So most of the time when we are confronted by more, rather than a few, choices we're often novices and so we don't really know how to differentiate these various options.

I mean can you walk to school on your own? Can you study science? Can you study math? Can you go to a normal school? Do you need to go to a special school? What is going to become of you when you grow up? Are you going to have to live on social security and SSI?

The saying goes that history repeats itself; personal histories do the same. We can gather the lessons of others' lives through observation, conversation, and by seeking advice. We can use the automatic system to find out who the happy people are, and the reflective system to evaluate how they got to be that way. Pursuing happiness need not be a lonely endeavor. In fact, throwing in our lot with others may be a very good way of coping with the disappointments of choice.

It's easy to assume people are conforming when we witness them all choosing the same option, but when we choose that very option ourselves, we have no shortage of perfectly good reasons for why we just happen to be doing the same thing as those other people; they mindlessly conform, but we mindfully choose. This doesn't mean that we're all conformists in denial. It means that we regularly fail to recognize that others' thoughts and behaviors are just as complex and varied as our own. Rather than being alone in a crowd of sheep, we're all individuals in sheep's clothing.

If you truly have expertise - and expertise can be say a chess master who has really mastered something or an artist or a musician of some sort you know if you give a jazz musician.

The first thing we looked at, in what case were people more likely to be attracted to the jar or jam, so in which case are people more likely to stop when they saw the display of jams and what we found was that more people stopped when there were 24 jams.

In order to 'hold fast' to something, one must allow oneself to be held to something. That commitment may be one of the hardest things to practice in a world of so much choice.