Quotes from Barry Schwartz

The more we are allowed to be the masters of our fates, the more we expect ourselves to be.

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.

it is not dancing toy animals that are an endless source of delight for infants, but rather having control.

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

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.

Bottom line—the options we consider usually suffer from comparison with other options.

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.

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.

when products are essentially equivalent, people go with what's familiar, even if it's only familiar because they know its name from advertising.

If people want real information, they have to go beyond advertising to disinterested sources such as Consumer Reports.

How people look is yet another thing that they are now responsible for deciding for themselves.

Clearly, the cumulative opportunity cost of adding options to one's choice set can reduce satisfaction. It may even make a person miserable.

decisions as trivial as renting a video become important if we believe that these decisions are revealing something significant about ourselves.

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.

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.

Our heightened individualism means that, not only do we expect perfection in all things, but we expect to produce this perfection ourselves.

Even how we dress for work has taken on a new element of choice, and with it, new anxieties.

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.

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.

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.

the more our connections to others weakens. In his book Bowling Alone, political scientist Robert Putnam focused attention on the deterioration of social connection in contemporary life. And in this context it is relevant that the incidence of depression among the Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, is less than 20 percent of the national rate.

The illusion that each person can have the body that he or she wants is especially painful for women, and especially in societies, like ours, in which the "ideal" body is extremely thin.

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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