We would be better off if we lowered our expectations about the results of decisions
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.
In an era of ever greater personal autonomy and control, what could account for this degree of personal misery?
There is a cost to having an overload of choice.
The fact that some choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better.
It is not dancing toy animals that are an endless source of delight for infants, but rather having control.
Counterfactual thinking is usually triggered by the occurrence of something unpleasant, something that itself produces a negative emotion.
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...
Postdecision regret is sometimes referred to as buyer’s remorse.
Practical wisdom," Aristotle told us, "is the combination of moral will and moral skill.
You seek and accept only the best, you are a maximizer.
We are free to be the authors of our own lives, but we don't know what kind of lives we want to 'write.
If you seek and accept only the best, you are a maximizer.
If society asks more of us, and arranges its social institutions appropriately, it will get more.
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.
But by restricting our options, we will be able to choose less and feel better.
Because of a ubiquitous feature of human psychology, very little in life turns out quite as good as we expect it will be.
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...