The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

by Barry Schwartz

So it seems that neither 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.

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.

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.

ENERGY, BEST, and REGRET

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

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.

I believe that the goal of maximizing is a source of great dissatisfaction, that it can make people miserable—especially in a world that insists on providing an overwhelming number of choices, both trivial and not so trivial.

In every area of life, you will always be open to the possibility that you might find something better if you just keep looking.

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.

Who has this kind of time? Who has the flexibility and breathing room in life’s regularly scheduled activities to be there when needed without paying a heavy price in stress and distraction?

the need to choose in ever more aspects of life causes us more distress than we realize.

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.

Bottom line—the options we consider usually suffer from comparison with other options.

The emotional cost of potential trade-offs does more than just diminish our sense of satisfaction with a decision. It also interferes with the quality of decisions themselves.

Everything is up for grabs; almost anything is possible. And each possibility they consider has its attractive features, so that the opportunity costs associated with those attractive options keep mounting up, making the whole decision-making process decidedly unattractive.

“What happens when you have too many options is that you are responsible for what happens to you.”

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.

This is postdecision regret, regret that occurs after we’ve experienced the results of a decision. But there is also something called anticipated regret, which rears its head even before a decision is made.

Perfection is the only weapon against regret, and endless, exhaustive, paralyzing consideration of the alternatives is the only way to achieve perfection. For a satisficer, the stakes are lower.

If there were only one pond—if everyone compared his position to the positions of everybody else—virtually all of us would be losers. After all, in the pond containing whales, even sharks are small.

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

My suspicion is that both are true—that the tendency to ruminate traps unhappy people in a downward psychological spiral that is fed by social comparison.

The maximizer becomes a slave in her judgments to the experiences of other people.

When we (inevitably) fail, the culture of individualism biases us toward causal explanations that focus on personal rather than universal factors.

We are surrounded by modern, time-saving devices, but we never seem to have enough time.

We are free to be the authors of our own lives, but we don’t know exactly what kind of lives we want to “write.”

The “success” of modernity turns out to be bittersweet, and everywhere we look it appears that a significant contributing fac...

If the ability to choose enables you to get a better car, house, job, vacation, or coffeemaker, but the process of choice makes you feel worse about what you’ve chosen, you really haven’t gained anything from the opportunity to choose.

When life is not too good, we think a lot about how it could be better. When life is going well, we tend not to think much about how it could be worse. But with practice, we can learn to reflect on how much better things are than they might be, which will in turn make the good things in life feel even better.

But what I’ve always wanted to point out to him is that he made the decision he made for a variety of complex reasons inherent in who he was as a young man.

But one thing I do know is that his experience of them would be infinitely happier if he could let go of regret.

What we can do is develop realistic expectations about how experiences change with time. Our challenge is to remember that the high-quality sound system, the luxury car, and the ten-thousand-square-foot house won’t keep providing the pleasure they give when we first experience them.

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