No matter how much a person has, it may not be enough.
To these three comparisons I have added a fourth: the gap between what one has and what one expects.
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 research that my colleagues and I have done suggests that, not surprisingly, maximizers are prime candidates for depression.
The more difficult information gathering is, the more likely it is that you will rely on the decisions of others.
The choice of when to be a chooser may be the most important choice we have to make.
Happy people have the ability to distract themselves and move on, whereas unhappy people get stuck ruminating and make themselves more and more miserable.
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...
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...
Theme we will pursue throughout this book, which is this: When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable. As the number of available choices increases, as it has in our consumer culture, the au...
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...
We get what we say we want, only to discover that what we want doesn’t satisfy us to the degree that we expect.
The way that the meal or the music or the movie makes you feel in the moment—either good or bad—could be called experienced utility.
The mistake is to assume that the way it feels at the moment is the way it will feel forever.
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 fact that counterfactual thinking seems to hone in on the controllable aspects of a situation only increases the chances that a person will experience regret when engaging in counterfactual thinki...
So, once again, satisficing appears the better way to maintain one’s autonomy in the face of an overwhelming array of choices.
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...