How people look is yet another thing that they are now responsible for deciding for themselves.
Focus on what makes you happy, and do what gives meaning to your life
ECONOMISTS POINT OUT THAT THE QUALITY OF ANY GIVEN OPTION can not be assessed in isolation from its alternatives. One of the costs of any option involves passing up the opportunities that a different...
Aversion to losses also leads people to be sensitive to what are called sunk costs. Imagine having a $50 ticket to a basketball game being played an hour’s drive away. Just before the game there’s a b...
As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize,
Americans spent about $27 billion on nontraditional remedies, most of them unproven.
The dissatisfaction that comes with social comparison can be fixed by teaching people to care less about status.
Whereas maximizers might do better objectively than satisficers, they tend to do worse subjectively.
UNLIKE OTHER NEGATIVE EMOTIONS—ANGER, SADNESS, DISAPPOINTMENT, even grief—what is so difficult about regret is the feeling that the regrettable state of affairs could have been avoided and that it cou...
The existence of multiple alternatives makes it easy for us to imagine alternatives that don’t exist—alternatives that combine the attractive features of the ones that do exist. And to the extent that...
On the other hand, the fact that some choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better.
NOVELIST AND EXISTENTIALIST PHILOSOPHER ALBERT CAMUS POSED the question, Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee? His point was that everything in life is choice.
FIRST, I THINK INCREASES IN EXPERIENCED CONTROL OVER THE YEARS have been accompanied, stride for stride, by increases in expectations about control. The more we are allowed to be the masters of our fa...
But if money doesn´t do it for people, what does? What seems to be the most important factor in providing happiness is close social relations. People who are married, who have good friends and who are...
Apparently we always think we want choice, but when we actually get it, we may not like it. Meanwhile, the need to chose in ever more aspects of life causes us more distress than we realize.
Adding the second option creates a conflict, forcing a trade-off between price and quality.
If the manufacturer wanted to sell more of his particular brand, he was either going to have to make it distinctive or make consumers think it was distinctive, which was considerably easier.
Choices are based upon expected utility. And once you have had experience with particular restaurants, CDs, or movies, future choices will be based upon what you remember about these past experiences,...
Unfortunately, the proliferation of choice in our lives robs us of the opportunity to decide for ourselves just how important any given decision is.
The alternative to maximizing is to be a satisficer. To satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better.