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.
— Daniel Kahneman
Most of the moments of our life - and I calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long; that means that, you know, in a life there are about 600 million of them; in a month, there are about 600,000 - most of them don't leave a trace.
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.
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.
All of us roughly know what memory is. I mean, memory is sort of the storage of the past. It's the storage of our personal experiences. It's a very big deal.
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.
The average investor's return is significantly lower than market indices due primarily to market timing.
There's a tendency to look at investments in isolation. Investors focus on the risk of individual securities.
People talk of the new economy and of reinventing themselves in the workplace, and in that sense most of us are less secure.
One thing we have lost, that we had in the past, is a sense of progress, that things are getting better. There is a sense of volatility, but not of progress.
People just hate the idea of losing. Any loss, even a small one, is just so terrible to contemplate that they compensate by buying insurance, including totally absurd policies like air travel.
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.
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.
By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases, and that is true for both humans and artificial intelligence, but the heuristics of AI are not necessarily the human ones.
Nobody would say, 'I'm voting for this guy because he's got the stronger chin,' but that, in fact, is partly what happens.
I used to hold a unitary view, in which I proposed that only experienced happiness matters, and that life satisfaction is a fallible estimate of true happiness.
So your emotional state really has a lot to do with what you're thinking about and what you're paying attention to.
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.
The experiencing self lives its life continuously. It has moments of experience, one after the other.
Hindsight bias makes surprises vanish.
Doubting what you see is a very odd experience. And doubting what you remember is a little less odd than doubting what you see. But it's also a pretty odd experience, because some memories come with a very compelling sense of truth about them, and that happens to be the case even for memories that are not true.
If you're going to be unreligious, it's likely going to be due to reflecting on it and finding some things that are hard to believe.
It's very difficult to distinguish between what a person believes and what they say they believe.
All of us would be better investors if we just made fewer decisions.
The concept of happiness has to be reorganised.
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.
When you look at the books about well-being, you see one word - it's happiness. People do not distinguish.
Alternative descriptions of the same reality evoke different emotions and different associations.
Clearly, the decision-making that we rely on in society is fallible. It's highly fallible, and we should know that.
Friends are sometimes a big help when they share your feelings. In the context of decisions, the friends who will serve you best are those who understand your feelings but are not overly impressed by them.
The planning fallacy is that you make a plan, which is usually a best-case scenario. Then you assume that the outcome will follow your plan, even when you should know better.
We are very influenced by completely automatic things that we have no control over, and we don't know we're doing it.
The experiencing self lives in the moment; it is the one that answers the question, 'Does it hurt?' or 'What were you thinking about just now?' The remembering self is the one that answers questions about the overall evaluation of episodes or periods of one's life, such as a stay in the hospital or the years since one left college.
Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it.
We think of our future as anticipated memories.
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.
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.
We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories, our memory tells us stories. That is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.
Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.
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.
Most people are highly optimistic most of the time.
It's very easy for trusted companies to mislead naive customers, and life insurance companies are trusted.
When people talk of the economy being strong, they don't seem to feel that they, too, are better off.
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.
Mental effort, I would argue, is relatively rare. Most of the time we coast.
If individuals are rational, there is no need to protect them against their own choices.
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.
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.
Suppose you like someone very much. Then, by a familiar halo effect, you will also be prone to believe many good things about that person - you will be biased in their favor. Most of us like ourselves very much, and that suffices to explain self-assessments that are biased in a particular direction.
We have no reason to expect the quality of intuition to improve with the importance of the problem. Perhaps the contrary: high-stake problems are likely to involve powerful emotions and strong impulses to action.
