Quote collection
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"This is at a time when you know most of us drank tap water, so I used to go to this store and examine all the varieties and we used to marvel at all the choices out there, but I found that I rarely bought anything and I kind of thought that was kind of curious. I mean, they had things that the other grocery stores didn't have and yet I never bought anything."
"I mean we know that some choice makes you better off than no choice. Now do we get better off if we go from a lot of choice versus a few choices? And there I think the answer is much, much, much more complicated."
"If you truly have expertise - and expertise can be say a chess master who has really mastered something or an artist or a musician of some sort you know if you give a jazz musician."
"I mean we might even go to war as to whether we love Coke or Pepsi and our whole identity is wrapped up in that choice. You know, for the Russians they felt that these minor differences between these various sodas was just hyped up and irrelevant."
"There is a different attitude about, you know, how much differentiation there needs to be between our options and how many choices do I need to have in order to make a choice."
"About the only time our gut can truly outperform our reason is if we truly have developed a kind of informed intuition. So that means the chess master or someone who has really thought about it and given themselves feedback on a particular activity for at least 10,000 hours or more."
"About the only question that we would say and this is a big one in our lives that we would say you don't just use pure reason to decide the answer to is anything that affects your happiness, because then gut and reason answer very different questions. So gut tells you "How do I feel about this right now?""
"So for decisions about happiness you essentially need at least both and probably even more than that, you probably also need to do analysis that doesn't involve yourself to get at the answer of what will make you happy in 10 years."
"I've done a number of studies with speed dating and Match.com and what's interesting is that you know we still walk into a speed dating event, you know, thinking about what it is we're looking for in a mate and so you ask people, like women will say "I'm looking for somebody who is really kind and sincere and smart and funny.""
"And guys will say looks matter, but they'll also say things like "Well, she should be smart and kind." And you know those are... so the typical responses and if you give them just a few options, like five or six, then they will rate them on the very characteristics that they said were really important to them."
"Now if you expand their choice set. Say you give them 20 different speed dates, everything goes out the window. Everybody starts choosing in accordance with looks because that becomes the easiest criteria by which to weed out all the options and decide "So who am I going to say yes to?""
"I didn't really give them anymore than one choice, soda or no soda. They didn't... whereas we put a lot of stock in the differences between soda."
"When I was in Russia I found that I thought I was going to give these people that I was interviewing a whole bunch of choice in terms of what they could drink while we were chatting."
"You know give me choices that are truly different from one another, otherwise they don't regard them as meaningful choices."
"I used to go to this store called Draeger's and you had a little bit of that same feeling because this was a store that offered you so many varieties, things you'd never contemplated before, you know like 250 mustards and vinegars and over 500 different kinds of fruits and vegetables, or over 2 dozen different types of water."
"People will make worse financial decisions for them if they're choosing from a lot of options than if they're choosing from a few options. If they have more options they're more likely to avoid stocks and put all their money in money market accounts, which doesn't even grow at the rate of inflation."
"What we share with animals is a desire for choice. It's a desire to have control over our life and a desire to live and use choice as a way in which we can facilitate our ability to live and that is something we really were born with."
"You know, whether it be humans or animals. So even humans - before we can speak or we can understand a baby's cognition - they're already showing us signs that they want choice."
"You know, you take a little infant and you turn on the music mobile on their crib and you find that if you give them a music mobile which turns on automatically versus a music mobile in which - if by chance their little legs or their little hands accidentally touches it - turns on they're so much more excited if by chance it turns on because they touched it, so that desire for control over their environment is... really appears from very early on and if you look at children's first words, "no, yes.""
"A chess master can keep track of more choices than the number of stars in the galaxy within an instant, but these are people that have truly learned and mastered the choices that they have and how to deal with those choices over a very, very long period of training, so essentially what they're really doing is ruling out all the irrelevant choices and only zeroing in on the most relevant, useful choices at the moment."