The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

by Barry Schwartz

choice no longer liberates, but debilitates.

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.

In the same way, we evaluate positive experiences on the basis of how good they feel at their best, and how good they feel at the end.

weight to these kinds of stories because they are extremely vivid and based on a personal, detailed, face-to-face account.

The availability heuristic says that we assume that the more available some piece

of information is to memory, the more frequently we must have encountered it in the past. This heuristic is partly true. In general, the frequency of experience does affect its availability to memory. But frequency of experience is not the only thing that affects availability to memory. Salience or vividness matters as well.

Vivid interviews with people have profound effects on judgment even when people are told, in advance of seeing the interviews, that the subjects of the interview are atypical.

I’m not saying that satisficers do not have standards. Satisficers may have very high standards. It’s just that they allow themselves to be satisfied once experiences meet those standards.

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.

Every choice we make is a testament to our autonomy, to our sense of self-determination.

choice. If we have choices in a particular situation, then we should be able to exert control over that situation, and thus we should be protected from helplessness.

The first is that, as the experience of choice and control gets broader and deeper, expectations about choice and control may rise to match that experience. As one barrier to autonomy after another gets knocked down, those that remain are, perhaps, more disturbing.

The second explanation is simply that more choice may not always mean more control.

Having the opportunity to choose is no blessing if we feel we do not have the wherewithal to choose wisely.

What looks attractive in prospect doesn’t always look so good in practice.

Once a society’s level of per capita wealth crosses a threshold from poverty to adequate subsistence, further increases in national wealth have almost no effect on happiness.

in religious communities are happier than those who do not.

Being connected to others seems to be much more important to subjective well-being than being rich.

In the context of this discussion of choice and autonomy, it is also important to note that, in many ways, social ties actually decrease freedom, choice, and autonomy.

Both books point out how the growth of material affluence has not brought

with it an increase in subjective well-being. But they go further.

There are too many life choices…without concern for the resulting overload…and the lack of constraint by custom…that is, demands to discover or create an identity rather than to accept a given identity.

That work strongly suggests that the more control people have, the less helpless, and thus the less depressed, they will be.