Barry Schwartz Quotes

People won’t ignore alternatives if they don’t realize that too many alternatives can create a problem.

The more our connections to others weakens. In his book Bowling Alone, political scientist Robert Putnam focused attention on the deterioration of social connection in contemporary life. And in this c...

There is a cost to having an overload of choice.

Hirsch calls goods like these positional goods, because how likely anyone is to get them depends upon his position in society.

I think that in modern America, we have far too many options for breakfast cereal and not enough options for president.

IT IS MAXIMIZERS WHO SUFFER MOST IN A CULTURE THAT PROVIDES too many choices.

If people think about options in terms of their features rather than as a whole, different options may rank as second best (or even best) with respect to each individual feature.

If people want real information, they have to go beyond advertising to disinterested sources such as Consumer Reports.

Much of human progress has involved reducing the time and energy, as well as the number of processes we have to engage in and think about, for each of us to obtain the necessities of life.

Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues have shown that what we remember about the pleasurable quality of our past experiences is almost entirely determined by two things:...

Notice that the curve falls steeply at the beginning and then gradually levels off. This reflects what might be called the decreasing marginal disutility of losses.

One could specialize in a certain skill and then trade the products of that skill for other goods.

Rather it is the result of a complex interaction among many psychological processes that permeate our culture, including rising expectations, awareness of opportunity costs, aversion to trade-offs, ad...

Social scientist Alex Michalos, in his discussion of the perceived quality of experience, argued that people establish standards of satisfaction based on the assessment of three gaps: the gap between...

The Paradox of Choice has a simple yet profoundly life-altering message for all Americans. Schwartz’s eleven practical, simple steps to becoming less choosey will change much in your daily life…. Buy...

The availability heuristic says that we assume that the more available some piece of information is to memory, the more frequently we must have encountered it in the past. This heuristic is partly tru...

The trouble was that with all these options available to me now, I was no longer sure that regular jeans were what I wanted. Perhaps the easy fit or the relaxed fit would be more comfortable.

The young New York immigrant woman from Mexico sitting in a college class in contemporary literature can ask herself, as class discussion of a novel begins, whether she’s going to express her identity...

There are some strategies you can use to help you avoid the disappointment that comes from thinking about opportunity costs: Unless you’re truly dissatisfied, stick with what you always buy. Don’t be...

There is also an important distinction to be made between upward and downward counterfactuals. Upward counterfactuals are imagined states that are better than what actually happened, and downward coun...