5 Sentences By Daniel Kahneman To Reflect

Daniel Kahneman is one of the few psychologists who managed to win a Nobel Prize.  It was in 2002 in Economics. His great merit was to carry out very valuable studies to understand how we make financial decisions. Considering the depth of his thinking and his knowledge of how we decide, Daniel Kahneman’s sentences are worth mentioning as they invite us to reflect.

For years, he worked as a professor and researcher at prestigious universities such as Harvard or Michigan. In addition, he published some books, such as Rápido e Devagar – Two Ways of Thinking , which had great success, especially among the non-specialized public, because of the richness of his dissemination work. Today, we’re going to discover some of Daniel Kahneman’s most important phrases.

Quotes by Daniel Kahneman to reflect

1. The mind makes everything worse

This first of Daniel Kahneman’s sentences refers to the tendency/temptation that we may have to put ourselves in the worst. In fact, there is a phrase mentioned by psychologist Sonia Cervantes that says: “there is no storm worse than the one formed in your head”.

This is well known to all people who suffer from obsessive/repetitive thoughts that cause anxiety. In their minds, they represent situations that have not happened yet – more or less likely – for which, however, they suffer. Therefore, it is important to relativize what we think and observe our thoughts more without judging them.

2. The problem of admitting one’s mistakes

The second of Daniel Kahneman’s sentences speaks of resistance to admitting our own mistakes. According to this author, most of us do not like others to question our actions. This questioning has a direct impact on our security: it makes us feel vulnerable.

This is not a good thing, as the inability to admit one’s mistakes often results in a lack of flexibility, both in norms and in criteria. This may be deeply rooted in our beliefs. Doing something based on them and hearing that we are wrong can come as a shock, because we tend to cling to them, treating them in some cases as absolute truths.

3. Relying a lot on our beliefs

This phrase is closely linked to what we mentioned earlier. In this case, Daniel Kahneman points out something very important: we generally ignore what we don’t know. Today, we could say that we sometimes ignore it, but many times we attack it.

Both in the news and on social media, we can see people defending various causes strongly linked to their beliefs, without taking into account that there are other interests and points of view. Beliefs are just that. It is very difficult to determine which ones are good or which ones are bad. The positive is knowing how to question them and see how they align with certain values.

4. Pressure sensitivity

The fourth of Daniel Kahneman’s sentences says that we are sensitive to pressure. Some topics that are difficult to address but require immediate action are postponed or treated as if their consequences were far away. It’s as if we believe (or want to believe) that it won’t affect us or that a particular problem can resolve itself.

While we believe that this only happens with issues like climate change, the truth is that this way of “living” is much more common than we think. Just think for a moment about our experiences in terms of relationships, for example, and how the consequences we’ve seen coming and could have done something came about because we didn’t take action in time.

5. Blindness that has no limits

This last of Daniel Kahneman’s phrases appears in his book Fast and Slow – Two Ways of Thinking . With it, this author invites us to a final reflection on our incredible ability to remain blind to what is presented to us in an evident way. If so, how can we be aware of our own blindness?

Opening your eyes is a difficult task. The stimuli come to us filtered by our beliefs, the first impression they have in the long range, and the misinformation to which we grant veracity.

The fact that we are not aware of how we use these filters and how these filters fill us with prejudices limits our critical capacity. Let’s think that the world we work in is not the world itself, but the particular world we build.

All these quotes by Daniel Kahneman reflect his way of thinking. His passion led him to write several books and leave us these sentences to reflect on our way of thinking and perceiving. Each one of them, without a doubt, allows us to learn something new or to realize what we already knew but have forgotten.