The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

by Barry Schwartz

According to a survey conducted by Yankelovich Partners, a majority of people want more control over the details of their lives, but a majority of people also want to simplify their lives. There you have it—the paradox of our times.

If consumers are buying their own insurance rather than choosing from what employers provide, even more options are available. Once again, I don’t mean to suggest that we can’t or don’t benefit from these options. Perhaps many of us do. But it presents yet another thing to worry about, to master, or, perhaps, to get very wrong.

The tenor of medical practice has shifted from one in which the all-knowing, paternalistic doctor tells the patient what must be done—or just does it—to one in which the doctor arrays the

possibilities before the patient, along with the likely plusses and minuses of each, and the patient makes a choice.

this change in the status of personal identity is both good and bad news: good news because it liberates us, and bad news because it burdens us

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” His point was that 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.

Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues have shown that what we remember about the pleasurable quality of our

past experiences is almost entirely determined by two things: how the experiences felt when they were at their peak (best or worst), and how they felt when they ended.

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.

Because our own actions are more available to us from memory, we assume they are more frequent.

diversity of individual experience can limit our propensity to choose in error, how

the expensive bread maker serving as an anchor, the $279 machine had become a bargain.

The original ticket price becomes an anchor against which the sale price is compared.

To compare unit prices across brands might require walking from one end of the aisle to the other. The multibrand list of unit prices makes it easier for shoppers to do cross-brand comparisons. And when such comparisons are easy to make, shoppers follow through and act on the information.

seems to be 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.

“law of diminishing marginal utility.” As the rich get richer, each additional unit of wealth satisfies them less.

The endowment effect helps explain why

companies can afford to offer money-back guarantees on their products. Once people own them, the products are worth more to their owners than the mere cash value, because giving up the products would entail a loss. Most interestingly, people seem to be utterly unaware that the endowment effect is operating, even as it distorts their judgment. In one study, participants were given a mug to examine and asked to write down the price they would demand for selling it if they owned it. A few minutes later, they were actually given the mug, along with the opportunity to sell it. When they owned the mug, they demanded 30 percent more to sell it than they had said they would only a few minutes earlier!

Thus the growth of options and opportunities for choice has three, related, unfortunate effects. It means that decisions require more effort. It makes mistakes more likely.

It makes the psychological consequences of mistakes more severe.

If you seek and accept only the best, you are a maximizer.

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. A satisficer has criteria and standards. She searches until she finds an item that meets those standards, and at that point, she stops.

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.

BEING SOCIALLY CONNECTED TAKES TIME. FIRST, IT TAKES TIME TO form close connections. To form a real friendship with someone, or to develop a romantic

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.

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.

Having the discipline to live by the rules you make for yourself is, of course, another matter, but one thing’s for sure: following rules eliminates troublesome choices in your daily life,

PART OF THE DOWNSIDE of abundant choice is that each new option adds to the list of trade-offs, and trade-offs have psychological consequences. The necessity of making trade-offs alters how we feel about the decisions we face; more important, it affects the level of satisfaction we experience from the decisions we ultimately make.

What these studies show is that when people are asked to give reasons for their preferences, they may struggle to find the words.

as the number of options goes up, the need to provide justifications for decisions also increases. And though this struggle to find reasons will lead to decisions that seem right at the moment, it will not necessarily lead to decisions that feel right later on.

We all learn as we grow up that living requires making choices and passing up opportunities. But our evolutionary history makes this a difficult lesson. Learning to choose is hard. Learning to choose well is harder. And learning to choose well in a world of unlimited possibilities is harder still, perhaps too hard.

I believe that one of the reasons that maximizers are less happy, less satisfied with their lives, and more depressed than satisficers is precisely because the taint of trade-offs and opportunity costs washes out much that should be satisfying about the decisions they make.

Suppose you have the choice between a guaranteed $100 and a risky $200, and suppose you choose the $100. You’ll never know what would have happened if instead you had chosen to go for the risky $200. So you’ll have no reason to regret your decision to take the sure thing. In contrast, suppose you go for the risk. Now you can’t help but know what would have happened if you had taken the sure thing; that’s what makes it a sure thing. So if you opt for risk and you lose, not only do you wind up with nothing, but you also have to live with the sting that you could have had $100. Taking the sure thing is a way to guarantee that you won’t regret your decision—you won’t regret it because you’ll never know how the alternative would have turned out.

We have seen that two of the factors affecting regret are Personal responsibility for the result How easily an individual can imagine a counterfactual, better alternative

The more options there are, the more if only’s you will be able to generate.

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.

consumption shifts increasingly to expensive, durable goods, with the result that disappointment with consumption increases.

Happy people have the ability to distract themselves and move on, whereas unhappy people get stuck ruminating and make themselves more and more miserable.

Focus on what makes you happy, and what gives meaning to your life.

Knowing the best way to teach kids how to pass up attractive options would make a real contribution to our understanding of modern parenting and its challenges. We are currently doing research on this very topic.

It’s good news, by the way, that even the most extreme maximizers satisfice about many things. This means that if you want to satisfice more and maximize less, you already know how to do so. You simply need to take decision-making strategies that you already use effectively in some areas of your life and apply them to others.