Research by Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, shows that reversible, keep-your-options-open decisions reliably lead to lower levels of satisfaction than irreversible ones.
Chrysler has since spent hundreds of millions of dollars on customer-satisfaction surveys and campaigns, including repeated mailings to address persistent complaints, even ones that aren't considered safety issues or defects.
Asked to rate their personal position on a ten-point scale of satisfaction, middle-class respondents are far more likely to put themselves near the top than are poor ones.