The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

published	January 1st 2005 by Harper Perennial
binding	Paperback
isbn	0060005696 (isbn13: 9780060005696)
ebook
pages	304
description	In the spirit of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, a social critique of our obsession with choice, and how it contributes to anxiety, dissatisfa...more [close] In the spirit of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, a social critique of our obsession with choice, and how it contributes to anxiety, dissatisfaction and regret. This paperback includes a new P.S. section with author interviews, insights, features, suggested readings, and more. Whether weᱥ buying a pair of jeans, ordering a cup of coffee, selecting a long–distance carrier, applying to college, choosing a doctor, or setting up a 401(k), everyday decisions––both big and small––have become increasingly complex due to the overwhelming abundance of choice with which we are presented. We assume that more choice means better options and greater satisfaction. But beware of excessive choice: choice overload can make you question the decisions you make before you even make them, it can set you up for unrealistically high expectations, and it can make you blame yourself for any and all failures. In the long run, this can lead to decision–making paralysis, anxiety, and perpetual stress. And, in a culture that tells us that there is no excuse for falling short of perfection when your options are limitless, too much choice can lead to clinical depression. In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz explains at what point choice––the hallmark of individual freedom and self–determination that we so cherish––becomes detrimental to our psychological and emotional well–being. In accessible, engaging, and anecdotal prose, Schwartz shows how the dramatic explosion in choice––from the mundane to the profound challenges of balancing career, family, and individual needs––has paradoxically become a problem instead of a solution. Schwartz also shows how our obsession with choice encourages us to seek that which makes us feel worse. By synthesizing current research in the social sciences, Schwartz makes the counterintuitive case that eliminating choices can greatly reduce the stress, anxiety, and busyness of our lives. He offers eleven practical steps on how to limit choices to a manageable number, have the discipline to focus on the important ones and ignore the rest, and ultimately derive greater satisfaction from the choices you have to make. [close]
date added	12-15-06 edit book

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Edward rated it:

03/23/08

Read in December, 2007

Really important book for me. Refers to some great research. Some highlights:

Prologue:
- “choice no longer liberates, but debilitates” -“choice overload”
- we’d be better off if we embraced some limits on choice instead of rebelling, by seeking “good enough” rather than the best, by lowering our expectations about our decisions, by making our decisions nonreversible, and by not comparing ourselves to others as much

I. When We Choose
...more

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Nathan rated it:

07/08/08

bookshelves: brain-cogsci-behavioural-economics, science-fact

I've been reading many of the pop-psych brain books lately, particularly interested in our cognitive biases: in which ways are we not perfectly rational creatures? Schwartz focuses on the ways that a wide selection of choices makes us incapable of making good decisions.

His basic points are few, repeated with anecdotes and accounts of psychological studies throughout the book. His advice at the end is really only three or four things we can do differently, leading to eight or so effects that w...more

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Jeanne rated it:

06/20/08

Excellent book that further reinforces my goal to quit being an average American consumer.

Some favorite quotes:

"Because of adaptation, enthusiasm about postive 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."

See- you're not going to enjoy that new car as much as you think you will.
...more Excellent book that further reinforces my goal to quit being an average American consumer.

Some favorite quotes:

"Because of adaptation, enthusiasm about postive 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."

See- you're not going to enjoy that new car as much as you think you will.

"The result of having pleasure turn into comfort is disappointment [adaptation:], and the disappointment will be especially severe when the goods we are consuming are "durable" goods, such as cars, houses, stereo systems, elegant clothes, jewelry, and computers. When the brief period of real enthusiasm and pleasure wanes, people will have these thigns around them -- as a constant reminder that consumption isn't all it's cracked up to be... Faced with this inevitable disappointment, what do people do?... Most are driven instead to pursue novelty... In time, these new commodities also will lose their intensity, but people still get caught up in the chase..."

Basically, pleasure turns into comfort, and comfort doesn't make us happy. So, we try to get bigger and better things to give us the high of pleasure. We adapt to that pleasure, turning it into comfort, and the cycle starts all over again.

"... unlike adaptation, the experience of gratitude is something we can affect directly. Experiencing and expressing gratitude actually gets easier with practice. By causing us to focus on how much better our lives are than thye could have been, or were before, the disappointment that adaptation brings in tis wake can be blunted."

Long story short - be grateful.

"One way of achieving this goal [keeping expectations modest:] 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. What's the point of great meals, great wines, and great blouses if they don't make you feel great?"

Love this quote - to me, this is why we need to keep Christmas in December (and not advertised starting in October). I'm going to stew on this a bit more because I know that this applies to my life in more ways than one.

And while I want to quote an entire sub-chapter titled "Learn to Love Contraints", I'll try to sum it up. In a nutshell, the sheer number of choices available to us is ever increasing. Because of these choices, we are more likely to experience an entire array of negative feelings (regret, comparison, adaptation, and expectations) with every choice. By self-limiting our choices, we free up time and attention to thinking about choices that really matter. Self-limited choices can also become habits. For example, you make the choice to always wear a seat belt. After a while, you don't even consciously make the choice to wear a seat belt - it has become habit. From someone that resists habits and routines, I'm finding more and more evidence that the very things I'm resisting are perhaps that very things that will allow me greater freedom....less

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Dan rated it:

10/02/07

Read in October, 2007

recommends it for: Capitalists, people who agonize over choices

This book is about how all the options and choices available to us in our day to day life can actually lead to people to be less happy. This is in direct contradiction to the axiom of free market capitalism that all choice is good.

Barry Schwartz describes to tendencies that people have while making decisions satisfying and maximizing. Satisfying is when someone tries to find a simple satisfying choice. Maximizing is when som...more This book is about how all the options and choices available to us in our day to day life can actually lead to people to be less happy. This is in direct contradiction to the axiom of free market capitalism that all choice is good.

Barry Schwartz describes to tendencies that people have while making decisions satisfying and maximizing. Satisfying is when someone tries to find a simple satisfying choice. Maximizing is when someone tries very hard to find the best choice. This book presents lots of evidence from contemporary psychological research that maximizing actually makes people less happy with their decisions. Furthermore, maximizing is more prevalent when people have more choices.

I think that the author has really good points in this book, and has good advice for how to avoid being unhappy given the plethora of choices that we have. I found his arguments and points to be well supported. I think that the advice and strategies for dealing with too much choice is good. I think that this is a good book for people to read to help realize how we can all make decisions better.

Despite this, I think that the book was not particularly well written. (Which is why it only gets 3/5 instead of higher.) The organization was alright, but the book reads like a college psychology textbook in many places. I found it hard to concentrate on the book and get through it in many places. It took me a long time to read this book. And even though I think the book has lots of good information, I think that the writing style made it hard to get through many parts.

One of the main conclusions that the author comes to is that we have so many choices in day to day life that we spend more time deciding and less time socially interacting. This concept of modern life leading to alienation is old and dates back to the industrial revolution. However, the specific proximate causes of modern American society are also thoroughly explored in the works of Chuck Palahniuk.

I read this book because I had heard compelling arguments like the ones in this book, and because a professor of mine lent me his copy.
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Shoshanapnw rated it:

01/11/08

bookshelves: 2007, psychology

Schwartz, with whom I had a pleasant chat at American Psychological Association a while back, contends that while having choices is valuable, more choices don't appear to lead to greater happiness, and may be psychologically detrimental. I enjoyed his arguments, which are closely associated with sociological and psychological studies, and recommend reading this book in conjunction with Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking or The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a B...more
Schwartz, with whom I had a pleasant chat at American Psychological Association a while back, contends that while having choices is valuable, more choices don't appear to lead to greater happiness, and may be psychologically detrimental. I enjoyed his arguments, which are closely associated with sociological and psychological studies, and recommend reading this book in conjunction with Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking or The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, or even Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (since you may recall that I didn't care much for the latter, you may shelve Schwartz near it without reading it if you so choose).

Though I agree with the conclusions drawn, in general, Schwartz's arguments seem reductive at times, and without seeing the studies themselves I can't evaluate whether other elements that may be important have been accounted for. Thus, choices are often presented as all-or-nothing, and research participants' pragmatic economic decision-making seems to be overlooked. For example, in studies where a sure bet of receiving $100 is set in opposition to a slightly better-weighted double-or-nothing option, participants' more common choice of $100 is not discussed in relativistic terms (such as would be familiar to readers of Gilligan's critique of Kohlberg) that include the participant's pragmatic life experience of needing to take a safe bet rather than a risky one with the potential for more gain but that might also cause loss.

In addition, those for whom the process of shopping or questing is enjoyable, and those who approach such activities with mindfulness and attention, are not well-represented in Schwartz's argument. Schwartz does allude to a related issue when he notes the possibility of history and cohort effects (though he doesn't say it that way); what is overwhelming for one generation (such as a cell phone) may be par for the course for the next (such as watching a video on an iPhone while texting about something else and pretending to be paying attention in class)....less

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Sbuchler rated it:

09/04/08

bookshelves: non-fiction, read-in-2008

Read in September, 2008

recommended to Sbuchler by: Eestep

Genre: Non-Fiction, Popular Psychology

This book looks at how the sheer embarrassment of choices middle-upper class Americans have is stressful and actually detrimental to our happiness.

The book is a quick read and there are some really interesting points that are made. Generally I really enjoyed it, however, I felt that about 2/3s of the way though it became repetitive fluff.

The beginning is fascinating - looking at the sheer number of choices we have in shopping; Barry Schwartz mana...more

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james rated it:

02/22/08

Read in February, 2008

You can pretty much get the premise of this book by reading the subtitle. The subtitle is one that gives words to what I have been feeling, but have been unable to articulate and defend outside of my own personal gut dissatisfaction and overwhelming when trying to decide what to order at a restaurant, among various other choices that i am presented with.

The premise is backed by a whole lot of soft science: sociology, psychology, surveys and analysis of the findings, and various other researc...more

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Margaret rated it:

(review of isbn 0060005688)

10/24/07

bookshelves: nonfiction

Read in February, 2007

This book changed my thinking more than any other I've read this year. In our consumerist society, we're always told that the more choices we have, the more empowered we are as individuals. But haven't you ever been paralyzed in making a decision because the vast number of choices is overwhelming? I've always had a nagging feeling that too many choices are actually detrimental to our happiness and satisfaction, and that's just what Barry Schwartz's book...more

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Elly rated it:

06/01/07

Read in May, 2007

This book looks at the effects of having a plethora of choices about everything. His conclusion is that too much of a good thing is too much, and in fact an overabundance of choices can reduce the amount of decisions one is willing to make. Particularly for people who need to compare all options before making a decision to ensure they've made the perfect decision, too many choices make us less happy. His recommendations for avoiding the indecision trap is to learn to be a satisficer: someone who...more

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Donna rated it:

12/08/07

bookshelves: general-nonfiction

Read in December, 2007

recommends it for: Those interested in behavior and decision-making

In The Paradox of Choice, Schwartz focuses on two basic ways of making decisions: maximizing (trying to make the very best possible choice) and satisficing (making a choice that will do well enough, all things considered).

In the past, I've thought of these two approaches in terms of the decisions that need to be made, not in terms of the person making them. For example, when picking a spouse or a house, one may want to take a lot of time and make the best possible decisi...more

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Laurie rated it:

09/03/07

bookshelves: non-fiction, self-help

Read in November, 2006

recommends it for: people who like those kinds of books that Malcolm Gladwell writes

I have a lot of issues with this book but, to be fair, I actually reference it in conversation all the time. I think it's worth a skim but most of it's kind of common sense.

Schwartz makes approximately seven interesting points but he makes them repeatedly for some 230-odd pages. Sometimes he makes the same point in different ways and sometimes he makes the same point in the same way. During an especially repetitive section, I actually suspected that there'd been a printing error and I'd acc...more

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Jessie rated it:

08/08/08

Read in August, 2008

This was a quick, interesting read. The book explains that the more choices we have, the harder it is for us to decide. The author says that we are better off with less choices.

In America we have so many choices in EVERYTHING we consume. When we have more choices to decide from, it takes longer, and heightens our expectations of enjoyment. If we don't enjoy it as much as we expected, we think we made the wrong choice. The fact that there are an abundance of choices gives us the illusion...more

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David added it

04/23/08

This one is a must-read: Some parts get a little complicated for just a quick read. But, at 240 pages this is a a fun look at the societal and psychological issues we face. <br /> <br />The areas explored are summed up with the following: <br /> <br />"...our experience of choice as a burden rather than a privilege is not a simple phenomenon. Rather it is the result of a complex interaction among many psychological processes that permeate our culture, including risin...more

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Ken rated it:

07/03/08

Read in July, 2008

A few very interesting points about human behavior based on research studies; for example, the peak-end theory says that people's memory of an event is heavily influenced by how they felt during the peak (high or low) and at the end.

But the book could not decide if it was about human behavior in general, or if it was a self-help book for those overwhelmed by all the choices in life. I would have preferred a book cut down to the 40 interesting pages, bypassing all the fatherly advice about ho...more

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Collin rated it:

06/15/08

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in June, 2008

recommends it for: people interested in psychology or who feel overwhelmed with the clutter of daily decisions.

Schwartz asserts in this book that we currently face too many choices and that the choices we do face have too many options, both to the degree that they negatively affect people psychologically. Ie, we'd be happier and more satisfied if we had fewer options and fewer choices.

This fascinating topic appeals to me intellectually and philosophically. However, I knocked the book down a star because of 2 flaws. One, I feel he belabors the setup ("Look how insanely many choices we have!&qu...more

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Carissa rated it:

04/25/08

bookshelves: adult, non-fiction

Read in September, 2005

another non-fiction choice that has altered my outlook on the way the world works. (another previous example of this was affluenza) the author writes very methodically to prove his theory that people in today’s american society are offered such a plethora of choices that choice has become crippling and has led to an increase in rates of depression. this may seem far-fetched, but he has some compelling arguments as to why we should conciously cut down on dithering and waffling and regret. he al...more

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Giedra rated it:

05/20/08

Read in May, 2008

This book is fascinating. The premise--that the large amount of choice we have in Western society actually contributes to unhappiness--is something I had considered before and read about in other contexts, so in some sense it was a big "duh," but a lot of the examples and studies that explored this concept further were very interesting to read about.

The author suggests some ideas for reducing the unhappiness that can come from too much choice. Again, to me they were kind of "...more

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Matthew rated it:

08/13/08

bookshelves: currently-reading

Although I still have 50 pages to go, this is an excellent read. Barry Schwartz discusses the unintended and negative side-effects that our consumer culture creates by marketing freedom through a never-ending and constantly-growing list of choices. Although it may sound trite, a few years ago I noticed that reading through the menu at a restaurant made going out for a relaxing dinner a little less enjoyable, so I started just telling the waiter or waitress what I felt like having and if what ...more

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Russell rated it:

(review of isbn 0060005688)

11/25/07

Read in October, 2004

recommends it for: all Americans

This was an incredibly insightful book that truly documents how the proliferation of choice really affects our daily lives. This book delves into how the requirement to choose things that only one generation ago were not options actually limits our mind's ability to contemplate important issues and clouds it unnecessarily with nonsensical whimsy and farce. The important decisions, which truly require our attention and concern, end up being treated just like the foolish decisions because our br...more