Choice is essential to autonomy, which is absolutely fundamental to well-being. Healthy people want and need to direct their own lives. (Location 89)
On the other hand, the fact that some choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better. As I will demonstrate, there is a cost to having an overload of choice. (Location 90)
we make the most of our freedoms by learning to make good choices about the things that matter, (Location 109)
Choosing well is especially difficult for those determined to make only the best choices, individuals I refer to as “maximizers.” (Location 111)
increased choice may actually contribute to the recent epidemic of clinical depression affecting much of the Western world. (Location 116)
When it came to buying, however, a huge difference became evident. Thirty percent of the people exposed to the small array of jams actually bought a jar; only 3 percent of those exposed to the large array of jams did so. (Location 272)
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. (Location 279)
a large array of options may diminish the attractiveness of what people actually choose, the reason being that thinking about the attractions of some of the unchosen options detracts from the pleasure derived from the chosen one. (Location 281)
Increasingly, the trend moves back toward time-consuming foraging behavior, (Location 321)
According to a survey conducted by Yankelovich Partners, a majority of people want more control over the details of their lives, but a majority of people also want to simplify their lives. There you have it—the paradox of our times. (Location 339)
As the number of options increases, the effort required to make a good decision escalates as well, which is one of the reasons that choice can be transformed from a blessing into a burden. (Location 614)
choices are based upon expected utility. (Location 624)
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 while the experience is occurring. And yet it is memories of the past and expectations for the future that govern our choices. (Location 674)
when products are essentially equivalent, people go with what’s familiar, even if it’s only familiar because they know its name from advertising. (Location 705)
Most of us give weight to these kinds of stories because they are extremely vivid and based on a personal, detailed, face-to-face account. (Location 744)
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. (Location 756)
Vivid interviews with people have profound effects on judgment (Location 765)
Even if companies sell almost none of their highest-priced models, they can reap enormous benefits from producing such models because they help induce people to buy their cheaper (but still extremely expensive) ones. (Location 826)
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. (Location 916)
So fairly subtle manipulations of wording can affect what the neutral point is and whether we are thinking in terms of gains or losses. (Location 922)
discounts and surcharges are just two ways of saying the same thing. (Location 924)
This phenomenon is called the endowment effect. Once something is given to you, it’s yours. (Location 931)
Aversion to losses also leads people to be sensitive to what are called “sunk costs.” (Location 948)
A chooser reflects on what’s important to him or her in life, what’s important about this particular decision, and what the short-and long-range consequences of the decision may be. (Location 980)
CHOOSING WISELY BEGINS WITH DEVELOPING A CLEAR UNDERSTANDING of your goals. And the first choice you must make is between the goal of choosing the absolute best and the goal of choosing something that is good enough. (Location 992)
Maximizers need to be assured that every purchase or decision was the best that could be made. (Location 999)
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. (Location 1003)
A satisficer has criteria and standards. She searches until she finds an item that meets those standards, and at that point, she stops. (Location 1004)
I believe that the goal of maximizing is a source of great dissatisfaction, that it can make people miserable—especially (Location 1014)
Our expectation was confirmed: people with high maximization scores experienced less satisfaction with life, were less happy, were less optimistic, and were more depressed than people with low maximization scores. (Location 1093)
learning how to satisfice is an important step not only in coping with a world of choice but in simply enjoying life. (Location 1099)
It’s hard to go through life regretting every decision you make because it might not have been the best possible decision. (Location 1106)
students who think they’re in the right place get far more out of a particular school than students who don’t. Conviction that they have found a good fit makes students more confident, more open to experience, and more attentive to opportunities. (Location 1140)
for someone who feels overwhelmed by choices, is to apply the satisficing strategy more often, letting go of the expectation that “the best” is attainable. (Location 1187)
Choice is what enables each person to pursue precisely those objects and activities that best satisfy his or her own preferences within the limits of his or her financial resources. (Location 1258)
Every choice we make is a testament to our autonomy, to our sense of self-determination. (Location 1278)
Learned helplessness can affect future motivation to try. It can affect future ability to detect that you do have control in new situations. (Location 1302)
our most fundamental sense of well-being crucially depends on our having the ability to exert control over our environment and recognizing that we do. (Location 1305)
we must learn to be selective in exercising our choices. We must decide, individually, when choice really matters and focus our energies there, (Location 1325)
The choice of when to be a chooser may be the most important choice we have to make. (Location 1326)
What seems to be the most important factor in providing happiness is close social relations. (Location 1356)
People who are married, who have good friends, and who are close to their families are happier than those who are not. (Location 1356)
Being connected to others seems to be much more important to subjective well-being than being rich. (Location 1358)
To be someone’s friend is to undertake weighty responsibilities and obligations that at times may limit your own freedom. (Location 1365)
We earn more and spend more, but we spend less time with others. (Location 1390)
ESTABLISHING AND MAINTAINING MEANINGFUL SOCIAL RELATIONS requires a willingness to be bound or constrained by them, even when dissatisfied. (Location 1411)
Most people find it extremely challenging to balance the conflicting impulses of freedom of choice on the one hand and loyalty and commitment on the other. (Location 1421)
Having the discipline to live by the rules you make for yourself is, of course, another matter, but one thing’s for sure: following rules eliminates troublesome choices in your daily life, each time you get into a car or each time you go to a cocktail party. (Location 1440)
Nonetheless, if she lists the things that matter to her, determines how much they matter, and evaluates how each possibility measures up, Angela will be able to make a choice. (Location 1491)
One of the “costs” of any option involves passing up the opportunities that a different option would have afforded. This is referred to as an opportunity cost. (Location 1519)
Every choice we make has opportunity costs associated with it. (Location 1522)
the presence of a clearly inferior alternative makes it easier for consumers to take the plunge. (Location 1607)
researchers concluded that when people are presented with options involving trade-offs that create conflict, all choices begin to look unappealing. (Location 1629)
Respondents cling to the form of the question (“award” or “deny”) as a guide to the kinds of reasons they will be looking for. (Location 1649)
Once again, this suggests that whenever we are forced to make decisions involving trade-offs, we will feel less good about the option we choose than we would have if the alternatives hadn’t been there. (Location 1662)
But once aspects of a relationship are put into words, their importance to the verbalizer takes on added significance. (Location 1788)
We all learn as we grow up that living requires making choices and passing up opportunities. (Location 1844)
We also found that people with high regret scores tend to be maximizers. (Location 1902)
Most of us seem to share the intuition that we regret actions that don’t turn out well more than we regret failures to take actions that would have turned out well. (Location 1916)
When asked about what they regret most in the last six months, people tend to identify actions that didn’t meet expectations. But when asked about what they regret most when they look back on their lives as a whole, people tend to identify failures to act. (Location 1920)
In the short run, we regret a broken romance, whereas in the long run, we regret a missed romantic opportunity. So it seems that we don’t close the psychological door on the decisions we’ve made, and as time passes, what we’ve failed to do looms larger and larger. (Location 1923)
But bad results make people regretful only if they bear responsibility. (Location 1946)
Counterfactual thoughts are generated in response to experiences such as poor exam grades, trouble in romantic relationships, and the illness or death of loved ones. (Location 1968)
So generating downward counterfactuals might engender not only a sense of satisfaction, but a sense of gratitude that things didn’t turn out worse. (Location 1984)
Taking the sure thing is a way to guarantee that you won’t regret your decision—you won’t regret it because you’ll never know how the alternative would have turned out. (Location 2031)
We show greater willingness to take risks when we know we will find out how the unchosen alternative turned out and there is thus no way to protect ourselves from regret. (Location 2035)
what also seems to matter is the level of previous investment. (Location 2076)
sunk-cost effects are much bigger when a person bears responsibility for the initial decision (Location 2077)
Many people persist in very troubled relationships not because of love or what they owe the other person or because they feel a moral obligation to honor vows, but because of all the time and effort they’ve already put in. (Location 2083)
Because of adaptation, enthusiasm about positive experiences doesn’t sustain itself. (Location 2149)
Novelty can change someone’s hedonic standards so that what was once good enough, or even better than that, no longer is. (Location 2178)
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. (Location 2296)
individuals who regularly experience and express gratitude are physically healthier, more optimistic about the future, and feel better about their lives than those who do not. (Location 2301)
The same meal, in the same restaurant, can be judged negatively on the basis of the first set of comparisons and positively on the basis of the second. (Location 2331)
The lower quality items that used to be perfectly acceptable are no longer good enough. (Location 2341)
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. (Location 2353)
A sign at a gas station that says “Discount for Paying Cash” sets the zero point at the credit card price. A sign that says “Surcharge for Using Credit” sets the zero point at the cash price. (Location 2356)
an experience that is on the positive side of the hedonic thermometer for a satisficer may be on the negative side for a maximizer. (Location 2390)
The blessing of modest expectations is that they leave room for many experiences to be a pleasant surprise, a hedonic plus. (Location 2392)
This essentially universal and unrealistically high standard of comparison decreases the satisfaction of those of us who are in the middle or below, even as the actual circumstances of our lives improve. (Location 2450)
Happy people have the ability to distract themselves and move on, whereas unhappy people get stuck ruminating and make themselves more and more miserable. (Location 2526)
the tendency to ruminate traps unhappy people in a downward psychological spiral that is fed by social comparison. (Location 2529)
Thus, from cradle to grave, having control over one’s life matters. (Location 2634)
The more we are allowed to be the masters of our fates, the more we expect ourselves to be. (Location 2694)
Emphasis on freedom of choice, together with the proliferation of possibilities that modern life affords, has, I believe, contributed to these unrealistic expectations. (Location 2698)
With group after group of people—varying in age, gender, educational level, geographical location, race, and socioeconomic status—we have found a strong positive relation between maximizing and measures of depression. (Location 2754)
The key thing to appreciate, though, is that what is most important to us, most of the time, is not the objective results of decisions, but the subjective results. (Location 2803)
To manage the problem of excessive choice, we must decide which choices in our lives really matter and focus our time and energy there, letting many other opportunities pass us by. (Location 2806)
establish rules of thumb for yourself about how many options to consider, or how much time and energy to invest in choosing. (Location 2814)
CHOOSERS ARE PEOPLE WHO ARE ABLE TO REFLECT ON WHAT MAKES a decision important, on whether, perhaps, none of the options should be chosen, on whether a new option should be created, and on what a particular choice says about the chooser as an individual. (Location 2825)
Choosers have the time to modify their goals; pickers do not. Choosers have the time to avoid following the herd; pickers do not. Good decisions take time and attention, and the only way we can find the needed time and attention is by choosing our spots. (Location 2830)
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 it. (Location 2847)
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. (Location 2897)
We can vastly improve our subjective experience by consciously striving to be grateful more often for what is good about a choice or an experience, and to be disappointed less by what is bad about it. (Location 2903)
Why not just tell yourself that “starting tomorrow, I’m going to pay more attention to what’s good in my life,” and be done with it? (Location 2909)
It also pays to remember just how complex life is and to realize how rare it is that any single decision, in and of itself, has the life-transforming power we sometimes think. (Location 2925)
WE ADAPT TO ALMOST EVERYTHING WE EXPERIENCE WITH ANY regularity. (Location 2935)
Remind yourself of how good things actually are instead of focusing on how they’re less good than they were at first. (Location 2948)
Reduce the number of options you consider. (Location 2954)
The thrill of unexpected pleasure stumbled upon by accident often can make the perfect little diner or country inn far more enjoyable than a fancy French restaurant or four-star hotel. (Location 2957)
Focus on what makes you happy, and what gives meaning to your life. (Location 2970)
Choice within constraints, freedom within limits, is what enables the little fish to imagine a host of marvelous possibilities. (Location 2984)
The older you are, the less likely you are to be a maximizer. (Location 3710)
I think that in modern America, we have far too many options for breakfast cereal and not enough options for president. (Location 3754)
The real challenge in life is doing the right thing in social interactions. It is knowing how to balance honesty with kindness, courage with caution, encouragement with criticism, empathy with detachment, paternalism with respect for autonomy. (Location 3778)
