The Happiness Hypothesis

You leave the store less confident in your choice, more likely to feel regret, and more likely to think about the options you didn’t choose.

relationships—having an annoying office mate or room-mate, or having chronic conflict with your spouse—is one of the surest ways to reduce your happiness.

The physicist Stephen Hawking has been trapped in a shell of a body since his early twenties, when he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. Yet he went on to solve major problems in cosmology, win many prizes, and write the best-selling science book of all time. During a recent interview in the New York Times, he was asked how he keeps his spir

But Schwartz and his colleagues62 find that the paradox mostly applies to people they call “maximizers”—those who habitually try to evaluate all the options, seek out more information, and make the best choice (or “maximize their utility,” as economists would say). Other people—“satisficers”—are more laid back about choice. They evaluate an array o

Studies that have assigned people to perform a random act of kindness every week, or to count their blessings regularly for several weeks, find small but sustained increases in happiness.54

The more choices there are, the more you expect to find a perfect fit; yet, at the same time, the larger the array, the less likely it becomes that you picked the best item.

Yet, when people are actually given a larger array of choices—for example, an assortment of thirty (rather than six) gourmet chocolates from which to choose—they are less likely to make a choice; and if they do, they are less satisfied

After conducting several variations of this experiment with similar findings each time, Van Boven and Gilovich concluded that experiences give more happiness in part because they have greater social value: Most activities that cost more than a hundred dollars are things we do with other people, but expensive material possessions are often purchased

Good relationships make people happy, and happy people enjoy more and better relationships than unhappy people.44