Instead you might consider adopting a simple routine: 1. Keep a notepad at your bedside. 2. Every morning, when you wake up, or every night, when you go to bed, use the notepad to list five things tha...
It is choosers who create new opportunities for themselves and everyone else. But when faced with overwhelming choice, we are forced to become pickers, which is to say, relatively passive selectors fr...
KAHNEMAN AND TVERSKY HAVE USED THEIR RESEARCH ON FRAMING and its effects to construct a general explanation of how we go about evaluating options and making decisions. They call it prospect theory.
Knowing that you’ve made a choice that you will not reverse allows you to pour your energy into improving the relationship that you have rather than constantly second-guessing it.
Lane writes that we are paying for increased affluence and increased freedom with a substantial decrease in the quality and quantity of social relations.
Learning to accept good enough will simplify decision making and increase satisfaction.
Most good decisions will involve these steps:1. Figure out your goal or goals.2. Evaluate the importance of each goal.3. Array the options.4. Evaluate how likely each of the options is to meet your go...
Over two centuries ago Adam Smith observed that individual freedom of choice ensures the most efficient production and distribution of society’s goods. A competitive market, unhindered by the governme...
PART OF THE DOWNSIDE of abundant choice is that each new option adds to the list of trade-offs, and trade-offs have psychological consequences. The necessity of making trade-offs alters how we feel ab...
So the researchers concluded that being forced to confront trade-offs in making decisions makes people unhappy and indecisive.
The alternative to maximizing is to be a satisficer. To satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better. A satisficer...
The benefits of having options are apparent with each particular decision we face, but the costs are subtle and cumulative.
The circumstances of modern life seem to be conspiring to make experiences less satisfying than they could and perhaps should be, in part because of the richness against which we are comparing our own...
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...
This is postdecision regret, regret that occurs after we’ve experienced the results of a decision. But there is also something called anticipated regret, which rears its head even before a decision is...
To understand this, we need to make a distinction between what is good for the individual and what is good for the society as a whole, between the psychology of personal autonomy and the ecology of pe...
WE ALL KNOW THAT REGRET CAN MAKE PEOPLE MISERABLE, BUT regret also serves several important functions. First, anticipating that we may regret a decision may induce us to take the decision seriously an...
Emotional cost of potential trade-offs does more than just diminish our sense of satisfaction with a decision. It also interferes with the quality of decisions themselves.
Human possibility, awash in material abundance. As a society, we have achieved what our ancestors could, at most, only dream about, but it has come at a great price.
It’s impossible to be a maximizer about everything. The trick is to learn to embrace and appreciate satisficing, to cultivate it in more and more aspects of life, rather than merely being resigned to...
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