Top 50 Barry Schwartz Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. Having the opportunity to choose is no blessing if we feel we do not have the wherewithal to choose wisely.
Barry Schwartz
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Focus on what makes you happy, and do what gives meaning to your life
Barry Schwartz
#11. 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
#12. Whereas maximizers might do better objectively than satisficers, they tend to do worse subjectively.
Barry Schwartz
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Practical wisdom is what's called for in situations that have a moral dimension to them.
Barry Schwartz
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. adding options can be detrimental to our well-being. Because we don't put rejected options out of our minds,
Barry Schwartz
#22. The mistake is to assume that the way it feels at the moment is the way it will feel forever.
Barry Schwartz
#23. 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
#24. What I look for in any book is an argument, based on evidence, that changes the way I think about something important.
Barry Schwartz
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. So the researchers concluded that being forced to confront trade-offs in making decisions makes people unhappy and indecisive.
Barry Schwartz
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Adding the second option creates a conflict, forcing a trade-off between price and quality.
Barry Schwartz
#32. it is not dancing toy animals that are an endless source of delight for infants, but rather having control.
Barry Schwartz
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Of course, bankers were always interested in making money. But when bankers had clients, they bore some responsibility for the clients' welfare.
Barry Schwartz
#42. 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
#43. 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
#45. To these three comparisons I have added a fourth: the gap between what one has and what one expects.
Barry Schwartz
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Bottom line - the options we consider usually suffer from comparison with other options.
Barry Schwartz
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