Quotes from Barry Schwartz

counterfactual thinking is usually triggered by the occurrence of something unpleasant, something that itself produces a negative emotion.

There is also an important distinction to be made between "upward" and "downward" counterfactuals. Upward counterfactuals are imagined states that are better than what actually happened, and downward counterfactuals are imagined states that are worse.

It is choosers who create new opportunities for themselves and everyone else. But when faced with overwhelming choice, we are forced to become "pickers," which is to say, relatively passive selectors from whatever is available.

The trouble was that with all these options available to me now, I was no longer sure that "regular" jeans were what I wanted. Perhaps the easy fit or the relaxed fit would be more comfortable.

There is an important lesson to be taken from this research on counterfactual thinking, and it's not that we should stop doing it; counterfactual thinking is a powerful intellectual tool. The lesson is that we should try to do more downward counterfactual thinking.

AS WE HAVE SEEN, REGRET WILL MAKE US FEEL WORSE AFTER DECISIONS—EVEN ones that work out—than we otherwise would, especially when we take opportunity costs into consideration.

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.

And what counterfactual thinking does is establish a contrast between a person's actual experience and an imagined alternative.

you seek and accept only the best, you are a maximizer.

it's impossible to be a maximizer about everything. 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. Becoming a conscious, intentional satisficer makes comparison with how other people are doing less important. It makes regret less likely. In the complex, choice-saturated world we live in, it makes peace of mind possible.

Every choice we make is a testament to our autonomy, to our sense of self-determination.

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.

From the perspective of a model of decision making that is future oriented, being sensitive to sunk costs is a mistake.

the fact that some choice is good doesn't necessarily mean that more choice is better.

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.

there is a cost to having an overload of choice.

philosopher Isaiah Berlin made an important distinction between "negative liberty" and "positive liberty." Negative liberty is "freedom from"—freedom from constraint, freedom from being told what to do by others. Positive liberty is "freedom to"—the availability of opportunities to be the author of your life and to make it meaningful and significant.

have seen that two of the factors affecting regret are Personal responsibility for the result How easily an individual can imagine a counterfactual, better alternative

On the other hand, the more we think about opportunity costs, the less satisfaction we'll derive from whatever we choose. So we should make an effort to limit how much we think about the attractive features of options we reject.

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.

I believe that many modern Americans are feeling less and less satisfied even as their freedom of choice expands. This book is intended to explain why this is so and suggest what can be done about it.

There are some strategies you can use to help you avoid the disappointment that comes from thinking about opportunity costs: Unless you're truly dissatisfied, stick with what you always buy. Don't be tempted by "new and improved." Don't "scratch" unless there's an "itch." And don't worry that if you do this, you'll miss out on all the new things the world has to offer.

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.

Americans spent about $27 billion on nontraditional remedies, most of them unproven.