8 Quotes & Sayings By Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College. His research papers have been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and other journals. He has been a recipient of the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award for Outstanding Contributions to Psychological Science from the Association for Psychological Science, has been a fellow at Harvard University's Society of Fellows, and is a past president of the Association for Psychological Science and the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. Schwartz received his Ph.D Read more

from Yale University in 1983 and was a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA before joining the faculty at Swarthmore in 1985.

Practical wisdom,
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Practical wisdom, " Aristotle told us, "is the combination of moral will and moral skill. Barry Schwartz
The secret to happiness is low expectations.
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The secret to happiness is low expectations. Barry Schwartz
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On "idea technology"-- Science creates ideas, science creates ways of understanding. And in the social sciences, ways of understanding ourselves. And they have an enormous influence on how we think, what we aspire to, and how we act....idea technology may be the most profoundly important technology that science gives us....we do have to worry about the theories we have of human nature, because human nature will be changed by the theories we have that are designed to explain and help us understand human beings..it is only human nature to have a human nature that is very much the product of the society in which people live.-- T E D The way we think about work is broken . Barry Schwartz
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The mistake is to assume that the way it feels at the moment is the way it will feel forever. Barry Schwartz
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Much of human progress has involved reducing the time and energy, as well as the number of processes we have to engage in and think about, for each of us to obtain the necessities of life. Barry Schwartz
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The lesson here is that high expectations can be counter-productive. We probably can do more to affect the quality of our lives by controlling our expectations than we can by doing virtually anything else. The blessing of modest expectations is that they leave room for many experiences to be a pleasant surprise, a hedonic plus. The challenge is to find a way to keep expectations modest, even as actual experiences keep getting better. . Barry Schwartz
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If you shatter the fish bowl so that everything is possible you don't have freedom you have paralysis. Everybody needs a fishbowl. Barry Schwartz