Why It’s Worth It | Today, options scream at us from all corners. Need a new x, there are x hundred reviews. And yet hours later, these x hundred reviews haven’t helped (Susie_18 had a valid problem with it turning on!), and x is still not bought. Why does having more information and more options somehow make us feel worse, not better? Maybe the whole framework we’ve been using to make “better” decisions actually makes “worse” ones?

In this episode of The Happiness Lab, host Laurie Santos sits down with psychologist Barry Schwartz to challenge the decision-making model most of us have quietly inherited from economics. Drawing on his new book Choose Wisely, co-authored with philosopher Richard Schuldenfrei, Barry makes the case that rational choice theory, the idea that good decisions maximize measurable utility, is just inadequate for life’s (small and conversely big) choices. What we need instead is something harder to quantify and far more useful: wisdom.

Barry opens with a distinction that reframes the entire conversation: the difference between maximizers and satisficers. Maximizers pursue the best possible option. Satisficers pursue good enough. A century ago, he notes, these approaches converged because there simply weren’t that many choices to compare. Today, the gap between the two categories is enormous, and maximizers pay the price. Barry recounts going to buy a pair of jeans and walking out with the best-fitting pair he’d ever owned, feeling worse. With so many options available, his standard for what counted as a good result quietly shifted upward, and good became a disappointment. We do this constantly, across decisions far more consequential than denim.

Laurie and Barry then dig more into rational choice theory (the economic model that has quietly shaped how we think we’re supposed to decide). In short, the theory holds that a good decision maximizes expected utility: for every option, estimate how good the outcome will be, multiply by the probability of getting it, and choose the highest number. It works beautifully in a casino but rather badly when choosing a college, a career, or a partner. Barry uses the Vietnam War as a blunt illustration of what happens when this model is applied to genuinely complex human situations: unable to measure progress in a guerrilla war, strategists measured casualties instead, optimizing for what was countable rather than what mattered. What they got instead was a grinding, brutal struggle with significant physical and emotional harm to the humans trapped in a policy choice. 

Barry pushes back on the quantification impulse in other domains too, including Nobel laureate Danny Kahneman’s attempt to build an objective measure of happiness from moment-to-moment experience. He has deep respect for Kahneman’s work, but argues that reducing happiness to its smallest measurable units misses what actually makes a life good. Eudaimonia, the Aristotelian conception of genuine flourishing, involves meaning, growth, and striving toward something larger, all experiences that often register as uncomfortable in the moment and irreducible to a five-point scale.

So what should we do instead? Barry and Laurie discuss a framework built around three things: understanding yourself, understanding your environment, and being genuinely reflective about purpose. What is this decision for? What kind of person do you want to become? These questions don’t yield clean answers, and that’s precisely the point. Barry is refreshingly direct about the anxiety this produces: uncertainty is not a bug in human decision-making, it is the condition. Good decisions are not error-free decisions. They are decisions made thoughtfully, held loosely, and revisited as we learn more. Spreadsheets, he allows, are useful depending on the data being tabulated and whether we leave decision-making room for unquantifiable things as well. 

Background | In this episode, Laurie speaks with Barry Schwartz, a psychologist, former professor at Swarthmore College, and co-author of Choose Wisely: Rationality, Ethics, and the Art of Decision-Making, written with philosopher Richard Schuldenfrei. Highlights include: 

• Satisficing beats maximizing: Seeking good enough instead of the best is not settling; it is wisdom. In a world of infinite options and abundant information, maximizers exhaust themselves chasing a standard that keeps rising. Satisficers make decisions and move forward.
• What gets measured gets managed (badly): When we reduce complex decisions to quantifiable metrics, we end up optimizing for what is measurable rather than what matters. From Vietnam body counts to college rankings, the danger is the same: the number becomes the goal.
• Purpose before pros and cons: Before evaluating any significant decision, ask what it is for. What kind of person do we want to become? What are we actually trying to build? Without that anchor, we are just comparing numbers that cannot capture what we care about most.
• Uncertainty is the condition, not the problem: Any decision worth more than five minutes of thought is guaranteed to be imperfect. Opportunity cost is real. We will always give something up. Accepting this in advance is not resignation; it is what allows us to choose and move forward rather than stall indefinitely.
• Decisions are not one and done: Big choices evolve. We change, circumstances change, and what we value shifts. Building in ongoing reflection, proportionate to the importance of the decision, is not second-guessing. It is how we course-correct and make the decisions we did make into better ones over time.
• The spreadsheet has its limits: Listing what matters and identifying our options is genuinely useful. Filling in numbers and expecting the right answer to emerge is not. The work of a good decision happens in the space that the spreadsheet cannot reach.

Source | The Happiness Lab: How to Make Better Choices – Season 10, Episode 39 (October 6, 2025)

About | Laurie Santos is a Yale professor, researcher, and happiness expert who studies how psychology can guide us to make better choices and live happier, more fulfilling lives. Her course on happiness, the most popular course at Yale in over 300 years, is offered in an online version, The Science of Well-being, on Coursera. Laurie also hosts The Happiness Lab, a podcast that focuses on changing how we think about happiness. Laurie’s core belief is simple: What our minds tell us will make us happy is often a lie.