Barry Schwartz Quotes & Sayings

How much does it really matter whether your child will soon be enjoying a first year at Harvard or Yale or will instead end up at her third or fourth or fifth choice? Probably much less than you think. — 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. — Barry Schwartz

Having the opportunity to choose is no blessing if we feel we do not have the wherewithal to choose wisely. — Barry Schwartz

Too little attention is paid to the dark side of incentives. They are anything but a magic bullet. Psychologists have known this for years, but it seems largely hidden from the world of commerce. — Barry Schwartz

information costs," is not the way to maximize one's investment. The true maximizer would determine just how much information seeking was the amount needed to lead to a very good decision. — Barry Schwartz

ECONOMISTS POINT OUT THAT THE QUALITY OF ANY GIVEN OPTION can not be assessed in isolation from its alternatives. One of the "costs" of any option involves passing up the opportunities that a different option would have afforded. This is referred to as an opportunity cost. — Barry Schwartz

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

Lane writes that we are paying for increased affluence and increased freedom with a substantial decrease in the quality and quantity of social relations. — Barry Schwartz

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

To these three comparisons I have added a fourth: the gap between what one has and what one expects. — Barry Schwartz

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. — Barry Schwartz

Everybody makes money for a living, but most of us actually do something that has a point, in addition to just making money. We examine and treat patients, we teach students, we draw up contracts and wills, we write for newspapers, magazines, and web sites, we clean floors, or we serve meals. — Barry Schwartz

In an ideal world, nobody's work would be just about the money. People could pursue excellence in what they do, take pride in achievement, and derive meaning from knowing that their work improved the lives of others. — Barry Schwartz

The mistake is to assume that the way it feels at the moment is the way it will feel forever. — Barry Schwartz

Without wisdom, brilliance is not enough. — Barry Schwartz

At present, the potential causal role that the availability of choice has in making people into maximizers is pure speculation. If the speculation is correct, we ought to find that in cultures in which choice is less ubiquitous and extensive than it is in the U.S., there should be fewer maximizers. — Barry Schwartz

I start with an idea that is no more than a paragraph long, and expand it slowly into an outline. But I'm always surprised by the directions things take when I actually start writing. — Barry Schwartz

I believe there are steps we can take to mitigate - even eliminate - many of these sources of distress, but they aren't easy. They require practice, discipline, and perhaps a new way of thinking. On the other hand, each of these steps will bring its own rewards. — Barry Schwartz

If people think about options in terms of their features rather than as a whole, different options may rank as second best (or even best) with respect to each individual feature. — Barry Schwartz

Of course, bankers were always interested in making money. But when bankers had clients, they bore some responsibility for the clients' welfare. — Barry Schwartz

Whereas maximizers might do better objectively than satisficers, they tend to do worse subjectively. — Barry Schwartz

The lesson here is that high expectations can be counter-productive. We probably can do more to affect the quality of our lives by controlling our expectations than we can by doing virtually anything else. The blessing of modest expectations is that they leave room for many experiences to be a pleasant surprise, a hedonic plus. The challenge is to find a way to keep expectations modest, even as actual experiences keep getting better. — Barry Schwartz

Most people give substantial weight to anecdotal evidence, perhaps so much that it will cancel out positive recommendations found in consumer reports. People's tendency to give undue weight to some types of information is called the availability heuristic. A heuristic is a rule of thumb, a mental shortcut. Suppose someone asked you a question like what's more common in English, words that start with the letter to r words that have t as the third letter. You would have an easier time generating words that started with the letter t. Words starting with t would be more 'available'. — Barry Schwartz

Apparently we always think we want choice, but when we actually get it, we may not like it. Meanwhile, the need to chose in ever more aspects of life causes us more distress than we realize. — Barry Schwartz

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

Every choice we make is a testament to our autonomy, to our sense of self-determination. Almost every social, moral, or political philosopher in the Western tradition since Plato has placed a premium on such autonomy. And each new expansion of choice gives us another opportunity to assert our autonomy, and this display our character. — Barry Schwartz

WE ALL KNOW THAT REGRET CAN MAKE PEOPLE MISERABLE, BUT regret also serves several important functions. First, anticipating that we may regret a decision may induce us to take the decision seriously and to imagine the various scenarios that may follow it. This anticipation may help us to see consequences of a decision that would not have been evident otherwise. Second, regret may emphasize the mistakes we made in arriving at a decision, so that, should a similar situation arise in the future, we won't make the same mistakes. Third, regret may mobilize or motivate us to take the actions necessary to undo a decision or ameliorate some of its unfortunate consequences. — Barry Schwartz

Most people can suppress counterfactual thoughts before they spin too far down a spiral, those who suffer from clinical depression may not be able to. When a student who didn't study much does badly on an exam, he could take responsibility for not having studied more. But the exam could have been easier, or more focused on the material the student knew. — Barry Schwartz

While maximizers and perfectionists both have very high standards, I think that perfectionists have very high standards that they don't expect to meet, whereas maximizers have very high standards that they do expect to meet. Which may explain why we found that those who score high on perfectionism, unlike maximizers, are not depressed, regretful, or unhappy. — Barry Schwartz

People who work in financial services don't have one shred of concern about the well-being of the people they serve. They're only interested in themselves. — Barry Schwartz

When you rely on incentives, you undermine virtues. Then when you discover that you actually need people who want to do the right thing, those people don't exist because you've crushed anyone's desire to do the right thing with all these incentives. — Barry Schwartz

keeping options open seems to extract a psychological price. When we can change our minds, apparently we do less psychological work to justify the decision we've made, reinforcing the chosen alternative and disparaging the rejected ones. — Barry Schwartz

You buy a pair of shoes that turn out to be uncomfortable. Thaler suggests the expensive they were, the more often you'll try to wear them. Eventually you'll stop wearing them, but you won't get rid of them. And the more you paid for them the longer they will sit in your closet. At some point, after the shoes have been fully depreciated psychologically, you will throw them away. — Barry Schwartz

I don't really read 'business books,' and I didn't think 'The Paradox of Choice' was a business book. I'm very surprised and gratified that the business world thought it was one. — Barry Schwartz

Much of human progress has involved reducing the time and energy, as well as the number of processes we have to engage in and think about, for each of us to obtain the necessities of life. — Barry Schwartz

We get what we say we want, only to discover that what we want doesn't satisfy us to the degree that we expect. — Barry Schwartz

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

We give disproportionate weight to whether yogurt is said to be five percent fat or 95 percent fat free. People seem to think that yogurt that is 95 percent fat free is a more healthful product than yogurt that has five percent fat. — Barry Schwartz

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

The circumstances of modern life seem to be conspiring to make experiences less satisfying than they could and perhaps should be, in part because of the richness against which we are comparing our own experiences. Again, as we'll see, an overload of choice contributes to this dissatisfaction. — Barry Schwartz

In a world of scarcity, opportunities don't present themselves in bunches, and the decisions people face are between approach and avoidance, acceptance or rejection. — Barry Schwartz

Focus on what makes you happy, and do what gives meaning to your life — Barry Schwartz

The key thing to appreciate, though, is that what is most important to us, most of the time, is not the objective results of decisions, but the subjective results. — Barry Schwartz

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

We are free to be the authors of our own lives, but we don't know what kind of lives we want to 'write. — Barry Schwartz

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 — Barry Schwartz

The very wealth of options before us may turn us from choosers into pickers. A chooser is someone who thinks actively about the possibilities before making a decision. A chooser reflects on what's important to him or her in life, what's important about this particular decision, and what the short- and long-range consequences of the decision may be. A chooser makes decisions in a way that reflects awareness of what a given choice means about him or her as a person. Finally, a chooser is thoughtful enough to conclude that perhaps none of the available alternatives are satisfactory, and that if he or she wants the right alternative, he or she might have to create it. A picker does none of these things. — Barry Schwartz

choices are based upon expected utility. And once you have had experience with particular restaurants, CDs, or movies, future choices will be based upon what you remember about these past experiences, in other words, on their remembered utility. — Barry Schwartz

Years of research in psychology has shown that rewards and punishments can be very effective in changing behavior. But, at the same time, they can create an addiction to rewards and punishments. — Barry Schwartz

Learning to choose is hard. Learning to choose well is harder. And learning to choose well in a world of unlimited possibilities is harder still, perhaps too hard. — Barry Schwartz

What we don't realize is that the very option of being allowed to change our minds seems to increase the chances that we will change our minds. — Barry Schwartz

on "idea technology"--Science creates ideas, science creates ways of understanding. And in the social sciences, ways of understanding ourselves. And they have an enormous influence on how we think, what we aspire to, and how we act. ......idea technology may be the most profoundly important technology that science gives us.......we do have to worry about the theories we have of human nature, because human nature will be changed by the theories we have that are designed to explain and help us understand human beings....it is only human nature to have a human nature that is very much the product of the society in which people live.
--TED The way we think about work is broken — Barry Schwartz

Practical wisdom is what's called for in situations that have a moral dimension to them. — Barry Schwartz

Most good decisions will involve these steps: Figure out your goal or goals. Evaluate the importance of each goal. Array the options. Evaluate how likely each of the options is to meet your goals. Pick the winning option. Later use the consequences of your choice to modify your goals, the importance you assign them, and the way you evaluate future possibilities. — Barry Schwartz

Freedom to choose has what might be called expressive value. Choice is what enables us to tell the world who we are and what we care about. — Barry Schwartz

But knowing what we want means, in essence, being able to anticipate accurately how one choice or another will make us feel, and that is no simple task. — Barry Schwartz

AWAY OF EASING THE BURDEN THAT FREEDOM OF CHOICE IMPOSES IS to make decisions about when to make decisions. These are what Cass Sunstein and Edna Ullmann-Margalit call second-order decisions. One kind of second-order decision is the decision to follow a rule. — Barry Schwartz

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. — Barry Schwartz

The secret to happiness is low expectations. — Barry Schwartz

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? — Barry Schwartz

What I look for in any book is an argument, based on evidence, that changes the way I think about something important. — Barry Schwartz