Daniel Kahneman

“The 'Instagram Generation' now experiences the present as an anticipated memory.”

“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.”

“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.”

“You're surprised by something, but you don't really know what surprised you; you recognize someone, but you don't really know what cues cause you to recognize that person.”

“Political columnists and sports pundits are rewarded for being overconfident.”

“I have always emphasized the willingness to discard.”

“Experienced happiness refers to your feelings, to how happy you are as you live your life. In contrast, the satisfaction of the remembering self refers to your feelings when you think about your life.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Slow thinking has the feeling of something you do. It's deliberate.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“The effort invested in 'getting it right' should be commensurate with the importance of the decision.”

“The average investor's return is significantly lower than market indices due primarily to market timing.”

“I think one of the major results of the psychology of decision making is that people's attitudes and feelings about losses and gains are really not symmetric. So we really feel more pain when we lose $10,000 than we feel pleasure when we get $10,000.”

“Many parents have discovered, perhaps with some guilt, that they can read a story to a child while thinking of something else.”

“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.”

“It's very easy for trusted companies to mislead naive customers, and life insurance companies are trusted.”