Summary
Virtually any economist will tell you that adding options will make some people better off while making no one worse off.
If you are out to find the best, then large choice sets pose a major problem, because the only way to know you have the best is by examining all the options. In contrast, if you are out to find something that is “good enough,” large choice sets are less of a problem. Indeed, they may not be a problem at all. People looking for things that are “good enough” stop searching as soon as they find them.
People who are out for the best — maximizers — have more trouble choosing and are less satisfied with their choices and with their lives in general, than people who are out for good enough — the people we call “satisficers.”
If you limit the number of choices you make and the number of options you consider, you’re going to have more time available for what’s important than do people who are plagued by one decision after another, always in search of the best.
Notes
- Prologue
- Increased choice among goods and services may contribute little or nothing to the kind of freedom that counts. Indeed, it may impair freedom by taking time and energy we’d be better off devoting to other matters.
- We make the most of our freedoms by learning to make good choices about the things that matter, while at the same time unburdening ourselves from too much concern about the things that don’t.
- When we choose
- We have too many choices, too many decisions, too little time to do what is really important.
- A majority of people want more control over the details of their lives, but a majority of people also want to simplify their lives.
- The burden of having every activity be a matter of deliberate and conscious choice would be too much for any of us to bear.
- How we choose
- The process of goal-setting and decision making begins with the question: “What do I want?”
- 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.
- 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.
- However well or poorly we determine our goals before making a decision, having set them, we then go through the task of gathering information to evaluate the options.
- Even if we can accurately determine what we want and then find good information, in a quantity we can handle do we really know how to analyze, sift, weigh, and evaluate it to arrive at the right conclusions and make the right choices?
- The group predictions are better than the predictions of any individual.
- Inaccurate information can create a bandwagon effect, leading quickly to a broad, but mis-taken, consensus.
- People tend to avoid taking risks — they are “risk averse” — when they are deciding among potential gains, potential positive outcomes. People embrace risk — they are “risk seeking” — in the domain of potential losses.
The goal of maximizing is a source of great dissatisfaction, that it can make people miserable — especially in a world that insists on providing an overwhelming number of choices, both trivial and not so trivial.
Being a maximizer does play a causal role in people’s unhappiness, and learning how to satisfice is an important step not only in coping with a world of choice but in simply enjoying life.
- Why we suffer
- Choice enable people to get what they need and want in life.
- Choice is also what enables us to tell the world who we are and what we care about.
- Every choice we make is a testament to our autonomy, to our sense of self-determination.
- We must decide, individually, when choice really matters and focus our energies there, even if it means letting many other opportunities pass us by.
- A way of easing the burden that freedom of choice imposes is to make decisions about when to make decisions — second-order decisions.
- By using rules, presumptions, standards, and routines to constrain ourselves and limit the decisions we face, we can make life more manageable, which gives us more time to devote ourselves to other people and to the decisions that we can’t or don’t want to avoid.
- While each second-order decision has a price — each involves passing up opportunities for something better — we could not get through a day without them.
- If we assume that missed opportunities take away from the overall desirability of the most-preferred option and that we will feel the mission-opportunity costs associated with many of the options we reject, then the more alternatives there are from which to choose, the greater our experience of the missed opportunities will be.
- Being forced to confront trade-offs in making decisions makes people unhappy and indecisive.
- Conflict induces people to avoid decisions even when the stakes are trivial.
- As the number of options goes up, the need to provide justifications for decisions also increases. And though this struggle to find reasons will lead to decisions that seem right at the moment, it will not necessarily lead to decisions that feel right later on.
- In the face of past failure, not changing is more salient and blameworthy than changing.
- While upward counterfactual thinking may inspire us to do better the next time, downward counterfactual thinking may induce us to be grateful for how well we did this time.
- The right balance of upward and downward counterfactual thinking may enable us to avoid spiraling into a state of misery while at the same time inspiring us to improve our performance.
- By causing us to focus on how much better our lives are than they could have been, or were before, the disappointment that adaptation brings in its wake can be blunted.
- What contributes to high expectations, above and beyond the quality of past experience, is the amount of choice and control we now have over most aspects of our lives.
- The challenge is to find a way to keep expectations modest, even as actual experiences keep getter better. One way of achieving this goal is by keeping wonderful experiences rare.
- What we can do (good summary, refer to book for more details)
- Choose when to choose
- Be a chooser, not a picker
- Satisfice more and maximize less
- Think about the costs of missed opportunities
- Make your decisions nonreversible
- Practice an “attitude of gratitude”
- Regret less
- Anticipate adaptation
- Control expectations
- Curtail social comparison
- Learn to embrace constraints
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