The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

by Barry Schwartz

ALBERT CAMUS POSED the question, “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”

When probed, the teenagers from affluent households talked about high expectations, both their own and their parents’. They talked about “too-muchness”: too many activities, too many consumer choices, too much to learn. Whereas teens from low-income households talked about how much easier it was to get schoolwork done thanks to computers and the Internet, teens from high-income homes talked about how much had to be sifted through because of computers and the Internet. As one commentator put it, “Children feel the pressure…to be sure they don’t slide back. Everything’s about going forward…. Falling back is the American nightmare.” So if your perch is high, you have much further to fall than if your perch is low. “Fear of falling,” as Barbara Ehrenreich put it, is the curse of high expectations.

The experiments required animals to jump over small hurdles to escape from or avoid electric shocks to the feet. The animals typically learn this quickly and easily, but a group of animals that were exposed to the task after having experienced a series of unavoidable shocks failed to learn. Indeed, many of them failed even to try. They sat passively and took the shocks, never venturing over the hurdle at all. The explanation for this failure was that when the animals were being exposed to the uncontrollable shocks, they learned that they were helpless. Having learned this helplessness, the animals then transferred the lesson to the new situation, one in which they actually did have control.

they will be small (sunlight streaming in through the bedroom window, a kind word from a friend, a piece of swordfish cooked just the way you like it, an informative article in a magazine).