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5e03805
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simply by being aware of the process we can anticipate its effects, and therefore be less disappointed when it comes. This means that when we are making decisions, we should think about how each of the options will feel not just tomorrow, but months or even years later.
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Barry Schwartz |
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c505868
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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.
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Barry Schwartz |
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0924c7a
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Gawande reports that research has shown that patients commonly prefer to have others make their decisions for them. Though as many as 65 percent of people surveyed say that if they were to get cancer, they would want to choose their own treatment, in fact, among people who do get
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Barry Schwartz |
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351924f
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Gawande reports that research has shown that patients commonly prefer to have others make their decisions for them. Though as many as 65 percent of people surveyed say that if they were to get cancer, they would want to choose their own treatment, in fact, among people who do get cancer, only 12 percent actually want to do so.
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Barry Schwartz |
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58e28ed
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How people look is yet another thing that they are now responsible for deciding for themselves.
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Barry Schwartz |
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87a0151
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When you hear the same story everywhere you look and listen, you assume it must be true.
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Barry Schwartz |
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43f43f9
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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 to hear it. This is how inaccurate information can create a bandwagon effect, leading quickly to a broad, but mistaken, consensus.
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Barry Schwartz |
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f366509
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the modern university is a kind of intellectual shopping mall.
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Barry Schwartz |
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1234fc7
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In the modern university, each individual student is free to pursue almost any interest, without having to be harnessed to what his intellectual ancestors thought was worth knowing. But this freedom may come at a price. Now students are required to make choices about education that may affect them for the rest of their lives. And they are forced to make these choices at a point in their intellectual development when they may lack the resour..
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Barry Schwartz |
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97270b2
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you will depend on how you do your accounting. People often talk jokingly about how "creative" accountants can make a corporate balance sheet look as good or as bad as they want it to look. Well, the point here is that we are all creative accountants when it comes to keeping our own psychological balance sheet."
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Barry Schwartz |
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c3e5fed
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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.
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Barry Schwartz |
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fb1f591
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As the magnitude of the gain increases, the amount of additional satisfaction people get out of each additional unit decreases. The shape of this curve conforms to what economists have long talked about as the "law of diminishing marginal utility." As the rich get richer, each additional unit of wealth satisfies them less."
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Barry Schwartz |
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b01a3d0
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And this, indeed, is the standard line among social scientists who study choice. If we're rational, they tell us, added options can only make us better off as a society. Those of us who care will benefit, and those of us who don't care can always ignore the added options. This view seems logically compelling; but empirically, it isn't true.
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Barry Schwartz |
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c7ce7f7
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A large array of options may discourage consumers because it forces an increase in the effort that goes into making a decision. So consumers decide not to decide, and don't buy the product. Or if they do, the effort that the decision requires detracts from the enjoyment derived from the results. Also, a large array of options may diminish the attractiveness of what people actually choose, the reason being that thinking about the attractions..
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Barry Schwartz |
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c4b969e
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people won't ignore alternatives if they don't realize that too many alternatives can create a problem.
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Barry Schwartz |
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1d88c7b
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Taking care of our own "wants" and focusing on what we "want" to do does not strike me as a solution to the problem of too much choice. It is precisely so that we can, each of us, focus on our own wants that all of these choices emerged in the first place."
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Barry Schwartz |
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98a0f24
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people tend to avoid taking risks--they are "risk averse"--when they are deciding among potential gains, potential positive outcomes."
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Barry Schwartz |
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ae19418
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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."
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Barry Schwartz |
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47cafe7
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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.
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Barry Schwartz |
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5f6dc63
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One could specialize in a certain skill and then trade the products of that skill for other goods.
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Barry Schwartz |
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c1826d3
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Even how we dress for work has taken on a new element of choice, and with it, new anxieties.
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Barry Schwartz |
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90649ff
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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."
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Barry Schwartz |
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0a02293
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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 as the Latina, the Mexican, the woman, the immigrant, or the teenager as class discussion unfolds.
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Barry Schwartz |
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917dc0d
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Identity is much less a thing people "inherit" than it used to be."
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Barry Schwartz |
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6c64c6f
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NOVELIST AND EXISTENTIALIST PHILOSOPHER ALBERT CAMUS POSED the question, "Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?" His point was that everything in life is choice."
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Barry Schwartz |
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030f520
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you seek and accept only the best, you are a maximizer.
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Barry Schwartz |
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df090ed
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So even before your eyes are more than half open--long before you've had your first cup of coffee--you've made a dozen choices or more. But they don't count, really, as choices. You could have done otherwise, but you never gave it a thought.
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Barry Schwartz |
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05bc74c
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The alternative to maximizing is to be a satisficer. To satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better. A satisficer has criteria and standards. She searches until she finds an item that meets those standards, and at that point, she stops.
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Barry Schwartz |
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cc5d9ec
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The key point is that maximizers aspire to achieve that goal. Thus, they spend a great deal of time and effort on the search, reading labels, checking out consumer magazines, and trying new products.
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Barry Schwartz |
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cce0f5c
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When Nobel Prize-winning economist and psychologist Herbert Simon initially introduced the idea of "satisficing" in the 1950s, he suggested that when all the costs (in time, money, and anguish) involved in getting information about all the options are factored in, satisficing is, in fact, the maximizing strategy."
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Barry Schwartz |
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465ac79
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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 experiences. Again, as we'll see, an overload of choice contributes to this dissatisfaction.
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Barry Schwartz |
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36900da
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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 it to be Comparing the experience to other experiences they have had in the recent past Comparing the experience to experiences that others have had
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Barry Schwartz |
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7342605
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It is called prospect theory, and it was developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. What the theory claims is that evaluations are relative to a baseline. A given experience will feel positive if it's an improvement on what came before and negative if it's worse than what came before.
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Barry Schwartz |
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f8c2958
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Almost by definition, to be a maximizer is to have high standards, high expectations. Because of this, and because of the role played by expectations in hedonic evaluations, an experience that is on the positive side of the hedonic thermometer for a satisficer may be on the negative side for a maximizer.
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Barry Schwartz |
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d0daa5a
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One way of achieving this goal is by keeping wonderful experiences rare. No matter what you can afford, save great wine for special occasions.
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Barry Schwartz |
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272a56b
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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 what one has and wants, the gap between what one has and thinks others like oneself have, and the gap between what one has and the best one has had in the past."
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Barry Schwartz |
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70a55e0
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If you live in a social world, as we all do, you are always being hit with information about how others are doing.
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Barry Schwartz |
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69b03ec
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This phenomenon is called the endowment effect. Once something is given to you, it's yours. Once it becomes part of your endowment, even after a very few minutes, giving it up will entail a loss. And, as prospect theory tells us, because losses are more bad than gains are good, the mug or pen with which you have been "endowed" is worth more to you than it is to a potential trading partner. And "losing" (giving up) the pen will hurt worse th..
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Barry Schwartz |
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b6ef394
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Aversion to losses also leads people to be sensitive to what are called "sunk costs." Imagine having a $50 ticket to a basketball game being played an hour's drive away. Just before the game there's a big snowstorm--do you still want to go? Economists would tell us that the way to assess a situation like this is to think about the future, not the past. The $50 is already spent; it's "sunk" and can't be recovered. What matters is whether you..
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Barry Schwartz |
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2b229cf
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it is not dancing toy animals that are an endless source of delight for infants, but rather having control.
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Barry Schwartz |
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f44dc38
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What Seligman and his colleagues proposed was that when people are looking for causes for failure, they display a variety of predispositions to accept one type of cause or another, quite apart from what the actual cause of the failure might be. There are three key dimensions to these predispositions, based on whether we view causes as being global or specific, chronic or transient, personal or universal.
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Barry Schwartz |
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d83ffb2
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In an era of ever greater personal autonomy and control, what could account for this degree of personal misery?
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Barry Schwartz |
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84e20e3
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FIRST, I THINK INCREASES IN EXPERIENCED CONTROL OVER THE YEARS have been accompanied, stride for stride, by increases in expectations about control. The more we are allowed to be the masters of our fates, the more we expect ourselves to be.
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Barry Schwartz |
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72abc1b
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The key fact about psychological life in societies in which you have little control over these aspects of life is that you also have little expectation of control. And because of this, I think, lack of control does not lead to feelings of helplessness and depression.
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Barry Schwartz |