Barry Schwartz Quotes

When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable. As the number of available choices increases... the autonomy, control and liberation... are powerful and positive. But as the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects... begin to appear. As the... choices grow further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.

If some of what enables people in our society to make all of the choices we make were shifted to societies in which people have too few options, not only would those people's lives be improved, but ours would be improved also. This is what economists call a Pareto improving move. Income redistribution will make everyone better off, not just poor people, because of how all of this excess choice plagues us.

Filtering out extraneous information is one of the basic functions of our consciousness.

I want to start with what I call the official dogma... of all Western industrial societies... "If we are interested in maximizing the welfare of our citizens... maximize individual freedom. ...The way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice."

A large array of options may discourage customers because it forces an increase in the effort that goes into making the decision. ...[T]hinking about the attractions of some of the unchosen options detracts from the pleasure derived from the chosen one.

[W]e must decide which choices in our lives really matter and focus our time and energy there, letting many other opportunities pass us by.

Having too many choices produces psychological distress, especially when combined with regret, concern about status, adaptation, social comparison, and perhaps most important, the desire to have the best of everything—to maximize.

Agonizing over whether your love is "the real thing" or your sexual relationship above or below par, and wondering whether you could have done better is a prescription for misery. Knowing that you've made a decision choice that you will not reverse allows you to pour your energy into improving the relationship that you have rather than constantly second-guessing it.

We almost have an unlimited variety of phones, especially in the world of cell phones. ...It is not possible to buy a cell phone that doesn't do too much.

Identity is much less a thing people "inherit" than it used to be.

We would be better off if we embraced certain voluntary constraints on our freedom of choice... better off seeking what was "good enough" instead of... best... better off if we lowered our expectations... if... decisions were nonreversable... if we paid less attention to what others around us were doing.

[W]e now face a demand to make choices that is unparalleled in human history.

There is in American society, not only the the American society but more here than anywhere else, what I have come to call the official syllogism and this is a set of assumptions that we have about well-being and about how society should be organized that runs so deep that I think we don't realize we make them. And the only time you start to notice that you make them is when you can start to accumulate evidence that they are wrong. So what is this official syllogism? First, we all think that the more freedom people have, the more welfare they have. How could you think otherwise? This is [a] no-brainer. What argument could you make to suggest that there is anything wrong with this assumption? The second thing we think is that the more choice people have, the more freedom they have. What does freedom mean if not choice?

Americans spend more time shopping than the members of any other society. ...more often than they go to houses of worship, and Americans now have more shopping centers than high schools. ...[P]eople are shopping more now but enjoying it less.

Responsibility for medical care has landed on the... patient with a resounding thud. ...The tenor of medical practice has shifted from... the all-knowing, paternalistic doctor... to one in which the doctor arrays the possibilities... along with the likely pluses and minuses... and the patient makes the choice.