Even how we dress for work has taken on a new element of choice, and with it, new anxieties.
Clearly, the cumulative opportunity cost of adding options to one’s choice set can reduce satisfaction. It may even make a person miserable.
But knowing what we want means, in essence, being able to anticipate accurately how one choice or another will make us feel, and that is no simple task.
But if you’ve been convinced by the arguments and the evidence in this book, you now know that choice has a downside, an awareness that should make it easier for you to adopt, and live with, a two opt...
But if unrestricted freedom can impede the individual’s pursuit of what he or she values most, then it may be that some restrictions make everyone better off. And if constraint sometimes affords a kin...
According to standard economic assumptions, the only opportunity costs that should figure into a decision are the ones associated with the next-best alternative.
AWAY OF EASING THE BURDEN THAT FREEDOM OF CHOICE IMPOSES IS to make decisions about when to make decisions. These are what Cass Sunstein and Edna Ullmann-Margalit call second-order decisions. One kind...
A large array of options may discourage consumers because it forces an increase in the effort that goes into making a decision. So consumers decide not to decide, and don’t buy the product. Or if they...
You seek and accept only the best, you are a maximizer.
Will argue that: We would be better off if we embraced certain voluntary constraints on our freedom of choice, instead of rebelling against them. We would be better off seeking what was good enough in...
The modern university is a kind of intellectual shopping mall.
Simply by being aware of the process we can anticipate its effects, and therefore be less disappointed when it comes. This means that when we are making decisions, we should think about how each of th...
People with high maximization scores experienced less satisfaction with life, were less happy, were less optimistic, and were more depressed than people with low maximization scores.
While maximizers and perfectionists both have very high standards, I think that perfectionists have very high standards that they don’t expect to meet, whereas maximizers have very high standards that...
When Nobel Prize–winning economist and psychologist Herbert Simon initially introduced the idea of satisficing in the 1950s, he suggested that when all the costs (in time, money, and anguish) involved...
Twenty-five years ago, economist Tibor Scitovsky explored some of the consequences of the phenomenon of adaptation in his book The Joyless Economy. Human beings, Scitovsky said, want to experience ple...
Thus, from cradle to grave, having control over one’s life matters.
There is an important lesson to be taken from this research on counterfactual thinking, and it’s not that we should stop doing it; counterfactual thinking is a powerful intellectual tool. The lesson i...
The key fact about psychological life in societies in which you have little control over these aspects of life is that you also have little expectation of control. And because of this, I think, lack o...
The best you can do is keep yourself from brooding about it.