Episode 043: The Arithmetic of Uncertainty with Barry Schwartz

Can you really put a number on what matters most? Barry Schwartz, emeritus professor of psychology at Swarthmore College and a visiting professor at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, joins host, Annie Duke, to challenge the idea that good decisions come only from spreadsheets, expected utility, or any framework that assumes one’s values can be weighed on a single scale. Drawing on his new book, Choose Wisely, Barry argues that rational choice theory can sometimes push people to rely on oversimplified frameworks that give us a false sense of certainty, when the real world is actually much messier and uncertain, and the decisions we make are more complex.

Key takeaways from this episode include why understanding what matters most to you in a situation is the first step to making better decisions, how choosing from a large set of options reveals more about your values than choosing from a small set, and why luck and the quality of your decisions are the true determiners of how your life turns out.

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This is The Decision Education Podcast, where we explore the science of decision-making with a diverse range of experts and offer practical strategies to transform our understanding of the role decisions play in our lives.