Barry Schwartz
How Choice, Ideas, and Rules are Holding Us Back
Intro
“When products are essentially equivalent, people go with what’s familiar, even if it’s only familiar because they know its name from advertising.”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
Writer and psychologist Barry Schwartz has a vision for our future. In it, there is less choice, less rules, and there are less faulty ideas about human nature. His work challenges us to think outside the box about the potential of humanity, and to abandon our preconceived notions of what will make us happy.
Drawing on psychological research into the differences between human and animal cognition, and human happiness and decision making, Schwartz’s theories have shaped the ideas behind his extensive body of work. Schwartz is famous for his provocative ideas that ultimately speak to what can make humans less stressed and more pleased with their lives. His most recent and perhaps most relevant work, Brilliant: The Art and Science of Making Better Decisions, offers 14 guided lectures on how to make decisions that improve your life.
Learning to choose is hard. Learning to choose well is harder. And learning to choose well in a world of unlimited possibilities is harder still, perhaps too hard.
– Barry Schwartz, Barry Schwartz
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
