We have too many choices, too many decisions, too little time to do what is really important.
There is a cost to having an overload of choice.
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...
People won’t ignore alternatives if they don’t realize that too many alternatives can create a problem.
No matter how much a person has, it may not be enough.
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...
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.
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.
Adding options can be detrimental to our well-being. Because we don’t put rejected options out of our minds,
When you hear the same story everywhere you look and listen, you assume it must be true. And the more people believe it’s true, the more likely they are to repeat it, and thus the more likely you are...
What we don’t realize is that the very option of being allowed to change our minds seems to increase the chances that we will change our minds.
WHEN PEOPLE EVALUATE AN EXPERIENCE, THEY ARE PERFORMING one or more of the following comparisons: Comparing the experience to what they hoped it would be Comparing the experience to what they expected...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The ubiquitous feature of human psychology is a process known as . Simply put, we used get to things and then we start to take them for granted.
The ideal legal system, mused Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo, would be a code at once so flexible and so minute, as to supply in advance for every conceivable situation the just and fitting ru...
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...
Some studies have estimated that losses have more than twice the psychological impact as equivalent gains. The fact is, we all hate to lose, which Kahneman and Tversky refer to as loss aversion.