and psychology to reveal how our minds work and how we often fall victim to cognitive biases and heuristics. The book introduces "System 1," which operates quickly and intuitively, and "System 2," which engages in deliberate and analytical thinking.
Through a wealth of compelling research and real-world examples, Kahneman demonstrates how these two systems interact, shaping our judgments, perceptions, and choices. He uncovers cognitive biases such as the availability heuristic, anchoring effect, and loss aversion, which influence our decision-making in predictable but often irrational ways. As readers journey through the fascinating landscape of human cognition, they gain profound insights into the limitations and fallibility of their own minds.
Kahneman's work holds profound implications for a wide range of fields, from economics and public policy to marketing and personal decision-making. "Thinking, Fast and Slow" is a captivating and eye-opening read that challenges readers to question their assumptions and recognize the cognitive traps that can compromise their judgment, paving the way for more informed and rational thinking. (Thinking Fast And Slow Summary).
Thinking Fast And Slow Quotes
"Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it”
"Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”
"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.” (Meaning)
"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.”
"If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.”
"Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.”
"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.”
"The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.”
"We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.”
"We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.”
"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.”
"A reliable way of making people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”
"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.”
"The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.”
"You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.”
"The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time. Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?”
"Familiarity breeds liking.”
"The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.”
"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.”
"Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.”
"The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact.”
"Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.”
"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”
"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.”
"Acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions.”
"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.”
"The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own.”
"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.”
"A stable relationship requires that good interactions outnumber bad interactions by at least 5 to 1.”
"Experts who acknowledge the full extent of their ignorance may expect to be replaced by more confident competitors, who are better able to gain the trust of clients. An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality—but it is not what people and organizations want.”
"Higher income is associated with a reduced ability to enjoy the small pleasures of life.”
"Jonathan Haidt said in another context, “The emotional tail wags the rational dog.”
"A simple rule can help: before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position. This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of knowledge and opinion in the group."
"The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of those who speak early and assertively, causing others to line up behind them.”
"Remember this rule: intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.”
"Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted.”
"Expert intuition strikes us as magical, but it is not. Indeed, each of us performs feats of intuitive expertise many times each day. Most of us are pitch-perfect in detecting anger in the first word of a telephone call, recognize as we enter a room that we were the subject of the conversation, and quickly react to subtle signs that the driver of the car in the next lane is dangerous. Our everyday intuitive abilities are no less marvelous than the striking insights of an experienced firefighter or physician—only more common. The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic."
"The worse the consequence, the greater the hindsight bias.”
"Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking of it.”
"To derive the most useful information from multiple sources of evidence, you should always try to make these sources independent of each other.”
"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.”
"To be useful, your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability.”
"You can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and undemanding.”
"If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do. My Princeton colleague Danny Oppenheimer refuted a myth prevalent among undergraduates about the vocabulary that professors find most impressive."
"If you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion.”
"It is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored.”
"Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high and there is no time to collect more information.”
"We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.”
"The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed.”
"The most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast.”
"The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.”
"Those who avoid the sin of intellectual sloth could be called “engaged.” They are more alert, more intellectually active, less willing to be satisfied with superficially attractive answers, more skeptical about their intuitions.”
"A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”
"If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism.”
"People who are poor think like traders, but the dynamics are quite different. Unlike traders, the poor are not indifferent to the differences between gaining and giving up. Their problem is that all their choices are between losses. Money that is spent on one good is the loss of another good that could have been purchased instead. For the poor, costs are losses.”
"Highly intelligent women tend to marry men who are less intelligent than they are.”
"If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another substitution.”
"In a state of flow, however, maintaining focused attention on these absorbing activities requires no exertion of self-control, thereby freeing resources to be directed to the task at hand.”
"The evidence of priming studies suggests that reminding people of their mortality increases the appeal of authoritarian ideas, which may become reassuring in the context of the terror of death.”
"An inability to be guided by a “healthy fear” of bad consequences is a disastrous flaw.”
"The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future. These illusions are comforting. They reduce the anxiety that we would experience if we allowed ourselves to fully acknowledge the uncertainties of existence. We all have a need for the reassuring message that actions have appropriate consequences, and that success will reward wisdom and courage. Many business books are tailor-made to satisfy this need.”
"As cognitive scientists have emphasized in recent years, cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain.”
"In essence, the optimistic style involves taking credit for successes but little blame for failures.”
"We know that people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers”
"It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.”
"Luck plays a large role in every story of success; it is almost always easy to identify a small change in the story that would have turned a remarkable achievement into a mediocre outcome.”
"The gorilla study illustrates two important facts about our minds: we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.”
"A divorce is like a symphony with a screeching sound at the end—the fact that it ended badly does not mean it was all bad.”
"A compelling narrative fosters an illusion of inevitability.”
"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. Here again, as in the mere exposure effect, the connection makes biological sense. A good mood is a signal that things are generally going well, the environment is safe, and it is all right to let one’s guard down. A bad mood indicates that things are not going very well, there may be a threat, and vigilance is required.”
"Declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.”
"Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion—and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined. The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.”
"The proper way to elicit information from a group is not by starting with a public discussion but by confidentially collecting each person’s judgment. This procedure makes better use of the knowledge available to members of the group than the common practice of open discussion.”
"The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the body, and effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the currency of glucose.”
"Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good.”
"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. Memory function is an attribute of System 1. However, everyone has the option of slowing down to conduct an active search of memory for all possibly relevant facts—just as they could slow down to check the intuitive answer in the bat-and-ball problem. The extent of deliberate checking and search is a characteristic of System 2, which varies among individuals.”
"A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world (or of any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.”
"It is useful to remember, however, that neglecting valid stereotypes inevitably results in suboptimal judgments. Resistance to stereotyping is a laudable moral position, but the simplistic idea that the resistance is costless is wrong. The costs are worth paying to achieve a better society, but denying that the costs exist, while satisfying to the soul and politically correct, is not scientifically defensible.”
"You have no compelling moral intuitions to guide you in solving that problem. Your moral feelings are attached to frames, to descriptions of reality rather than to reality itself.”
"People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations.”
"Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality.”
"In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1748, the Scottish philosopher David Hume reduced the principles of association to three: resemblance, contiguity in time and place, and causality. Our concept of association has changed radically since Hume’s days, but his three principles still provide a good start.”
"Do we still remember the question we are trying to answer? Or have we substituted an easier one?”
"System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions. When all goes smoothly, which is most of the time, System 2 adopts the suggestions of System 1 with little or no modification.”
"The ultimate test of an explanation is whether it would have made the event predictable in advance. No story of Google’s unlikely success will meet that test, because no story can include the myriad of events that would have caused a different outcome. The human mind does not deal well with nonevents.”
"How do people make the judgments and how do they assign decision weights? We start from two simple answers, then qualify them. Here are the oversimplified answers: People overestimate the probabilities of unlikely events. People overweight unlikely events in their decisions.”
"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.”
"The pupil of the eye as a window to the soul.”
"Evaluating people as attractive or not is a basic assessment. You do that automatically whether or not you want to, and it influences you.”
"The expectation of intelligent gossip is a powerful motive for serious self-criticism, more powerful than New Year resolutions to improve one's decision making at work and at home.”
"My advice to students when I taught negotiations was that if you think the other side has made an outrageous proposal, you should not come back with an equally outrageous counteroffer, creating a gap that will be difficult to bridge in further negotiations. Instead you should make a scene, storm out or threaten to do so, and make it clear—to yourself as well as to the other side—that you will not continue the negotiation with that number on the table.”
"The idea that large historical events are determined by luck is profoundly shocking, although it is demonstrably true.”
"A stupid decision that works out well becomes a brilliant decision in hindsight.”
"Experienced radiologists who evaluate chest X-rays as “normal” or “abnormal” contradict themselves 20% of the time when they see the same picture on separate occasions.”
"You know far less about yourself than you feel you do.”
"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.”
"You know you have made a theoretical advance when you can no longer reconstruct why you failed for so long to see the obvious.”
"We all have a need for the reassuring message that actions have appropriate consequences, and that success will reward wisdom and courage. Many business books are tailor-made to satisfy this need.”
"The prominence of causal intuitions is a recurrent theme in this book because people are prone to apply causal thinking inappropriately, to situations that require statistical reasoning.”
"System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and the quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions.”
― Quotes from the book Thinking Fast And Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Thinking Fast And Slow Author
Daniel Kahneman is a groundbreaking psychologist and Nobel laureate whose pioneering work in the field of behavioral economics has revolutionized our understanding of human decision-making. As one of the founders of prospect theory, Kahneman demonstrated how individuals deviate from rational decision-making, often relying on cognitive biases and heuristics. His influential book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" presents a comprehensive exploration of the two systems that drive our thinking processes: the intuitive, fast-thinking system, and the deliberate, slow-thinking system. Kahneman's research sheds light on the intricacies of judgment, risk, and happiness, uncovering the subtle ways our minds can lead us astray. By illuminating the systematic errors that affect our choices, Daniel Kahneman has not only transformed academic disciplines but also influenced policymakers and professionals, prompting them to design better institutions and make more informed decisions.
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
