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...
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...
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.
IT IS MAXIMIZERS WHO SUFFER MOST IN A CULTURE THAT PROVIDES too many choices.
I think that in modern America, we have far too many options for breakfast cereal and not enough options for president.
I am not suggesting that we will always, or even frequently, be better off going with our gut when making choices. What I am suggesting is there are pitfalls to deciding after analyzing. My concern, g...
Having the opportunity to choose is no blessing if we feel we do not have the wherewithal to choose wisely.
Going to the doctor—at least this doctor—was like going to the hairdresser. The client (patient) has to let the professional know what she wants out of each visit. The patient is in charge.
Certainly, it is safe to say that, based on available research, social comparison does nothing to improve one’s satisfaction with the choices one makes.
We have too many choices, too many decisions, too little time to do what is really important.
Philosopher Isaiah Berlin made an important distinction between negative liberty and positive liberty. Negative liberty is freedom from—freedom from constraint, freedom from being told what to do by o...
Keeping options open seems to extract a psychological price. When we can change our minds, apparently we do less psychological work to justify the decision we’ve made, reinforcing the chosen alternati...
Information costs, is not the way to maximize one’s investment. The true maximizer would determine just how much information seeking was the amount needed to lead to a very good decision.
Adding options can be detrimental to our well-being. Because we don’t put rejected options out of our minds,
When people are looking for causes of failure, they are predisposed to one of these positions. Suppose you apply for a job, but fail to get hired. Here are some possible answers you give.Global: I don...
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.
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.
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...
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.
I believe that many modern Americans are feeling less and less satisfied even as their freedom of choice expands. This book is intended to explain why this is so and suggest what can be done about it.