Quotes About Choice

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.

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

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.

If you shatter the fish bowl so that everything is possible you don't have freedom you have paralysis. Everybody needs a fishbowl.

Over two centuries ago Adam Smith observed that individual freedom of choice ensures the most efficient production and distribution of society's goods. A competitive market, unhindered by the government and filled with entrepreneurs eager to pinpoint consumers' needs and desires, will be exquisitely responsive to them.

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.

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.

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.

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

The research that my colleagues and I have done suggests that, not surprisingly, maximizers are prime candidates for depression.

ANYTIME YOU MAKE A DECISION AND IT DOESN'T TURN OUT WELL or you find an alternative that would have turned out better, you're a candidate for regret.

Clearly, our experience of choice as a burden rather than a privilege is not a simple phenomenon. Rather it is the result of a complex interaction among many psychological processes that permeate our culture, including rising expectations, awareness of opportunity costs, aversion to trade-offs, adaptation, regret, self-blame, the tendency to engage in social comparisons, and maximizing.

This is postdecision regret, regret that occurs after we've experienced the results of a decision. But there is also something called anticipated regret, which rears its head even before a decision is made.

Postdecision regret is sometimes referred to as "buyer's remorse.

The benefits of having options are apparent with each particular decision we face, but the costs are subtle and cumulative.

If we are responsible for an action that turns out badly and if it almost turned out well, then we are prime candidates for regret.

But if you've been convinced by the arguments and the evidence in this book, you now know that choice has a downside, an awareness that should make it easier for you to adopt, and live with, a "two options is my limit" rule. It's worth a try.

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.

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.

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.