The Paradox of Choice

I randomly picked The Paradox of Choice out of Catherine's bookshelf (during an awesome Thanksgiving weekend that also featured a hike in the Blue Hills, a hike up Mount Liberty, the very awesome Stranger than Fiction, the surprisingly dark The Prestige, the tasty BV Rutherford and Roederer, and pumpkin curry soup). I had read some articles about the book, but unlike so many of these sorts of books (e.g. The Wisdom of Crowds), it actually had many more ideas to convey than I had seen in the reviews and excerpts. It was really a whirlwind tour of a bunch of interesting psychology results: things like how people remember the peak and end of experiences, how quickly people adapt to changes to their lives, how the enjoyment of something is reduced by the sum of the opportunity costs of other options considered, how the nature and number of options can increase or decrease the tendency to make a decision at all, how marginal enjoyment diminishes and is less than marginal displeasure, how framing matters, how we're averse to losses and risk, how we refuse to part with whatever we already have. Some of these were ideas I'd encountered before, but it was interesting to see them all in one place. It's hard to say how easy it is to change myself in response to the book, though. There are some decisions I just get unreasonably compulsive about.