You know give me choices that are truly different from one another, otherwise they don't regard them as meaningful choices.

I mean it wasn't that they sat around thinking oh gosh I needed more choices in my grocery stores the way I had come to think about it as an American growing up.

Now to what...? How we teach people to make choices and the things they're going to make choices over - that is culturally learned.

When I was in Russia I found that I thought I was going to give these people that I was interviewing a whole bunch of choice in terms of what they could drink while we were chatting.

Also if they choose from more options than fewer options they're less satisfied with what they choose and that is true whether they're choosing chocolates or which job offer to accept.

One could even argue that we have a duty to create and pass on stories about choice because once a person knows such stories, they can't be taken away from him. He may lose his possessions, his home, his loved ones, but if he holds on to a story about choice, he retains the ability to practice choice.

About the only time our gut can truly outperform our reason is if we truly have developed a kind of informed intuition. So that means the chess master or someone who has really thought about it and given themselves feedback on a particular activity for at least 10,000 hours or more.