20 March 2022
The Paradox of Choice
The Paradox of Choice
Why More Is Less
Barry Schwartz

Highlights

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.
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A large array of options may discourage consumers because it forces an increase in the effort that goes into making a decision. So consumers decide not to decide, and don’t buy the product. Or if they do, the effort that the decision requires detracts from the enjoyment derived from the results. Also, a large array of options may diminish the attractiveness of what people actually choose, the reason being that thinking about the attractions of some of the unchosen options detracts from the pleasure derived from the chosen one.
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Could readers be attracted to a magazine that offered to simplify their lives by convincing them to stop wanting many of the things they wanted? That might go a long way toward reducing the choice problem. But who would choose to buy the magazine?
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[W]hether or not we work has become a matter of hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute choice.
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People can never relax and enjoy what they have already achieved. At all times, they have to stay alert for the next big chance.
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[W]e evaluate positive experiences on the basis of how good they feel at their best, and how good they feel at the end.
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The discrepancy between logic and memory suggests that we don’t always know what we want.
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[N]either 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.
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[F]requency of experience is not the only thing that affects availability to memory. Salience or vividness matters as well.
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People’s natural egocentrism makes it much easier to bring their own actions to mind than those of their partner. Because our own actions are more available to us from memory, we assume they are more frequent.
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But while diversity of individual experience can limit our propensity to choose in error, how much can we count on diversity of experience?
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[A]ny particular item will always be at the mercy of the context in which it is found.
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[A] fairly general principle that when making choices among alternatives that involve a certain amount of risk or uncertainty, we prefer a small, sure gain to a larger, uncertain one.
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[I]t is the framing of the choice that affects our perception of it, and in turn affects what we choose.
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[P]eople tend to avoid taking risks—they are “risk averse”—when they are deciding among potential gains, potential positive outcomes…[P]eople embrace risk—they are “risk seeking”—in the domain of potential losses.
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[S]ubtle manipulations of wording can affect what the neutral point is and whether we are thinking in terms of gains or losses. And these manipulations will in turn have profound effects on the decisions we make.
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[T]he proliferation of choice in our lives robs us of the opportunity to decide for ourselves just how important any given decision is.
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Choosing wisely begins with developing a clear understanding of your goals.
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[P]eople 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.
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[I]f you experience regret on a regular basis, it will rob you of at least some of the satisfaction that your good decisions warrant. What is even worse is that you can actually experience regret in anticipation of making a decision.
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So while objective experience clearly matters, subjective experience has a great deal to do with the quality of that objective experience.
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The true maximizer would determine just how much information seeking was the amount needed to lead to a very good decision. The maximizer would figure out when information seeking had reached the point of diminishing returns.
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There are people who care desperately about maximizing their returns on investments even if they don’t want to spend their money on anything in particular.
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It is possible that a wide array of options can turn people into maximizers. If this is true, then the proliferation of options not only makes people who are maximizers miserable, but it may also make people who are satisficers into maximizers.
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One vote is so unlikely to make a difference that it’s hardly worth the inconvenience of walking across the street to the polling place. Yet people do vote, presumably at least in part because of what it says about who they are. Voters take citizenship seriously, they do their duty, and they do not take political freedom for granted.
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Every choice we make is a testament to our autonomy, to our sense of self-determination. Almost every social, moral, or political philosopher in the Western tradition since Plato has placed a premium on such autonomy. And each new expansion of choice gives us another opportunity to assert our autonomy, and thus display our character.
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We must learn to be selective in exercising our choices. We must decide, individually, when choice really matters and focus our energies there, even if it means letting many other opportunities pass us by. The choice of when to be a chooser may be the most important choice we have to make.
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Time is the ultimate scarce resource, and for some reason, even as one “time-saving” bit of technology after another comes our way, the burdens on our time seem to increase. Again, it is my contention that a major contributor to this time burden is the vastly greater number of choices we find ourselves preparing for, making, reevaluating, and perhaps regretting. Should you book a table at your favorite Italian place or that new bistro? Should you rent the cottage on the lake or take the plunge and go to Tuscany? Time to refinance again? Stick with your Internet provider or go with a new direct service line? Move some stocks? Change your health insurance? Get a better rate on your credit card? Try that new herbal remedy? Time spent dealing with choice is time taken away from being a good friend, a good spouse, a good parent, and a good congregant.
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Establishing and maintaining meaningful social relations requires a willingness to be bound or constrained by them, even when dissatisfied.
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Most people find it extremely challenging to balance the conflicting impulses of freedom of choice on the one hand and loyalty and commitment on the other. Each person is expected to figure out this balance individually. Those who value freedom of choice and movement will tend to stay away from entangling relationships; those who value stability and loyalty will seek them. Many will cobble together some mixture of these two modes of social engagement. If we fail in establishing exactly the kinds of social relations we want. we will feel that we have only ourselves to blame. And many times we will fail.
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Social institutions could ease the burden on individuals by establishing constraints that, while open to transformation, could not be violated willy-nilly by each person as he chooses.
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But the price of accepting constraints imposed by social institutions is a restriction on individual freedom. Is it a price worth paying? A society that allows us to answer this question individually has already given us an answer, for by giving people the choice, it has opted for freedom. And a society that does not allow us to answer this question individually has also given an answer, opting for constraints. But if unrestricted freedom can impede the individual’s pursuit of what he or she values most, then it may be that some restrictions make everyone better off. And if “constraint” sometimes affords a kind of liberation while “freedom” affords a kind of enslavement, then people would be wise to seek out some measure of appropriate constraint.
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So by using rules, presumptions, standards, and routines to constrain ourselves and limit the decisions we face, we can make life more manageable, which gives us more time to devote ourselves to other people and to the decisions that we can’t or don’t want to avoid.
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Pay attention to what you’re giving up in the next-best alternative, but don’t waste energy feeling bad about having passed up an option further down the list that you wouldn’t have gotten to anyway.
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If we assume that opportunity costs take away from the overall desirability of the most-preferred option and that we will feel the opportunity costs associated with many of the options we reject, then the more alternatives there are from which to choose, the greater our experience of the opportunity costs will be. And the greater our experience of the opportunity costs, the less satisfaction we will derive from our chosen alternative.
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The existence of multiple alternatives makes it easy for us to imagine alternatives that don’t exist—alternatives that combine the attractive features of the ones that do exist. And to the extent that we engage our imaginations in this way, we will be even less satisfied with the alternative we end up choosing. So, once again, a greater variety of choices actually makes us feel worse.
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Difficult trade-offs make it difficult to justify decisions, so decisions are deferred; easy trade-offs make it easy to justify decisions. And single options lie somewhere in the middle.
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When people are presented with options involving trade-offs that create conflict, all choices begin to look unappealing.
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Even decisions as trivial as renting a video become important if we believe that these decisions are revealing something significant about ourselves.
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As the stakes of decisions rise, we feel an increased need to justify them. We feel compelled to articulate—at least to ourselves—why we made a particular choice. This need to search for reasons seems useful; it ought to improve the quality of our choices. But it doesn’t necessarily.
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So they grasp at what they can say, and identify it as the basis for their preference. But once the words are spoken, they take on added significance to the person who spoke them. At the moment of choice, these explicit, verbalized reasons weigh heavily in the decision. As time passes, the reasons that people verbalized fade into the background, and people are left with their unarticulated preferences, which wouldn’t have steered them to the poster they chose. As the salience of the verbalized reasons fades, so, too, does people’s satisfaction with the decision they made.
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With fewer options and more constraints, many trade-offs would be eliminated, and there would be less self-doubt, less of an effort to justify decisions, more satisfaction, and less second-guessing of the decisions once made.
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We couldn’t make it through the day without counterfactual thinking. Without the ability to imagine a world that is different from our actual world and then to act to bring this imagined world into being, we never would have survived as a species, much less advanced through the millions of stages of speculation and trial and error that is the history of human progress. But the downside of counterfactual thinking is that it fuels regret, both postdecision regret and anticipated regret.
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[U]pward counterfactual thinking may inspire us to do better the next time, downward counterfactual thinking may induce us to be grateful for how well we did this time. The right balance of upward and downward counterfactual thinking may enable us to avoid spiraling into a state of misery while at the same time inspiring us to improve our performance.
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[W]hen confronted with decisions, we often choose the option that minimizes the chances that we will experience regret.
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We show greater willingness to take risks when we know we will find out how the unchosen alternative turned out and there is thus no way to protect ourselves from regret.
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What I do with my computer hasn’t changed all that much over the years. But what I expect it to do for me has.
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Because of adaptation, enthusiasm about positive experiences doesn’t sustain itself. And what’s worse, people seem generally unable to anticipate that this process of adaptation will take place. The waning of pleasure or enjoyment over time always seems to come as an unpleasant surprise.
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Human beings, 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.
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If the decision provides substantial satisfaction for a long time after it is made, the costs of making it recede into insignificance.
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Happiness isn’t everything. Subjective experience is not the only reason we have for existing. Careful, well-researched, and labor-intensive decisions may produce better objective results than impulsive decisions. A world with multiple options may make possible better objective choices than a world with few options. But at the same time, happiness doesn’t count for nothing, and subjective experience isn’t trivial. If adaptation saddles people with a subjective experience of their choices that doesn’t justify the effort that went into making those choices, people will begin to see choice not as a liberator but as a burden.
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[S]imply by being aware of the process we can anticipate its effects, and therefore be less disappointed when it comes. This means that 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.
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[U]nlike adaptation, the experience of gratitude is something we can affect directly. Experiencing and expressing gratitude actually get easier with practice. By causing us to focus on how much better our lives are than they could have been, or were before, the disappointment that adaptation brings in its wake can be blunted.
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When we consider whether we liked a meal, a vacation, or a class, inevitably we are asking ourselves, “Compared to what?” For purposes of making decisions about what to do in the future, the “Was it good or bad?” question is less important than “How good or bad was it?”
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And by and large, we are unlikely to realize that our evaluations are as much a commentary on what we bring.
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The lesson here is that high expectations can be counterproductive. We probably can do more to affect the quality of our lives by controlling our expectations than we can by doing virtually anything else. The blessing of modest expectations is that they leave room for many experiences to be a pleasant surprise, a hedonic plus. The challenge is to find a way to keep expectations modest, even as actual experiences keep getting better.
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Our answer to the “How am I doing?” question depends on our own past experiences, aspirations, and expectations, but the question is virtually never asked or answered in a social vacuum. “How am I doing?” almost always carries “compared to others” in parentheses.
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It is maximizers who have the relative standards and satisficers who have the absolute ones. While, in theory, “the best” is an ideal that exists independent of what other people have, in practice, determining the best is so difficult that people fall back on comparisons with others. “Good enough” is not an objective standard that exists out there for all to see. It will always be relative to the person doing the judging.
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There is much to be gained by arriving at causal explanations that are accurate, whatever the psychological cost, because it is accurate explanations that offer the best chance of producing better results the next time.
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[I]t 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.
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[A]lmost every experience people have nowadays will be perceived as a disappointment, and thus regarded as a failure—a failure that could have been prevented with the right choice.
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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.
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Significant social involvement requires subordinating the self. So the more we focus on ourselves, the more our connections to others weakens.