The Art Of Choosing: The Decisions We Make Everyday of our Lives, What They Say About Us and How We Can Improve Them

by Sheena Iyengar

greater choice can lead to greater regret is the very fact that it does increase the potential benefits of choosing well, even as it makes the process of choosing more difficult. When the options are few, we can be happy with what we choose since we are confident that it is the best possible choice for us. When the options are practically infinite, though, we believe that the perfect choice for us must be out there somewhere and that it’s our responsibility to find it. Choosing can then become a lose-lose situation: If we make a choice quickly without fully exploring the available options, we’ll regret potentially missing out on something better; if we do exhaustively consider all the options, we’ll expend more effort (which won’t necessarily increase the quality of our final choice), and if we discover other good options, we may regret that we can’t choose them all. This dilemma can occur for choices from the mundane, like picking a restaurant, to the highly significant, like whom to marry or what career to pursue.