Quotes About Choice

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question."29

Whenever my behavior is biologically determined or socially conditioned, it is not truly free. To act freely, according to Kant, is to act autonomously. And to act autonomously is to act according to a law I give myself—not according to the dictates of nature or social convention.

We're not only sentient beings, governed by the pleasure and pain delivered by our senses; we are also rational beings, capable of reason. If reason determines my will, then the will becomes the power to choose independent of the dictates of nature or inclination

The world's not just a stage. It's a casino, and our lives are games of chance. And when people calculate the odds in any life situation, they are often making judgments about similarity—or (strange new word!) representativeness. You

If it doesn't happen, it never was going to happen. If you never did it, it wasn't there to begin with.

And [Thaler] noticed that when he had his fellow economists to dinner, they filled up on cashews, which meant they had less appetite for the meal. More to the point, he noticed that they tended to be relieved when he removed the cashew nuts, so they didn't ruin their dinners. The idea that it could make you better off to reduce your choices—that idea was alien to economics.

Los sujetos no elegían entre cosas. Elegían entre descripciones de cosas.

big choices we make are practically random. The small choices probably tell us more about who we are.

It's one thing to bet on red or black and know that you are betting on red or black. It's another to bet on a form of red and not to know it.

Regret was the ham in the back of the deli that caused people to switch from turkey to roast beef.

I share your feeling that such behavior is, in some sense, unwise or erroneous, but this does not mean that it does not occur,' Amos wrote to an American economist who complained about the description of human nature implied by 'Value Theory.' 'A theory of vision cannot be faulted for predicting optical illusions. Similarly, a descriptive theory of choice cannot be rejected on the grounds that it predicts 'irrational behavior' if the behavior in question is in fact observed.

People did not choose between things. They chose between descriptions of things.

When choosing between sure things and gambles, people's desire to avoid loss exceeded their desire to secure gain.

People regretted what they had done, and what they wished they hadn't done, far more than what they had not done and perhaps should have.

would never again let the market dictate the direction of his life.

But it implied, as utility theory never had, that it was as easy to get people to take risks as it was to get them to avoid them. All you had to do was present them with a choice that involved a loss. In the more than two hundred years since Bernoulli started the discussion, intellectuals had regarded risk-seeking behavior as a curiosity. If risk seeking was woven into human nature, as Danny and Amos's theory implied that it was, why hadn't people noticed it before?

For people to accept the yoke, they must believe they have no choice.

The reference point was a state of mind. Even in straight gambles you could shift a person's reference point and make a loss seem like a gain, and vice versa. In so doing, you could manipulate the choices people made, simply by the way they were described.

chose the surgery. People facing a life-and-death decision responded not to the odds but to the way the odds were described to them.

What is it with you freedom-loving Americans? he asked. Live free or die. I don't get it. I say, "Regulate me gently. I'd rather live.

The job of the decision maker wasn't to be right but to figure out the odds in any decision and play them well.

Actually, they soon discovered, you had to reduce the amount of the certain loss even further if you wanted to get people to accept it. When choosing between sure things and gambles, people's desire to avoid loss exceeded their desire to secure gain.

The gist of it was that people don't learn what is imposed upon them but rather what they freely seek, out of desire or need.

In Danny and Amos's working theory, the paradox was now resolved differently. It wasn't that (or at least not only that) people anticipated regret when making a decision in the first situation that they did not anticipate in making the second. It was that they treated 50 percent as more than 50 percent and saw the difference between 4 percent and 2 percent as far less than it was.