Barry Schwartz Quotes

And what counterfactual thinking does is establish a contrast between a person’s actual experience and an imagined alternative.

When products are essentially equivalent, people go with what’s familiar, even if it’s only familiar because they know its name from advertising.

We could go a long way toward improving the experienced well-being of people in our society if we could find a way to stop the process of adaptation.

WE’VE SEEN THAT AS THE NUMBER OF OPTIONS UNDER CONSIDERATION goes up and the attractive features associated with the rejected alternatives accumulate, the satisfaction derived from the chosen alternat...

It is not dancing toy animals that are an endless source of delight for infants, but rather having control.

The fact that some choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better.

In an era of ever greater personal autonomy and control, what could account for this degree of personal misery?

Counterfactual thinking is usually triggered by the occurrence of something unpleasant, something that itself produces a negative emotion.

The more difficult information gathering is, the more likely it is that you will rely on the decisions of others.

The research that my colleagues and I have done suggests that, not surprisingly, maximizers are prime candidates for depression.

The choice of when to be a chooser may be the most important choice we have to make.

Buying jeans is a trivial matter, but it suggests a much larger theme we will pursue throughout this book, which is this: When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable.

We get what we say we want, only to discover that what we want doesn’t satisfy us to the degree that we expect.

And this, indeed, is the standard line among social scientists who study choice. If we’re rational, they tell us, added options can only make us better off as a society. Those of us who care will bene...

We are free to be the authors of our own lives, but we don't know what kind of lives we want to 'write.

To these three comparisons I have added a fourth: the gap between what one has and what one expects.

If society asks more of us, and arranges its social institutions appropriately, it will get more.

The mistake is to assume that the way it feels at the moment is the way it will feel forever.

Postdecision regret is sometimes referred to as buyer’s remorse.

Happy people have the ability to distract themselves and move on, whereas unhappy people get stuck ruminating and make themselves more and more miserable.