Quotes from Barry Schwartz

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.

Most of us think about empathy as a "feeling" or an "emotion." It is. To be empathetic is to be able to feel what the other person is feeling. But empathy is more than just a feeling. In order to be able to feel what another person is feeling, you need to be able to see the world as that other person sees it. This ability to take the perspective of another demands perception and imagination. Empathy thus reflects the integration of thinking and feeling.

Because of a ubiquitous feature of human psychology, very little in life turns out quite as good as we expect it will be.

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.

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.

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.

The choice of when to be a chooser may be the most important choice we have to make.

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?

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.

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

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

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

emotional cost of potential trade-offs does more than just diminish our sense of satisfaction with a decision. It also interferes with the quality of decisions themselves.

Ask yourself what is the point of advertising prescription drugs (antidepressant, anti-inflammatory, antiallergy, diet, ulcer—you name it) on prime-time television. We can't just go to the drugstore and buy them. The doctor must prescribe them. So why are drug companies investing big money to reach us, the consumers, directly?

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

But by restricting our options, we will be able to choose less and feel better.

But if unrestricted freedom can impede the individual's pursuit of what he or she values most, then it may be that some restrictions make everyone better off. And if "constraint" sometimes affords a kind of liberation while "freedom" affords a kind of enslavement, then people would be wise to seek out some measure of appropriate constraint.

The transformation of choice in modern life is that choice in many facets of life has gone from implicit and often psychologically unreal to explicit and psychologically very real.

Being able to criticize our own certainties is often a painful struggle, demanding some courage as we try to stand back and impartially judge ourselves and our own responsibility.

And once people are in the position to be able to work at any time from any place, they face decisions every minute of every day about whether or not to be working.

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.

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

In general, human beings are remarkably bad at predicting how various experiences will make them feel.

So to make the task of lowering expectations easier: Reduce the number of options you consider. Be a satisficer rather than a maximizer. Allow for serendipity.