Born to Chose Article

Jengar article:

• What evidence shows that choice is important?
• People are happy when offered a lot of choices. Choices may be important for self-efficacy, you cant feel effective if you don’t have the opportunity to make choices. Its adaptive for our survival. 
• Studies of the elderly patients who have some elements of control of their environment, people actually live longer in those conditions. A big issue in retirement homes… loss of control is just really massive.
• “Mindless Eating” claiming that we are led into eating too much because we use heuristics to decide how much to eat and those shortcuts are misleading us. So we eat mindlessly. We utilize system 1 (intuition) thinking.. and diets fail disastrously because they force people to use system 2 all the time. Its too attention demanding. We are so driven by our intuitions… so we need to arrange our minds so we eat mindlessly without lead into eating too much.
• choice is critical because choice is rewarding. It gives us a good feeling to be in control in some ways.
• Why do we cling so strongly to the importance of choice and to our right to choice?
• She basically says, that’s sort of just the way we are. Its built into the structure of our brains and minds to want and need that. We don’t have any choice but to believe in choice.
• How are our attitudes effected by our choices?
• If we chose something, then we like it better! If you choose something out of as set, then you end up evaluating it more highly than you did initially.
• Music studies… once they’ve chosen a piece of music, they like it better.
• Its like a justification of our choice.
• What evidence indicates that choice can overwhelm??
• indidviduals were more satisfied with their choices when there was a smaller array of things to choose from.
• If there is an array of 30 jams, people are more likely to buy one from an array of 6.
• We want lots of choice, but when we have it, we don’t really want it that much.
• We are very poor predictors of what we are going to like… 
• When we have a really long list of things that you have, you just have to satisfice instead of thoroughly doing it all.
• You end up wondering if you could have done something better if you had looked longer, etc. Too many choices can be annoying.
• When people are faced with these health care options, people don’t know what the hell to do with them. People don’t actually like what they say they want in terms of healthcare, etc. 
• TED talk: cultural differences. They studied children of first generation parents and other children. They could choose their anagrams, take on the teacher had given them, or take one their mom had picked. American kids did way better when they themselves picked it, but Japanese children were more likely to do well when their parents may have picked it.
• Our culture seemed more obsessed with choice than others.
• Ex. French vs. American parents taking their children off of live support… americans want control but look at it more negatively.
• Still examples of how what we say what we want is not what we end up liking
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