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The Paradox of Choice by Barry Shwartz

The Paradox of Choice by Barry Shwartz

by Parker · 148 things on Twos

Why More is Less
Tim Ferriss and Derek Sivers recommendation
Prologue: The Paradox of Choice: A Road Map
When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable. As the number of available choices increases, as it has in our consumer culture, the autonomy, control, and liberation this variety brings are powerful and positive. But as the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear. As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.
There is no denying that choice improves the quality of our lives. It enables us to control our destinies and to come close to getting exactly what we want out of any situation. Choice is essential to autonomy, which is absolutely fundamental to well-being. Healthy people want and need to direct their own lives.
Clinging tenaciously to all the choices available to us contributes to bad decisions, to anxiety, stress, and dissatisfaction—even to clinical depression.
Negative liberty is “freedom from”—freedom from constraint, freedom from being told what to do by others. Positive liberty is “freedom to”—the availability of opportunities to be the author of your life and to make it meaningful and significant. Isaiah Berlin
instead of being fetishistic about freedom of choice, we should ask ourselves whether it nourishes us or deprives us, whether it makes us mobile or hems us in, whether it enhances self-respect or diminishes it, and whether it enables us to participate in our communities or prevents us from doing so.
Freedom is essential to self-respect, public participation, mobility, and nourishment, but not all choice enhances freedom.
Increased choice among goods and services may contribute little or nothing to the kind of freedom that counts. Indeed, it may impair freedom by taking time and energy we’d be better off devoting to other matters.
I believe that we make the most of our freedoms by learning to make good choices about the things that matter, while at the same time unburdening ourselves from too much concern about the things that don’t.
We would be better off if we embraced certain voluntary constraints on our freedom of choice, instead of rebelling against them.
We would be better off seeking what was “good enough” instead of seeking the best.
We would be better off if we lowered our expectations about the results of decisions.
We would be better off if the decisions we made were nonreversible.
We would be better off if we paid less attention to what others around us were doing.
Part 1: When We Choose
Chapter One: Let's Go Shopping
People won’t ignore alternatives if they don’t realize that too many alternatives can create a problem.
Chapter Two: New Choices
Most people may feel that they lack the expertise to make decisions about their money by themselves.
The doctors are now merely instruments for the execution of our decisions.
Once people are in the position to be able to work at any time from any place, they face decisions every minute of every day about whether or not to be working.
"Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?" - Albert Camus
Everything in life is choice. Every second of every day, we are choosing, and there are always alternatives. Existence, at least human existence, is defined by the choices people make.
Part 2: How We Choose
Chapter Three: Deciding and Choosing
Most good decisions will involve these steps:
Figure out your goal or goals.
Evaluate the importance of each goal.
Array the options.
Evaluate how likely each of the options is to meet your goals.
Pick the winning option.
Later use the consequences of your choice to modify your goals, the importance you assign them, and the way you evaluate future possibilities.
Neither our predictions about how we will feel after an experience nor our memories of how we did feel during the experience are very accurate reflections of how we actually do feel while the experience is occurring. And yet it is memories of the past and expectations for the future that govern our choices.
The endowment effect makes us value the things we own more than if we didn't own them
Chapter Four: When Only the Best Will Do
Choosing wisely begins with developing a clear understanding of your goals.
Maximizers need to be assured that every purchase or decision was the best that could be made.
The alternative to maximizing is to be a satisficer. To satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better.
People with high maximization scores experienced less satisfaction with life, were less happy, were less optimistic, and were more depressed than people with low maximization scores. In fact, people with extreme maximization scores—scores of 65 or more out of 91—had depression scores that placed them in the borderline clinical depression range.
What these studies show is that being a maximizer is correlated with being unhappy. They do not show that being a maximizer causes unhappiness, because correlation does not necessarily indicate cause and effect. Nonetheless, I believe that being a maximizer does play a causal role in people’s unhappiness, and I believe that learning how to satisfice is an important step not only in coping with a world of choice but in simply enjoying life.
While maximizers and perfectionists both have very high standards, I think that perfectionists have very high standards that they don’t expect to meet, whereas maximizers have very high standards that they do expect to meet.
But for a satisficer, it does not have to be such a burden. In fact, the more options there are, the more likely it is that the satisficer will find one that meets his or her standards. Adding options doesn’t necessarily add much work for the satisficer, because the satisficer feels no compulsion to check out all the possibilities before deciding.
Part 3: Why We Suffer
Chapter Five: Choice and Happiness
Miserable people are surely less likely than happy people to have close friends, devoted family, and enduring marriages. So it is at least possible that happiness comes first and close relations come second.
Happy people attract others to them, and being with others makes people happy.
Since 1960 in the U.S., the divorce rate has doubled, the teen suicide rate has tripled, the recorded violent crime rate has quadrupled, the prison population has quintupled, the percentage of babies born to unmarried parents has sextupled, and the rate of cohabitation without marriage (which actually is a pretty good predictor of eventual divorce) has increased sevenfold. This is clearly not a mark of improved well-being.
If you adopt the rule that you will never cheat on your partner, you will eliminate countless painful and tempting decisions that might confront you later on.
Following rules eliminates troublesome choices in your daily life, each time you get into a car or each time you go to a cocktail party.
Presumptions are less stringent than rules. Presumptions are like the default settings on computer applications.
Standards are even less rigorous than rules or presumptions. When we establish a standard, we are essentially dividing the world of options into two categories: options that meet the standard and options that don’t. Then, when we have to make a choice, we need only investigate the options within category number one.
Chapter Six: Missed Opportunities
One of the “costs” of any option involves passing up the opportunities that a different option would have afforded. This is referred to as an opportunity cost.
Even decisions that appear to be no-brainers carry the hidden costs of the options declined. Thinking about opportunity costs may not change the decision you make, but it will give you a more realistic assessment of the full implications of that decision.
Ultimately, the quality of choices that matters to people is the subjective experience that the choices afford. And if, beyond a certain point, adding options diminishes our subjective experience, we are worse off for it.
When people are presented with options involving trade-offs that create conflict, all choices begin to look unappealing.
There is a great deal of evidence that negative emotional states of mind narrow our focus. Instead of examining all aspects of a decision, we home in on only one or two, perhaps ignoring aspects of the decision that are very important. Negative emotion also distracts us, inducing us to focus on the emotion rather than on the decision itself. As the stakes of decisions involving trade-offs rise, emotions become more powerful, and our decision making can be severely impaired.
When we are in a good mood, we think better. We consider more possibilities; we’re open to considerations that would otherwise not occur to us; we see subtle connections between pieces of information that we might otherwise miss. Positive emotion enables us to broaden our understanding of what confronts us.
Satiation by simulation. You just imagine yourself eating dishes you love, and after you’ve imagined enough of them, you start to get full. When the time finally comes to sit down and eat, you don’t have much appetite.
Even decisions as trivial as renting a video become important if we believe that these decisions are revealing something significant about ourselves.
“What happens when you have too many options is that you are responsible for what happens to you.”
Chapter Seven: “If Only...”: The Problem of Regret
Anticipated regret, which rears its head even before a decision is made. How will it feel to buy this sweater only to find a nicer, cheaper one in the next store? How will it feel if I take this job only to have a better opportunity appear next week?
Postdecision regret is sometimes referred to as “buyer’s remorse.” After a purchasing decision, we start to have second thoughts, convincing ourselves that rejected alternatives were actually better than the one we chose, or imagining that there are better alternatives out there that we haven’t yet explored.
Both types of regret—anticipated and postdecision—will raise the emotional stakes of decisions. Anticipated regret will make decisions harder to make, and postdecision regret will make them harder to enjoy.
Most of us seem to share the intuition that we regret actions that don’t turn out well more than we regret failures to take actions that would have turned out well. This is sometimes referred to as an omission bias, a bias to downplay omissions (failures to act) when we evaluate the consequences of our decisions.
When asked about what they regret most in the last six months, people tend to identify actions that didn’t meet expectations. But when asked about what they regret most when they look back on their lives as a whole, people tend to identify failures to act. In the short run, we regret a bad educational choice, whereas in the long run, we regret a missed educational opportunity. In the short run, we regret a broken romance, whereas in the long run, we regret a missed romantic opportunity.
From the perspective of a model of decision making that is future oriented, being sensitive to sunk costs is a mistake. The tickets are bought, and the money is spent. That’s over. The only question the ticket holders should be asking themselves on the night of the performance is, “Will I get more satisfaction out of a night at the theater or out of a night spent reading and listening to music at home?” But people don’t operate this way.
The more options there are, the more if only’s you will be able to generate. And with each if only you generate will come a little more regret and a little less satisfaction with the choice you actually made.
No matter how good something is, if a maximizer discovers something better, he’ll regret having failed to choose it in the first place. Perfection is the only weapon against regret, and endless, exhaustive, paralyzing consideration of the alternatives is the only way to achieve perfection. For a satisficer, the stakes are lower. The possibility of regret doesn’t loom as large, and perfection is unnecessary.
First, anticipating that we may regret a decision may induce us to take the decision seriously and to imagine the various scenarios that may follow it. This anticipation may help us to see consequences of a decision that would not have been evident otherwise. Second, regret may emphasize the mistakes we made in arriving at a decision, so that, should a similar situation arise in the future, we won’t make the same mistakes. Third, regret may mobilize or motivate us to take the actions necessary to undo a decision or ameliorate some of its unfortunate consequences. Fourth, regret is a signal to others that we care about what happened, are sorry that it happened, and will do what we can to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.
Chapter Eight: Why Decisions Disappoint: The Problem of Adaptation
Human beings, Tibor Scitovsky said, want to experience pleasure. And when they consume, they do experience pleasure—as long as the things they consume are novel. But as people adapt—as the novelty wears off—pleasure comes to be replaced by comfort. It’s a thrill to drive your new car for the first few weeks; after that, it’s just comfortable. It certainly beats the old car, but it isn’t much of a kick. Comfort is nice enough, but people want pleasure. And comfort isn’t pleasure.
Faced with this inevitable disappointment, what do people do? Some simply give up the chase and stop valuing pleasure derived from things. Most are driven instead to pursue novelty, to seek out new commodities and experiences whose pleasure potential has not been dissipated by repeated exposure. In time, these new commodities also will lose their intensity, but people still get caught up in the chase, a process that psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell labeled the hedonic treadmill. No matter how fast you run on this kind of machine, you still don’t get anywhere. And because of adaptation, no matter how good your choices and how pleasurable the results, you still end up back where you started in terms of subjective experience.
Those predicting expected each of the hypothetical changes—both good and bad—to have a bigger effect than was reported by those reflecting back on actual experience.
When we are making decisions, we should think about how each of the options will feel not just tomorrow, but months or even years later. Factoring in adaptation to the decision-making process may make differences that seem large at the moment of choice feel much smaller. Factoring in adaptation may help us be satisfied with choices that are good enough rather than “the best,” and this in turn will reduce the time and effort we devote to making those choices. Finally, we can remind ourselves to be grateful for what we have. This may seem trite, the sort of thing one hears from parents or ministers, and then ignores. But individuals who regularly experience and express gratitude are physically healthier, more optimistic about the future, and feel better about their lives than those who do not. Individuals who experience gratitude are more alert, enthusiastic, and energetic than those who do not, and they are more likely to achieve personal goals.
Chapter Nine: Why Everything Suffers from Comparison
In part because the members of a society develop higher and higher standards for what is good, people live much better material lives today than they ever did before, objectively speaking.
As long as expectations keep pace with realizations, people may live better, but they won’t feel better about how they live.
A given experience will feel positive if it’s an improvement on what came before and negative if it’s worse than what came before. To understand how we will judge an experience, it is necessary first to find out where we set our hedonic zero point.
A sign at a gas station that says “Discount for Paying Cash” sets the zero point at the credit card price. A sign that says “Surcharge for Using Credit” sets the zero point at the cash price. Though the difference between cash and credit may be the same at both gas stations, people will be annoyed at having to pay a surcharge and delighted at getting a discount.
One way of achieving this goal is by keeping wonderful experiences rare. No matter what you can afford, save great wine for special occasions. No matter what you can afford, make that perfectly cut, elegantly styled, silk blouse a special treat. This may seem like an exercise in self-denial, but I don’t think it is. On the contrary, it’s a way to make sure that you can continue to experience pleasure.
Social psychologists have found that upward comparisons produce jealousy, hostility, negative mood, frustration, lowered self-esteem, decreased happiness, and symptoms of stress. By the same token, downward comparisons have been found to boost self-esteem, increase positive mood, and reduce anxiety.
The way to be happy—the way to succeed in the quest for status—is to find the right pond and stay in it.
This essentially universal and unrealistically high standard of comparison decreases the satisfaction of those of us who are in the middle or below, even as the actual circumstances of our lives improve.
Happy people have the ability to distract themselves and move on, whereas unhappy people get stuck ruminating and make themselves more and more miserable.
Based on available research, social comparison does nothing to improve one’s satisfaction with the choices one makes.
We found that maximizers were much more affected by the presence of another person than satisficers were. Solving anagrams alongside someone who seemed to be doing it better produced in maximizers both a deterioration of mood and a lowered assessment of their anagram-solving ability. The social comparison information had no such effect on satisficers.
Maximizers want the best, but how do you know that you have the best, except by comparison? And to the extent that we have more options, determining the “best” can become overwhelmingly difficult. The maximizer becomes a slave in her judgments to the experiences of other people.
Chapter Ten: Whose Fault Is It? Choice, Disappointment, and Depression
Depressed people get sick more. Mildly depressed individuals miss 1.5 times as much work as nondepressed, and severely depressed individuals miss five times as much. And depressed people die younger, from a variety of causes, including heart disease. Suicide is, of course, the most extreme consequence of depression. Depressed people commit suicide at roughly 25 times the rate of nondepressed people, and it is estimated that about 80 percent of suicidal people are significantly depressed.
The nursing home residents given a small measure of control over their daily lives were more active and alert, and reported a greater sense of well-being than the residents without such control. Even more dramatically, the residents who had control lived several years longer, on average, than the residents who did not. Thus, from cradle to grave, having control over one’s life matters.
When people are looking for causes for failure, they display a variety of predispositions to accept one type of cause or another, quite apart from what the actual cause of the failure might be. There are three key dimensions to these predispositions, based on whether we view causes as being global or specific, chronic or transient, personal or universal.
People who find chronic causes for failure expect failures to persist; those who find transient causes don’t. People who find global causes for failure expect failure to follow them into every area of life; those who find specific causes don’t. And people who find personal causes for failure suffer large losses in self-esteem; those who find universal causes don’t.
It is much easier to blame yourself for disappointing results in a world that provides unlimited choice than in a world in which options are limited.
Suicide is the second leading cause of death (after accidents) among American high school and college students. In the past thirty-five years, the suicide rate among American college students has tripled. Throughout the developed world suicide among adolescents and young adults is increasing dramatically. In a study comparing rates in 1990 to rates in the 1970s and 1980s, UNICEF found that the incidence of suicide tripled in France, more than doubled in Norway, doubled in Australia, and increased by 50 percent or more in Canada, England, and the U.S. Only in Japan and what was then West Germany did youth suicide go down.
The more we are allowed to be the masters of our fates, the more we expect ourselves to be. We should be able to find education that is stimulating and useful, work that is exciting, socially valuable, and remunerative, spouses who are sexually, emotionally, and intellectually stimulating and also loyal and comforting. Our children are supposed to be beautiful, smart, affectionate, obedient, and independent. And everything we buy is supposed to be the best of its kind. With all the choice available, we should never have to settle for things that are just “good enough.” Emphasis on freedom of choice, together with the proliferation of possibilities that modern life affords, has, I believe, contributed to these unrealistic expectations.
The amount of pleasure and satisfaction we derive from experience has as much to do with how the experience relates to expectations as it does with the qualities of the experience itself. People on diets evaluate weight loss relative to expectations about weight loss. It feels great to find out you lost ten pounds when you were expecting to lose five, but not when you were expecting to lose fifteen. College students evaluate grades relative to expectations about grades. It feels great to get a B when you were expecting a C, but not when you were expecting an A.
Our heightened individualism means that, not only do we expect perfection in all things, but we expect to produce this perfection ourselves. When we (inevitably) fail, the culture of individualism biases us toward causal explanations that focus on personal rather than universal factors. That is, the culture has established a kind of officially acceptable style of causal explanation, and it is one that encourages the individual to blame himself for failure. And this is just the kind of causal explanation that promotes depression when we are faced with failure.
Viewed from within Amish society, where expectations about individual control and autonomy are very different than they are in mainstream America, community membership doesn’t entail much in the way of personal sacrifice. For the Amish, the unease that the rest of us may feel at the prospect of significant communal obligation is largely absent. It’s just the way things are—for everybody. By elevating everyone’s expectations about autonomy and control, mainstream American society has made deep community involvement much more costly than it would be otherwise.
Even at a time and place when excessive expectations of and aspirations for control are contributing to an epidemic of depression, those who feel that they have control are in better psychological shape than those who don’t.
Part 4: What We Can Do
Chapter Eleven: What to Do About Choice
Having too many choices produces psychological distress, especially when combined with regret, concern about status, adaptation, social comparison, and perhaps most important, the desire to have the best of everything—to maximize.
Choose when to choose
If the ability to choose enables you to get a better car, house, job, vacation, or coffeemaker, but the process of choice makes you feel worse about what you’ve chosen, you really haven’t gained anything from the opportunity to choose.
Set rules for yourself when choosing like two options is my limit.
Be a chooser, not a picker
Choosers are people who are able to reflect on what makes a decision important, on whether, perhaps, none of the options should be chosen, on whether a new option should be created, and on what a particular choice says about the chooser as an individual.
But when faced with overwhelming choice, we are forced to become “pickers,” which is to say, relatively passive selectors from whatever is available. Being a chooser is better, but to have the time to choose more and pick less, we must be willing to rely on habits, customs, norms, and rules to make some decisions automatic.
Choosers have the time to modify their goals; pickers do not. Choosers have the time to avoid following the herd; pickers do not. Good decisions take time and attention, and the only way we can find the needed time and attention is by choosing our spots.
Satisfice more and maximize less
It is maximizers who suffer most in a culture that provides too many choices. It is maximizers who have expectations that can’t be met. It is maximizers who worry most about regret, about missed opportunities, and about social comparisons, and it is maximizers who are most disappointed when the results of decisions are not as good as they expected.
Learning to accept “good enough” will simplify decision making and increase satisfaction.
To become a satisficer, however, requires that you think carefully about your goals and aspirations, and that you develop well-defined standards for what is “good enough” whenever you face a decision. Knowing what’s good enough requires knowing yourself and what you care about.
Think about the opportunity costs of opportunity costs
When making a decision, it's usually a good idea to think about the alternatives we will pass up when choosing our most-preferred option. Ignoring these “opportunity costs” can lead us to overestimate how good the best option is. On the other hand, the more we think about opportunity costs, the less satisfaction we’ll derive from whatever we choose. So we should make an effort to limit how much we think about the attractive features of options we reject.
It is difficult or impossible to judge how good an option is except in relation to other options. What defines a “good investment,” for example, is to a large degree its rate of return in comparison with other investments. There is no obvious absolute standard that we can appeal to, so some amount of reflection on opportunity costs is probably essential.
Unless you’re truly dissatisfied, stick with what you always buy.
Don’t be tempted by “new and improved.”
Don’t “scratch” unless there’s an “itch.”
And don’t worry that if you do this, you’ll miss out on all the new things the world has to offer.
Your friends and coworkers will tell you about products they’ve bought or vacations they’ve taken. So you’ll stumble onto improvements on your habitual choices without going looking for them. If you sit back and let “new and improved” find you, you’ll spend a lot less time choosing and experience a lot less frustration over the fact that you can’t find an alternative that combines all the things you like into one neat package.
Make your decisions nonreversible
When we can change our minds about decisions, we are less satisfied with them. When a decision is final, we engage in a variety of psychological processes that enhance our feelings about the choice we made relative to the alternatives. If a decision is reversible, we don’t engage these processes to the same degree.
A friend once told me how his minister had shocked the congregation with a sermon on marriage in which he said flatly that, yes, the grass is always greener. What he meant was that, inevitably, you will encounter people who are younger, better looking, funnier, smarter, or seemingly more understanding and empathetic than your wife or husband. But finding a life partner is not a matter of comparison shopping and “trading up.” The only way to find happiness and stability in the presence of seemingly attractive and tempting options is to say, “I’m simply not going there. I’ve made my decision about a life partner, so this person’s empathy or that person’s looks really have nothing to do with me. I’m not in the market—end of story.” Agonizing over whether your love is “the real thing” or your sexual relationship above or below par, and wondering whether you could have done better is a prescription for misery. Knowing that you’ve made a choice that you will not reverse allows you to pour your energy into improving the relationship that you have rather than constantly second-guessing it.
Practice an “attitude of gratitude”
We can vastly improve our subjective experience by consciously striving to be grateful more often for what is good about a choice or an experience, and to be disappointed less by what is bad about it.
When life is not too good, we think a lot about how it could be better. When life is going well, we tend not to think much about how it could be worse. But with practice, we can learn to reflect on how much better things are than they might be, which will in turn make the good things in life feel even better.
Regret less
It also pays to remember just how complex life is and to realize how rare it is that any single decision, in and of itself, has the life-transforming power we sometimes think.
Your experience would be infinitely happier if you could let go of regret.
Anticipate adaptation
Our challenge is to remember that the high-quality sound system, the luxury car, and the ten-thousand-square-foot house won’t keep providing the pleasure they give when we first experience them. Learning to be satisfied as pleasures turn into mere comforts will ease disappointment with adaptation when it occurs. We can also reduce disappointment from adaptation by following the satisficer’s strategy of spending less time and energy researching and agonizing over decisions.
Remind yourself of how good things actually are instead of focusing on how they’re less good than they were at first.
Control expectations
Our evaluation of experience is substantially influenced by how it compares with our expectations. So what may be the easiest route to increasing satisfaction with the results of decisions is to remove excessively high expectations about them.
The thrill of unexpected pleasure stumbled upon by accident often can make the perfect little diner or country inn far more enjoyable that a fancy French restaurant or four-star hotel.
Curtail Social Comparison
Though social comparison can provide useful information, it often reduces our satisfaction. So by comparing ourselves to others less, we will be satisfied more.
Remember that “He who dies with the most toys wins” is a bumper sticker, not wisdom.
Focus on what makes you happy, and what gives meaning to your life.
Learn to love constraints
Society provides rules, standards, and norms for making choices, and individual experience creates habits. By deciding to follow a rule (for example, always wear a seat belt; never drink more than two glasses of wine in one evening), we avoid having to make a deliberate decision again and again. This kind of rule-following frees up time and attention that can be devoted to thinking about choices and decisions to which rules don’t apply.
Choice within constraints, freedom within limits, is what enables the little fish to imagine a host of marvelous possibilities.
Choice within constraints, freedom within limits, is what enables the little fish to imagine a host of marvelous possibilities.