Ryan Moyer: Hello and welcome to Why Do We Do That, a psychology podcast that deconstructs the human experience through the perspectives of social scientists, psychologists, and other experts who apply psychology in their work. I'm your host, Dr. Ryan Moyer. Why can trying too hard to make the best decision actually lead us to make worse ones? We're constantly being told to make rational decisions, weigh the pros and cons, compare our options, calculate the risks, and choose whatever gives us the best possible outcome. That sounds reasonable. But real life rarely gives us choices that can be neatly reduced to a formula. How do you compare a high-paying job with one that gives you more time with your family? Or decide whether spending your Saturday getting ahead at work? Is really better than visiting someone you love. Today I'm joined by Barry Schwartz, an influential psychologist and the best-selling author of The Paradox of Choice. His latest book, Choose Wisely: Rationality, Ethics, and the Art of Decision Making, challenges some of our most basic assumptions about what it means to make a good decision. In this conversation, We explore why numbers can give us a false sense of certainty, why searching for the best option can leave us less satisfied with whatever we choose, and why good decision making requires more than simply following our gut or crunching the numbers. We also discuss the importance of judgment, knowing when good enough really is good enough, and even why a little regret. Can help us make better decisions in the future. So if you've ever agonized over a decision, wondered whether you made the right choice, or spent way too much time trying to find the absolute best option, this episode might change the way you think about choosing altogether. So why do we do that? Let's find out.

speaker-0: Okay, today I am joined by Barry Schwartz. Thank you so much for being on today.

speaker-1: It's my pleasure.

speaker-0: So Barry has a new book out called Choose Wisely: Rationality, Ethics, and the Art of Decision Making. the book spends a it's it's a lot of time discussing the the common wisdom that that a lot of people thought about decision making and how decision making should go, and essentially dismantles a a theory called rational choice theory, which we'll we'll get into in a bit. but the the book really sets out to tell this story about how decision making is is is often a a a process that's a little bit more complex than you might expect. I have a very romantic view of decision making. I you know you you talk about all all the other influences on human behavior. You have genetics, which you can't really change. you talk about the social environment, which you can influence, but you don't have a lot of control over necessarily. You've got your habits, but even habits, even though they're a a powerful way to control your life, a lot of habits just kind of occur. They're not they're not decided upon or built. But there's something about the decision that we we can make, a a a single solitary decision. Whether you think free will is real or it's just an illusion, a decision is this pure example of exercising control over one's life. Do you share the same sentiment about decision making or or do you think decision making is more like a computer just executing commands?

speaker-1: Well, I I think you and I may agree about this. I I don't have a position on the determinism versus free will issue. So ultimately is there some computational machinery that is spewing out the decisions that we think are the product of careful, rational deliberation? I don't know, but I sh completely share with you the view. that this is the moment in life or these are the moments in life when we feel like we are exerc exercising autonomy, control, judgment. These are the moments in life that we want to be known by and known for. So yes, they're they're sacrosanct. And you know, I'm sure that your listeners are have some familiarity, maybe a lot, with a field that's come to be called behavioral economics, which is really just psychology applied to issues that economists study. Kahneman and Tversky are the leading lights in the development of this field. And the most popular single book is probably Freakonomics, written by an economist Stephen Levitt. And the all that work is d focuses on the ways in which we fall short of rational decision making. So, you know, economists have told us the right way to do it, and we don't do it that way. And here are the various ways in which we get things wrong, and maybe things we might do to help correct some of these mistakes. And I've taught that material for 25 years and written about it, and I think it's an amazingly important contribution to our understanding and It has one really big problem. And that really big problem is that the standard of what counts as a rational decision, how we should be deciding, they it accepts essentially without criticism. You know, economists said this is the right way to do it. We'll accept that this is the right way to do it, and then we'll catalog all the ways in which people don't do it the right way. And the point of this book is that the model that economists have given us, what you call rational choice theory, what we call rational choice theory, is a horrible model for what it means to be rational. And somehow, because of all this work on how it it's bad as a description of what people do, what's been left unchallenged is whether it's okay as a norm for what people should do. And our argument is that it's a terrible norm for what people how we should go about making decisions.

speaker-0: In the book, you return to the question, what should I do today? Yeah. quite a bit. Because it's it's this little gateway, it's it's a kind of a perfect scenario for discussing decision making. you know, based on the argument of the book and how economists have put forward this rational choice theory is how we should be making decisions. Can you talk about the complexity, the the hidden perhaps complexity of the question, what should I do today? And and you know, set up this story about how what we should be doing may not be consistent with what what we've learned since in terms of behavioral economics and human sure decision making and things like that.

speaker-1: And we chose this example not because we think it's extraordinary, but because we think it's so ordinary. so this guy wakes up on a Saturday and and he has no obligations that he has to meet. And he asks a beautiful day, and he says, What should I do today? Most of us feel too busy to have such freedom, but the whole canvas is blank in front of him. What should I do today? Well I can get exercise. I can go for a hike. I could see something beautiful. I could veg out and watch sports on television. I could get a head start on work that I know I'm gonna be facing next week in the office. I could catch up on work that maybe I didn't finish last week in the office. I can go visit my mother who's living in a nursing home and you never think she sees me frequently enough. I could go visit my adult daughter who's about to move and probably could use my help packing up her apartment. And on and on and on it goes. I mean, the set of things one might do on a Saturday is essentially infinite. And the question is, A, how does this person decide? And B, how should this person decide? And the reason. that we take this example is that even though it's completely mundane, it makes, at least for us, it makes apparent what is wrong with our models of how to make decisions like this. For example, what's the metric that you use to compare how much satisfaction you'll get out of going for a hike? with how much satisfaction you'll get out of visiting your mother or helping your daughter heck. What's what's the common denominator that those two absolutely qualitatively different sorts of things can have in common so that we can directly compare them? And you know, our argument is that life is full of decisions. That are where the options are not strictly comparable to one another. We call it incommensurability. You know, there are no units of getting ahead in next week's work that you can trade off against spending an afternoon with your mother. Right. You know, eventually you'll decide, and you'll presumably decide on some basis, but it won't be anything like a formula that you can apply. And what rational choice theory tells us is that any decision, the aim of any decision is to maximize your utility, whatever that means. And in order to make a decision, you need to know two things how good will the option I choose be for me, and how likely is it to be that good? You know, it's an the world is an uncertain place. So you array all the options, you give them some sort of a score on goodness, you give them another score on likelihood, and you do the math, and out comes the answer. And so the model that they have in mind is like deciding what bets to make in a gambling casino or at a racetrack, where indeed there are only two things that are relevant. How much do I win? How likely am I to win? You know, we we're familiar with that. And and and this notion that things can be compared effortlessly and quantified effortlessly is at the heart of what makes rational choice theory so compelling. It's it's it you know, there's a sense in which you're not an agent anymore. You just have to plug numbers into a formula and the formula tells you what the right thing to do is. And I think this captures virtually none of the decisions that we actually make in life and it shouldn't. You know, we you need discernment, you need judgment, you need wisdom. That's why the book is called Choose Wisely, because things are not easy to compare. Context matters. Framing the situation you're in, you know, this is a is this going to be a restful Saturday? That's one frame you might impose. And that would Suggest some things you might do and rule out others. Is it going to be a l labor-intensive Saturday? Well, that puts some things in the frame and eliminates others and s and so on. But what frame is the right frame is itself a matter of judgment, not a matter of formula. And so we set in front of people a model. That is A, impossible actually to meet the standards of, and B will lead to horrible decisions. There's an example we use of somebody gets invited to Thanksgiving dinner at a friend's parents' house, has a wonderful dinner, and when the dinner is over, leaves the hostess a tip. Now now that seems wrong, I hope, to to you and to me and to anyone listening to this. You know, you don't tip hostesses when you go to a family dinner. There's a there are ways to show your appreciation. Leaving a tip is not one of them. Similarly, if you have a wonderful meal in a restaurant, you don't hug your server. Right. Right. And we know that. So there are categories and understandings, norms about what's the right way to be thinking about options in this situation versus that one. And it's important that we preserve this knowledge that we have and and take advantage of it instead of trying to homogenize everything into one single space where th anything can be compared to anything else. and you know there is there is a a human invention that's very well suited to everything can be compared to everything else. And that human invention is called money. And the thing about money is a dollar is a dollar. And if you put monetary value on things that don't come with monetary value, Well now you can compare anything to anything, you know.

speaker-0: But that doesn't mean you should necessarily

speaker-1: Really doesn't mean you should, and what we try to suggest is that you absolutely shouldn't.

speaker-0: Yeah. So it it sounds to me like the story here is that there is there is what humans do by default. Then the controversy comes when you try to answer the question what should we be doing? And that is what the book focuses on, which is you know, this rational choice theory of maximizing utility or maximizing value. So If you're deciding what to eat. it does help to decide a goal. Like there is no answer to the question, what's the best thing to eat, unless you establish a goal. So if your goal is taste, then you establish, I'm gonna try to pick the thing that I think tastes the best. If you're trying to be healthy, you know, this is what I think is the healthiest, Healthy could be lowest calorie. It could also be a specific set of macronutrients, right? and in addition to that, there's that element of well, you also have to estimate how well a decision fits that. And it you you kind of focus in on the book. there's this book called Thinking and Bets by Annie Duke. You know, you you brought up Putting a dollar dollar amount to something. And in her book, she talks about how we have to kind of focus on these probable you know, these probabilities that we're estimating. And that and we we can we can use that to help us make better decisions. So if if there is something flawed about rational choice theory and there's something flawed about our ability to estimate. What what is what is flawed about our ability to estimate outcomes?

speaker-1: Well, there are two answers to that. One is that as the research in behavioral economics has shown, we're not really very good at thinking about or understanding probabilistic outcomes. And so we are likely to make a series of mechanical errors. Okay. and that's true even if we've been trained in probability theory, The reason Kahneman and Tversky did the work that they did is that they would throw out these scenarios to their students and find that their students consistently gave the wrong answers, the intuitive answers, even though these were advanced graduate students who had had several years of research of of courses in statistics. So they knew how to do statistics, they just didn't apply what they knew to To this sort of everyday situation correctly. And if these highly educated people were susceptible to these errors, God help the rest of us, right? So so there's the mechanical problem of do you know how to calculate? So that's a you problem. You could get better at it. But there's another problem, and that is that the world doesn't always cooperate. There are certain domains. That I would describe as radically uncertain, meaning that it is a fantasy to attach probabilities to outcomes. When I say that I think the Yankees are going to win the World Series this year, and you say, yeah, how sure are you? And I s and I say I think there's a seventy five percent chance. What the hell does that mean? Does it mean the same thing as a bet in a gambling casino? No, it's a way of me expressing how confident I am, but the quantitative manifestation of that confidence is just an invention. You know? And there may be somebody who knows a lot more about baseball than I do who can give you, you know, w the source of that 75% figure. but most of us most of the decisions we face in life. can't be quantified in that way. You try your kids trying to decide where to go to college. Well, what's the ch what are the chances that Yale is gonna be better than Princeton? What's the probability? Give me a break.

speaker-0: Right. Right. And and and also when you know, as I started reading the book, I I immediately understood the premise, which is that it's not so much that you can't quantify decision making in some context as as you discuss, if you're at a blackjack table or if you're at a roulette wheel. you you can apply some of these techniques more effectively but you know to your point you it it's a fool's errand to attempt to estimate which of the colleges that will be most likely to bring you joy or achieve the goal that you're attempting. you know I I feel like may there there might be an ability to say I like one more than the other. But i it makes no sense to try to build a statistical model inside of our heads, right?

speaker-1: That's right. And saying I like one more than another doesn't say how much more. And you need to know how much more, right? And that that's when we g enter the world of fantasy. And it has another effect, and and and this is even more troubling. If we knew the limits of quantification, then we would take our estimates with several grains of salt. In other words, we wouldn't take them too seriously. When I say the Yankees have a 75% chance of winning the World Series, I don't really mean that they have a 75%. It means I feel good about the Yankees this year. The trouble is that people are very much seduced by quantification. The more you can quantify any dis anything, any decision, the more confidence you have in that decision. And What that does is it gets people, say to choose a college on the basis of aspects of the place that can be quantified. What is the college's endowment? You know, it's not unreasonable to say that in general richer is better means more opportunities for students, but is endowment a proxy for educational quality? Hardly. What percentage of students who apply get accepted? is the rejection rate a proxy for an equality of the student body? Well, you know, it's not irrelevant, but it's hardly a perfect proxy. On the other hand, US News World Report publishes, you know, the most famous or infamous effort to rank colleges and universities, and they quantify everything. And so if you are a university, you want the rejection rate to be high. Because the more people you reject, the higher ranking you'll get from US News and World Report. And then some poor 17 year old is looking and saying, they reject 98% of the people who apply. That must be all pointy headed geniuses there. That's for me, you know, that sort of thing. And big endowment, that's for me. So instead of the things that can be quantified having their place, that place becomes every place because we don't take qualitative evaluations as seriously as we do quantitative evaluations when it comes to predicting what it's going to be like for us to be at that school or to take that job. How are how are the colleagues at the job that you're contemplating taking? You can't quantify that. You know, you could invent a number, but it wouldn't really mean anything. What's the s chances of advancement? That's more easily quantified. What's the salary? That's very easily quantified. What are the benefits? That's very easily quantified. And so you end up Choosing not on the basis of what you think is most important, but instead on the basis of what can be most precisely quantified.

speaker-0: Yeah. So adjacent to this idea of of this the seductive nature of quantifying these pieces of our decision making is the idea of choosing quote unquote the best, right? Whether you want to call that maximization or optimization, which are not the same things, oftentimes it There's this idea that we sh we're trying to make the best decision. let's put this in the context of let's say I'm I I like to eat mixed nuts and I want I want to find the best nut to buy at the at the grocery store. Let's say I just want to find the best nut, which is actually a balance, a balance of factors. So I want to choose the best nut, and I take two weeks and I try them all, and I look at the nutritional facts and the fiber, and I weigh that I weigh that with how good each one tastes, and I decide that option A, the pistachio, is the best. Okay. Would you say that the two week or three week process that I went through of weighing these properties and deciding on one w should I have gone through this at all in the first place?

speaker-1: So I wrote another book twenty years ago called The Paradox of Choice. And in that book, one of the key ideas is that looking for the best, that is to say, maximizing, is a fool's errand for two reasons. One is that in order to find the best, you have to examine every option, and the number of options in the modern world is essentially infinite. So you'll never put a nut, you'll never buy any nuts if you want to find the best mixture. And the second is that people who go at make decisions in pursuit of the best are typically less satisfied than people who are looking for good enough. They get better things, they buy better jeans, they get better jobs, and they feel worse about. And so if the ultimate aim is for you to get some kind of satisfaction out of a decision, looking for the best seems to be self-defeating. Because even when you find it, you don't it's not as good as you somehow thought it would be. So so my general view is that maximizing is a bad idea even when the stakes are high, and it's ludicrous when the stakes are low, like which bag of nuts should I buy? but it's the only it's the coin of the realm in rational choice theory. It's it's left essentially unexamined. I mean, why wouldn't you want the best? why would you settle for good enough when when the best is out there just waiting to be found? And in fairness, people f who work within this framework do talk about things like search costs. So If there are millions of different options when it comes to nut collections, the cost of finding the best isn't worth the benefit. So you shouldn't do it. And no doubt there is some optimal amount of searching you should do to find a mixture of nuts that is good enough to meet your high standards. But doesn't consume a ridiculous amount of your time and energy. And you could probably calculate the optimum amount of time to spend searching for nuts and the optimum amount of time to spend searching for a job, the optimum amount of time to spend searching for a life partner. You know, life partner is a to me a particularly telling example because in these days of digital matchmaking. We have essentially an infinite number of possible partners. And so if we're out to find that special perfect person that God has ordained is our match, we will all end up dying alone.

speaker-0: are you conceding that there is some some value in going through this rational process, this systematic analytical process up until that point where it starts to become unreasonable? No.

speaker-1: No, no, no, no. I think I think rational choice theory, this kind of systematic, analytical, quantitative process has its place. But that place isn't every place. And if we try to make every decision situation we find ourselves in into the equivalent of a gambling casino, then we will really distort the kinds of decisions we face. And how we should be thinking about them. So by no means do I think rational choice theory is just wrong and should be discarded. I think we need to there's a step one that we don't take that we should, which is to ask: is this a situation to which rational choice theory applies? Is this a situation to To which we should devote all of our analytical skills and energy. And the question here is: is it worth the effort? That's one. And two, is it really quantifiable in the way that it needs to be? And if you think it's not worth the effort, then you don't do it. And if you think it it to quantify it in that way is to distort it, then you don't do it. So the first question you have to ask is. Is the situation appropriate for using these tools, these analytical tools that I have? Having answered that question, no, you then have to ask yourself, well, then how should I go about making this decision? You know, and we are not suggesting that people should go with their gut. It's like either you think about it, in which case rational choice theory is the way to do it, or you go with your gut, in which case I don't even know what that means. No, we're suggesting there's a kind of intermediate where you think about it a lot and you ask yourself, what are my goals in this situation? What should my goals be in this situation? And so on. You reflect and eventually you make a choice after you've thought about why you're facing the decision and what the possible what you can possibly be aspiring to. So that that's stage one. And then you actually make the choice. So it is not go with your intuition. It is going with your judgment. And judgment, of course, is some of us have better judgment than others of us. And some of us have good judgment in some settings and terrible judgment in others. So judgment is something that has to be cultivated. So when you make a decision, you have to pay attention to the results so that the next time around you'll do better. But not in a formulaic way. In the way that every situation is different, every decision maker is different. And learning how to decide is essentially what it means to be alive.

speaker-0: Yeah.

speaker-1: That's that's what we do. We learn how to make better decisions if we're paying attention.

speaker-0: So let's let's stay on this a little bit. if if rash if this idea of of of using this rational choice theory and maximizing utility is is not is not optimal, and in so you're proposing not intuition, but something called judgment. is there a way? Because you've you've talked very broadly about this, but is there a way? To effectively balance logic, intuition, emotion, all of these things. let's let's like take a deep dive into this. What what does the judgment process even look like if we are going to move past the hyper analytic view of of rational choice?

speaker-1: that's a great question, and I must honestly admit that we don't do as good a job as we wish we could in spelling that out, because we don't really know how to spell that out. And one of the problems is that if your question is, can you offer an alternative that is as precise and formulaic as rational choice theory? And if not, you've not delivered the goods, well, then we fail. Because the whole point of the argument is that that kind of quantitative formulaic method is not the always the appropriate method. So we don't want to be, we don't want to be evaluated on the basis of criteria that rational choice theory sets out.

speaker-0: Right. It's it's kind of like health. Like you can there are these two ideas that are seemingly incompatible. One is there is an objective concept of health. And B you don't have to be the optimal h you don't have to do the right decision in every moment to be healthy. Right. you know, you can say that. Well, we don't really know about eggs. eggs might be healthy, they might not be, they might right. But that d just because it's that example is vague, it doesn't mean that there isn't a concept of eating healthy. Exactly. And so you can't necessarily set out for the goal of tell me the perfect breakfast, lunch, and dinner to be healthy, because it it seems as though the goal is wrong. The question you're asking is wrong. Instead of asking what is the perfect breakfast, lunch, and dinner and dinner in a linear way that that spits out a result like a like a statistical model, we instead need to have a softer solution. Right. And maybe it's trade-offs. I think about the word trade-offs all the time, which is you know, w what are your goals from for your diet? If your goals are to eat healthy, you know, 90% of the time, again, there we get into the quantification part, but let's say your goals are to eat healthy 90% of the time. Well, then, you know, 10% of the time, one day a week or one meal a week, you're gonna make a trade-off. You're gonna say, This is my trade off. I'm gonna I'm gonna bump up the value of taste so I can have cake at this birthday versus I am going to, you know, I'm gonna grind through it and just Maybe I'm gonna prioritize consistency. So I'm not gonna have the cake. But it's all it it seems like trade offs are w are at least one part of this better solution.

speaker-1: Absolutely. But here again, the problem rears its head because people who do cost benefit analysis for a living are all about calculating trade offs. But if you're going to get a government agency to take you seriously, you have to find a way to express those trade offs quantitatively, because that's the coin of the realm. And so you can't keep it vague. You know, you can't say, I think that this this way of tackling COVID is going to end up better than that way of cat tackling COVID. And they say, Well, what do you mean by better? And you say, Well, fewer deaths, or maybe you say less suffering, whatever you say, and then they say, How much better? And you go, Well, I really don't know. And then they call in another consultant who has no trouble saying, This is what I mean by better, and it's gonna save six hundred and seventy-two thousand lives. And you, you know, you're you're shown the door. So yes, trade offs, but you we have to be willing to accept that trade offs are not easy to make and they are often not quantifiable. You're acknowledging that you have multiple goals when you sit down to a meal. You want to enjoy the meal. You want to be having the meal with people you like to talk to. You want to be healthy enough that when you get out of bed in the morning, you feel ready to take on the day. You know, you're Father died of a heart attack at age fifty, and you want so there's a certain sense of of your precariousness that pervades your decision making around food. All of these things are considered, all of these things are balanced. And if you're a lunatic, you don't eat cake at this birthday party. The you don't make exceptions, and it makes life simpler. If you simply follow the rules, even if the rules don't necessarily make that much sense, it makes your life simpler because it takes decision out of your hands. You it's it's sort of like be being an orthodox follower of a religion. I'm Jewish. there j Judaism tells you what to do about virtually any situation that you encounter. It is really, it is a religion of rules, many of them. And you know, you could make one decision. I am going to be an observant Jew. Having made that decision, thousands of future decisions are taken off the table. Right? Because it's basically telling you how you're supposed to live your life in minute detail. So you could do that. And it has some virtues, but it seems to me it doesn't square very well with the kind of complex trade-off laden situations that we actually find ourselves confronted with. my wife is a was now retired neuropsychologist, so she studies people who have strokes and other kinds of brain injury. and the She was studying a patient who is in a come came from an Orthodox Jewish household and worked enormously many hours with this woman to s help figure out exactly what the problem was and what maybe could be done to improve her ability to understand language. And her the woman's family was incredibly appreciative, and they came and chatted with my wife. And the her husband would not shake my wife's hand because he was an Orthodox Jew and you don't shake, or at least the version of it that he observed, you don't shake women's hands. And he felt mortified because they were so grateful for what she had done. But you know, rules are rules. So that's one way to go through life. The world doesn't isn't very hospitable to that, but it simplifies the world you live in.

speaker-0: So if I were to just you know take that anecdote and reduce it down trying to reduce an idea down into its very core. is what you're saying that the the solution to making decisions that make us happy. or maybe happy is happiness is the wrong goal, but making decisions that that make us feel satisfied is this balance of we want values and principles so that we're not just winging every decision we make, but we also need the balance of flexibility. Like it's is that the summation? Is there something missing from from those two? ideas.

speaker-1: I don't think so. But notice the how unsatisfyingly vague what you just said is. Right? We want some flexibility. Well, what does flexibility mean? What does sum mean? It doesn't really solve your problem except to tell you to steer clear of any system that says there are rules and formulas. And to steer clear of any system that says just wing it. And you're in this uncomfortable middle ground where you have to decide, is this worth thinking about? And then you have to decide, how should I think about it? And you have to decide how should I compare these options that don't seem to have anything in common? But that's life. And pretending that you can somehow reduce it to something formulaic distorts life. And I guarantee you it will lead people to make ridiculous decisions. Because, you know, we don't maybe in the military, the world, everyday world is like what rational choice theory imagines it to be. But even there, it seems to me, at least in the heat of actual combat, you know. No matter how long the rule book is, soldiers, sailors, airmen, they confront situations that are not covered by the rule book. And they have to use their judgment.

speaker-0: So to wrap up, I want to talk about regret. Because one thing that we have to keep in mind is that when we make decisions, that is not the end of the evaluation of the decision, right?

speaker-1: And it shouldn't be.

speaker-0: Right. there are processes that our brain engages in after we make a decision. sometimes our brain might evaluate it as satisfactory and sometimes we might feel bad. Can you talk about the process that our brain goes through after we make a decision and if it gives us helpful information or perhaps leads us astray?

speaker-1: yeah, we make decisions and if they fall short in some way, we regret the decisions. But what's complicated is the vagueness of fall short in some way, right? I mean, if you're looking for the best, then pretty much any decision you make will fall short. And you can you can regret any imperfection in the decision, because you imagine somewhere out there was an a alternative w where there were no imperfections. So that's and and of course if you regret the decision, even if you think it's on average it's was good, if you regret it, the regret subtracts from your satisfaction. You know, this was a good this was a very good meal, but I bet the Italian place downtown would have been better. That's going to make your appreciation of the meal you just had go down. So this is an argument for somehow banishing regret from our repertoire of emotions, since all it does is make us feel bad, feel worse than we should. And that I think is a terrible lesson. I think it is really important that we regret decisions because that. The sting of regret is what enables us to develop the tools for making better decisions. And sometimes it's it sort of puts something we've done wrong in italics. And that means that we're going to be a little less likely to make the same mistake the next time. So, you know, he just as with judgment, you need regret, but you need the right amount of regret. If you regret everything, then life is a misery. If you regret nothing, then you're a sociopath. And you've, you know, what's the right amount? It's a hard thing to calibrate and calculate. And some people may be too susceptible to regret in some areas of their lives and not susceptible enough in others. So when they hurt other people, maybe they just they don't look back. And that's bad. you should be very sensitive to when you hurt other people in some way. on the other hand, when you had a disappointing side dish with your grilled salmon, no, that should not cost you a night's sleep. So so, you know, regret things where it's important that you italicize that things have gone wrong. And here too, experience one hopes teaches us. which things are worthy of our regret and which things aren't. And the then the regret becomes an important input it that enables us to make a better decision the next time. So it's I I I think mostly in a world of essentially unlimited choice, people regret more than they should. But that doesn't mean that they shouldn't regret at all. Mm-hmm.

speaker-0: Well, hopefully hopefully the listeners have taken away some ideas through this conversation, especially related to balance and how we shouldn't be seeking out these perfect solutions to all of our thinking problems that we encounter. thank you so much for joining me to discuss decision making. again, the name of the book is Choose Wisely. Rationality, ethics, and the art of decision making. thank you again, Barry Schwartz.

speaker-1: Thank you so much, Ryan. You asked really wonderful questions and I enjoyed our conversation immensely.