Not all choices are the same, obviously. But they are joined, as Frost intuited, by our belief that they follow a similar pattern: We observe, we consciously evaluate, we choose between or among competing options. The choice, as they say, is ours. And implicated in that belief is a distinctive way of looking at the world and ourselves. Researchers who study cross-cultural attitudes routinely find that the United States is one of the most individualistic countries in the world—if not the most—and that its individualism is linked with an unusually high acceptance of status stratification. (In cross-cultural research, the combination of these traits is referred to as a VI culture—Vertical, Individualistic—and the United States is sometimes described as the “quintessential” example.) In 2002, Pew Research Center polled dozens of countries on the following question as part of its Global Attitudes Project: “Some say that most people who don’t succeed in life fail because of society’s failures. Others say that most people who don’t succeed do so because of their own individual failures. Which comes closer to your point of view?” Eighty-two percent of the respondents in the United States answered “individual failure,” putting the U.S. ahead of every country but the Czech Republic, which had the same score.

AS ONE MIGHT EXPECT, then, choice has become a subject of relentless, nearly overwhelming interest to Western audiences, and especially to American audiences. One of the most straightforward ways to get a sense of the intensity and range of that interest is simply to type “how to make decisions” into the Amazon.com search bar. This will give you, among many other titles, such helpful books as:

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

Winning Decisions: Getting It Right the First Time

Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions

Mental Training: The Art of Life and Death Decision Making

Eyes Wide Open: How to Make Smart Decisions in a Confusing World

Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions

Make Up Your Mind: A Decision Making Guide to Thinking Clearly and Choosing Wisely

Decisions: How to Make the Best Choice Every Time

Power of Decision: How to Make Better Decisions Every Day

How to Make “Choice” Decisions: Discover How to Make the Right Decisions All the Time

And so on. If the speaker of “The Road Not Taken” had the benefit of this reading list, the poem might have ended after two lines: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood / And I took the correct one, after carefully weighing all factors to maximize expected utility.”