Barry Schwartz Quotes

We get what we say we want, only to discover that what we want doesn't satisfy us to the degree that we expect.

People who work in financial services don't have one shred of concern about the well-being of the people they serve. They're only interested in themselves.

Adding the second option creates a conflict, forcing a trade-off between price and quality.

We are free to be the authors of our own lives, but we don't know what kind of lives we want to 'write.

Most people can suppress counterfactual thoughts before they spin too far down a spiral, those who suffer from clinical depression may not be able to. When a student who didn't study much does badly on an exam, he could take responsibility for not having studied more. But the exam could have been easier, or more focused on the material the student knew.

Everybody makes money for a living, but most of us actually do something that has a point, in addition to just making money. We examine and treat patients, we teach students, we draw up contracts and wills, we write for newspapers, magazines, and web sites, we clean floors, or we serve meals.

Lane writes that we are paying for increased affluence and increased freedom with a substantial decrease in the quality and quantity of social relations.

Focus on what makes you happy, and do what gives meaning to your life

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.

But knowing what we want means, in essence, being able to anticipate accurately how one choice or another will make us feel, and that is no simple task.

On the contrary, it's a way to make sure that you can continue to experience pleasure. What's the point of great meals, great wines, and great blouses if they don't make you feel great?

You buy a pair of shoes that turn out to be uncomfortable. Thaler suggests the expensive they were, the more often you'll try to wear them. Eventually you'll stop wearing them, but you won't get rid of them. And the more you paid for them the longer they will sit in your closet. At some point, after the shoes have been fully depreciated psychologically, you will throw them away.

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.

Freedom to choose has what might be called expressive value. Choice is what enables us to tell the world who we are and what we care about.

Too little attention is paid to the dark side of incentives. They are anything but a magic bullet. Psychologists have known this for years, but it seems largely hidden from the world of commerce.

When you rely on incentives, you undermine virtues. Then when you discover that you actually need people who want to do the right thing, those people don't exist because you've crushed anyone's desire to do the right thing with all these incentives.

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 types of information is called the availability heuristic. A heuristic is a rule of thumb, a mental shortcut. Suppose someone asked you a question like what's more common in English, words that start with the letter to r words that have t as the third letter. You would have an easier time generating words that started with the letter t. Words starting with t would be more 'available'.

Whereas maximizers might do better objectively than satisficers, they tend to do worse subjectively.

The discrepancy between logic and memory suggests that we don't always know what we want.

So the researchers concluded that being forced to confront trade-offs in making decisions makes people unhappy and indecisive.

adding options can be detrimental to our well-being. Because we don't put rejected options out of our minds,

Having the opportunity to choose is no blessing if we feel we do not have the wherewithal to choose wisely.

What I look for in any book is an argument, based on evidence, that changes the way I think about something important.

Happiness as a goal is a recipe for disaster.

Learning to choose is hard. Learning to choose well is harder. And learning to choose well in a world of unlimited possibilities is harder still, perhaps too hard.

Of course, bankers were always interested in making money. But when bankers had clients, they bore some responsibility for the clients' welfare.

I start with an idea that is no more than a paragraph long, and expand it slowly into an outline. But I'm always surprised by the directions things take when I actually start writing.

Every choice we make is a testament to our autonomy, to our sense of self-determination. Almost every social, moral, or political philosopher in the Western tradition since Plato has placed a premium on such autonomy. And each new expansion of choice gives us another opportunity to assert our autonomy, and this display our character.

We would be better off if we lowered our expectations about the results of decisions

Apparently we always think we want choice, but when we actually get it, we may not like it. Meanwhile, the need to chose in ever more aspects of life causes us more distress than we realize.

The secret to happiness is low expectations.

In a world of scarcity, opportunities don't present themselves in bunches, and the decisions people face are between approach and avoidance, acceptance or rejection.

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.

Practical wisdom is what's called for in situations that have a moral dimension to them.

I believe there are steps we can take to mitigate - even eliminate - many of these sources of distress, but they aren't easy. They require practice, discipline, and perhaps a new way of thinking. On the other hand, each of these steps will bring its own rewards.

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.

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.

on "idea technology"--Science creates ideas, science creates ways of understanding. And in the social sciences, ways of understanding ourselves. And they have an enormous influence on how we think, what we aspire to, and how we act. ......idea technology may be the most profoundly important technology that science gives us.......we do have to worry about the theories we have of human nature, because human nature will be changed by the theories we have that are designed to explain and help us understand human beings....it is only human nature to have a human nature that is very much the product of the society in which people live.
--TED The way we think about work is broken

To these three comparisons I have added a fourth: the gap between what one has and what one expects.

Practical wisdom," Aristotle told us, "is the combination of moral will and moral skill.

Years of research in psychology has shown that rewards and punishments can be very effective in changing behavior. But, at the same time, they can create an addiction to rewards and punishments.

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. Pick the winning option. Later use the consequences of your choice to modify your goals, the importance you assign them, and the way you evaluate future possibilities.

In an ideal world, nobody's work would be just about the money. People could pursue excellence in what they do, take pride in achievement, and derive meaning from knowing that their work improved the lives of others.

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.

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.

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