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...
The benefits of having options are apparent with each particular decision we face, but the costs are subtle and cumulative.
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 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...
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.
So it seems that neither our predictions about how we will feel after an experience nor our memories of how we did feel during the experience are very accurate reflections of how we actually do feel w...
Religious institutions then become a kind of market for comfort, tranquility, spirituality, and ethical reflection, and we religion consumers shop in that market until we find what we like.
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...
Pay attention to what you’re giving up in the next-best alternative, but don’t waste energy feeling bad about having passed up an option further down the list that you wouldn’t have gotten to anyway.
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...
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...
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.
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.
Most people give substantial weight to anecdotal evidence, perhaps so much that it will cancel out positive recommendations found in consumer reports. People's tendency to give undue weight to some ty...
Most good decisions will involve these steps: Figure out your goal or goals. Evaluate the importance of each goal. Array the options. Evaluate how likely each of the options is to meet your goals. Pic...
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...
Learning to accept good enough will simplify decision making and increase satisfaction.
Lane writes that we are paying for increased affluence and increased freedom with a substantial decrease in the quality and quantity of social relations.
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.