The book analyzes decision-making in circumstances where one of the possible options offers a radically new experience that cannot be assessed in advance, such as deciding to become a parent, or choosing to alter one's physical or mental capabilities.

Paul argues that several major life choices, such as having a child, converting to a religion, or medically altering one's physical and mental capacities, are transformative experiences that are structurally similar to becoming a vampire.

[7] By the end of 2015 Cass Sunstein had named Transformative Experience in his Bloomberg essay on the "best books of 2015 on human bias and blunders".

In a review in Mind, Richard Pettigrew criticized Paul's statement of the problem of deciding to become a parent, noting that the book did not consider how a person might rationally assign subjective probabilities that are not highly certain yet support a rational choice, but he concluded that the book "has proved enormously influential, and rightly so".

[10] In Dialogue Irena Cronin praised the framework provided in Transformative Experience, particularly its distinction between decision-making processes in high-stakes life choices and low-stakes decisions about, for example, whether or not to try eating an unusual fruit.