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d796e5a
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At present, the potential causal role that the availability of choice has in making people into maximizers is pure speculation. If the speculation is correct, we ought to find that in cultures in which choice is less ubiquitous and extensive than it is in the U.S., there should be fewer maximizers.
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Barry Schwartz |
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b87adda
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CHOICE HAS A CLEAR AND POWERFUL INSTRUMENTAL VALUE; IT enables people to get what they need and want in life.
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Barry Schwartz |
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07cc6d6
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will argue that: We would be better off if we embraced certain voluntary constraints on our freedom of choice, instead of rebelling against them. We would be better off seeking what was "good enough" instead of seeking the best (have you ever heard a parent say, "I want only the 'good enough' for my kids"?). We would be better off if we lowered our expectations about the results of decisions. We would be better off if the decisions we made ..
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Barry Schwartz |
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83525a5
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Seligman's discovery of learned helplessness has had a monumental impact in many different areas of psychology. Hundreds of studies leave no doubt that we can learn that we don't have control.
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Barry Schwartz |
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be74dfd
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Quite apart from the instrumental benefits of choice--that it enables people to get what they want--and the expressive benefits of choice--that it enables people to say who they are--choice enables people to be actively and effectively engaged in the world, with profound psychological benefits.
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Barry Schwartz |
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a0cbbd8
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The choice of when to be a chooser may be the most important choice we have to make.
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Barry Schwartz |
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0648cba
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Both books point out how the growth of material affluence has not brought with it an increase in subjective well-being. But they go further. Both books argue that we are actually experiencing a fairly significant decrease in well-being.
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Barry Schwartz |
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c454dd1
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Bottom line--the options we consider usually suffer from comparison with other options.
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Barry Schwartz |
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24da9f7
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WE'VE SEEN THAT AS THE NUMBER OF OPTIONS UNDER CONSIDERATION goes up and the attractive features associated with the rejected alternatives accumulate, the satisfaction derived from the chosen alternative will go down.
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Barry Schwartz |
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97be123
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adding options can be detrimental to our well-being. Because we don't put rejected options out of our minds,
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Barry Schwartz |
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117d9e9
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Clearly, the cumulative opportunity cost of adding options to one's choice set can reduce satisfaction. It may even make a person miserable.
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Barry Schwartz |
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7504480
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decisions as trivial as renting a video become important if we believe that these decisions are revealing something significant about ourselves.
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Barry Schwartz |
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9e0c3c6
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What these studies show is that when people are asked to give reasons for their preferences, they may struggle to find the words. Sometimes aspects of their reaction that are not the most important determinants of their overall feeling are nonetheless easiest to verbalize.
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Barry Schwartz |
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8c89ca4
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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, given the research on trade-offs and opportunity costs, is that as the number of options goes up, the need to provide justifications for decisions also increases."
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Barry Schwartz |
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2872872
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As we see reversible marriages come apart, we may think to ourselves, how fortunate the couple was to have a flexible attitude toward marital commitment, given that it didn't work out. It might not occur to us that the flexible attitude might
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Barry Schwartz |
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e00c911
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As a result, individuals with "nonreversible" marriages might be more satisfied than individuals with "reversible" ones. As we see reversible marriages come apart, we may think to ourselves, how fortunate the couple was to have a flexible attitude toward marital commitment, given that it didn't work out. It might not occur to us that the flexible attitude might have played a causal role in the marriage's failure."
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Barry Schwartz |
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ba668b6
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I believe that one of the reasons that maximizers are less happy, less satisfied with their lives, and more depressed than satisficers is precisely because the taint of trade-offs and opportunity costs washes out much that should be satisfying about the decisions they make.
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Barry Schwartz |
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d557ecc
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ANYTIME YOU MAKE A DECISION AND IT DOESN'T TURN OUT WELL or you find an alternative that would have turned out better, you're a candidate for regret.
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Barry Schwartz |
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4bc1d75
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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 made.
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Barry Schwartz |
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38cf8e9
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Postdecision regret is sometimes referred to as "buyer's remorse."
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Barry Schwartz |
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975b0b2
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If we are responsible for an action that turns out badly and if it almost turned out well, then we are prime candidates for regret.
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Barry Schwartz |
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caaf6ce
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counterfactual thinking is usually triggered by the occurrence of something unpleasant, something that itself produces a negative emotion.
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Barry Schwartz |
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ae2b668
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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 counterfactuals are imagined states that are worse."
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Barry Schwartz |
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7413fcc
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There is an important lesson to be taken from this research on counterfactual thinking, and it's not that we should stop doing it; counterfactual thinking is a powerful intellectual tool. The lesson is that we should try to do more downward counterfactual thinking.
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Barry Schwartz |
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f39102d
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AS WE HAVE SEEN, REGRET WILL MAKE US FEEL WORSE AFTER DECISIONS--EVEN ones that work out--than we otherwise would, especially when we take opportunity costs into consideration.
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Barry Schwartz |
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19fcd1a
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AWAY OF EASING THE BURDEN THAT FREEDOM OF CHOICE IMPOSES IS to make decisions about when to make decisions. These are what Cass Sunstein and Edna Ullmann-Margalit call second-order decisions. One kind of second-order decision is the decision to follow a rule.
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Barry Schwartz |
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ed1f9f4
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choices are based upon expected utility. And once you have had experience with particular restaurants, CDs, or movies, future choices will be based upon what you remember about these past experiences, in other words, on their remembered utility.
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Barry Schwartz |
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3dc4878
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if the manufacturer wanted to sell more of his particular brand, he was either going to have to make it distinctive or make consumers think it was distinctive, which was considerably easier.
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Barry Schwartz |
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db01e69
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when products are essentially equivalent, people go with what's familiar, even if it's only familiar because they know its name from advertising.
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Barry Schwartz |
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4b9df01
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If people want real information, they have to go beyond advertising to disinterested sources such as Consumer Reports.
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Barry Schwartz |
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b6d7e55
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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 true. In general, the frequency of experience does affect its availability to memory. But frequency of experience is not the only thing that affects availability to memory. Salience or vividness matters as well.
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Barry Schwartz |
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8b356fa
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And what counterfactual thinking does is establish a contrast between a person's actual experience and an imagined alternative.
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Barry Schwartz |
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daf814a
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UNLIKE OTHER NEGATIVE EMOTIONS--ANGER, SADNESS, DISAPPOINTMENT, even grief--what is so difficult about regret is the feeling that the regrettable state of affairs could have been avoided and that it could have been avoided by you, if only you had chosen differently.
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Barry Schwartz |
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6a0cdf4
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From the perspective of a model of decision making that is future oriented, being sensitive to sunk costs is a mistake.
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Barry Schwartz |
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7e0a648
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have seen that two of the factors affecting regret are Personal responsibility for the result How easily an individual can imagine a counterfactual, better alternative
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Barry Schwartz |
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9a86b42
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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 and to imagine the various scenarios that may follow it. This anticipation may help us to see consequences of a decision that would not have been evident otherwise. Second, regret may emphasize the mistakes we made in arriving at a decision, so t..
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Barry Schwartz |
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1002afd
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Because of a ubiquitous feature of human psychology, very little in life turns out quite as good as we expect it will be.
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Barry Schwartz |
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5dc2576
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This ubiquitous feature of human psychology is a process known as adaptation. Simply put, we get used to things, and then we start to take them for granted.
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Barry Schwartz |
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d69c0fa
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Even though we don't expect it to happen, such adaptation to pleasure is inevitable, and it may cause more disappointment in a world of many choices than in a world of few.
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Barry Schwartz |
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c2387f9
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Twenty-five years ago, economist Tibor Scitovsky explored some of the consequences of the phenomenon of adaptation in his book The Joyless Economy. Human beings, Scitovsky said, want to experience pleasure. And when they consume, they do experience pleasure--as long as the things they consume are novel. But as people adapt--as the novelty wears off--pleasure comes to be replaced by comfort. It's a thrill to drive your new car for the first ..
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Barry Schwartz |
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17992e3
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satisfaction treadmill. Suppose that in addition to adapting to particular objects or experiences, you also adapt to particular levels of satisfaction. In other words, suppose that with great ingenuity and effort in making decisions, you manage to keep your "hedonic temperature" at +20 degrees, so that you feel pretty good about life almost all of the time. Is +20 degrees good enough? Well, it might be good enough at the beginning, but if y..
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Barry Schwartz |
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e220cf7
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In general, human beings are remarkably bad at predicting how various experiences will make them feel.
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Barry Schwartz |
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3afa1c5
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If people err systematically and substantially in making those predictions, it's likely that they will make some bad decisions--decisions that produce regret, even when events turn out well.
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Barry Schwartz |
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b5551e6
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We could go a long way toward improving the experienced well-being of people in our society if we could find a way to stop the process of adaptation.
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Barry Schwartz |