Postdecision regret is sometimes referred to as buyer’s remorse.
Following the other suggestions I’ve made may sometimes mean that when judged by an absolute standard, the results of decisions will be less good than they might otherwise have been—all the more reaso...
But by restricting our options, we will be able to choose less and feel better.
As a result, individuals with nonreversible marriages might be more satisfied than individuals with reversible ones. As we see reversible marriages come apart, we may think to ourselves, how fortunate...
The lesson here is that high expectations can be counter-productive. We probably can do more to affect the quality of our lives by controlling our expectations than we can by doing virtually anything...
Have seen that two of the factors affecting regret are Personal responsibility for the result How easily an individual can imagine a counterfactual, better alternative
What these studies show is that when people are asked to give reasons for their preferences, they may struggle to find the words. Sometimes aspects of their reaction that are not the most important de...
The very wealth of options before us may turn us from choosers into pickers. A chooser is someone who thinks actively about the possibilities before making a decision. A chooser reflects on what's imp...
The key thing to appreciate, though, is that what is most important to us, most of the time, is not the objective results of decisions, but the subjective results.
The illusion that each person can have the body that he or she wants is especially painful for women, and especially in societies, like ours, in which the ideal body is extremely thin.
So, to be better prepared for, and less disappointed by adaptation: As you buy your new car, acknowledge that the thrill won’t be quite the same two months after you own it. Spend less time looking fo...
Quite apart from the instrumental benefits of choice—that it enables people to get what they want—and the expressive benefits of choice—that it enables people to say who they are—choice enables people...
In the modern university, each individual student is free to pursue almost any interest, without having to be harnessed to what his intellectual ancestors thought was worth knowing. But this freedom m...
In general, human beings are remarkably bad at predicting how various experiences will make them feel.
If you seek and accept only the best, you are a maximizer.
I believe that one of the reasons that maximizers are less happy, less satisfied with their lives, and more depressed than satisficers is precisely because the taint of trade-offs and opportunity cost...
Freedom to choose has what might be called expressive value. Choice is what enables us to tell the world who we are and what we care about.
Bottom line—the options we consider usually suffer from comparison with other options.
Because of a ubiquitous feature of human psychology, very little in life turns out quite as good as we expect it will be.
Almost by definition, to be a maximizer is to have high standards, high expectations. Because of this, and because of the role played by expectations in hedonic evaluations, an experience that is on t...