Barry Schwartz

At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates.

We would be better off if we embraced certain voluntary constraints on our freedom of choice, instead of rebelling against them.
We would be better off seeking what was “good enough” instead of seeking the best (have you ever heard a parent say, “I want only the ‘good enough’ for my kids”?).
We would be better off if we lowered our expectations about the results of decisions.
We would be better off if the decisions we made were nonreversible.
We would be better off if we paid less attention to what others around us were doing.

The large array of jams attracted more people to the table than the small array, though in both cases people tasted about the same number of jams on average.

According to a survey conducted by Yankelovich Partners, a majority of people want more control over the details of their lives, but a majority of people also want to simplify their lives. There you have it—the paradox of our times.

In other words, cosmetic surgery is slowly shifting from being a procedure that people gossip about to being a commonplace tool for self-improvement.

As journalist Wendy Kaminer puts it, “Beauty used to be a gift bestowed upon the few for the rest of us to admire. Today it’s an achievement, and homeliness is not just misfortune but a failure.”

Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues have shown that what we remember about the pleasurable quality of our past experiences is almost entirely determined by two things: how the experiences felt when they were at their peak (best or worst), and how they felt when they ended.

This “peak-end” rule of Kahneman’s is what we use to summarize the experience, and then we rely on that summary later to remind ourselves of how the experience felt. The summaries in turn influence our decisions about whether to have that experience again, and factors such as the proportion of pleasure to displeasure during the course of the experience or how long the experience lasted, have almost no influence on our memory of it.

So the second group experienced the same moment-by-moment discomfort as the first group, with the addition of somewhat lesser discomfort for twenty seconds more. And that is what they reported, moment-by-moment, as they were having the procedure. But a short time after it was over, the second group rated their experience as less unpleasant than did the first. Whereas both groups had the same peak experience, the second group had a milder end experience.

According to James Twitchell, the key insight that has shaped modern advertising came to cigarette manufacturers in the 1930s. In the course of market research, they discovered that smokers who taste-tested various cigarette brands without knowing which was which couldn’t tell them apart. So, if the manufacturer wanted to sell more of his particular brand, he was either going to have to make it distinctive or make consumers think it was distinctive, which was considerably easier. With that was born the practice of selling a product by associating it with a glamorous lifestyle.