Barry Schwartz Quotes

Practical wisdom," Aristotle told us, "is the combination of moral will and moral skill.

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...

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...

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...

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 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.

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

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.

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...

Because of a ubiquitous feature of human psychology, very little in life turns out quite as good as we expect it will be.

Most of us think about empathy as a feeling or an emotion. It is. To be empathetic is to be able to feel what the other person is feeling. But empathy is more than just a feeling. In order to be able...

So, once again, satisficing appears the better way to maintain one’s autonomy in the face of an overwhelming array of choices.

Seligman’s discovery of learned helplessness has had a monumental impact in many different areas of psychology. Hundreds of studies leave no doubt that we can learn that we don’t have control.

This phenomenon is called the endowment effect. Once something is given to you, it’s yours. Once it becomes part of your endowment, even after a very few minutes, giving it up will entail a loss. And,...

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...

When asked about what they regret most in the last six months, people tend to identify actions that didn’t meet expectations. But when asked about what they regret most when they look back on their li...

So even before your eyes are more than half open—long before you’ve had your first cup of coffee—you’ve made a dozen choices or more. But they don’t count, really, as choices. You could have done othe...

According to standard economic assumptions, the only opportunity costs that should figure into a decision are the ones associated with the next-best alternative.

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...

But by restricting our options, we will be able to choose less and feel better.