We have associations to things. We have, you know, we have associations to tables and to - and to dogs and to cats and to Harvard professors, and that's the way the mind works. It's an association machine.
Interpretation
Our minds create connections to various concepts and objects, shaping our understanding and experiences.
In this quote, Daniel Kahneman emphasizes the fundamental process of human cognition, where our minds link different concepts and entities together. This associative thinking governs how we perceive the world around us, influencing our reactions and interactions based on the connections we make between experiences, objects, and people.
In practice
In a psychology class discussing how our thoughts influence behavior.
We think, each of us, that we're much more rational than we are. And we think that we make our decisions because we have good reasons to make them. Even when it's the other way around. We believe in the reasons, because we've already made the decision.
The average investor's return is significantly lower than market indices due primarily to market timing.
Banks are run by executives, and executives protect themselves, and that does not always mean that banks are going to behave rationally.
Laziness is built deep into our nature.
Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.
You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.
Our government's got a war on drugs. That's certainly better than no drugs at all.
This freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth.
Men have been obliged to make for themselves a notion of what religion is, long before the science of religions started its methodical comparisons.
The people I really do dislike are the morally unimaginative kind of evolutionary reductionists who, in the name of science, think they can explain everything in terms of our early hominid ancestors or our genes, with their combination of high-handed tone and disregard for history. Such reductive speculation encourages a really empty scientism.
The following of authority is the denial of intelligence. [It] may help us temporarily to cover up our difficulties and problems; but to avoid a problem is only to intensify it, and in the process, self-knowledge and freedom are abandoned.
We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life.
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