The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

by Barry Schwartz

A large array of options may discourage consumers because it forces an increase in the effort that goes into making a decision. So consumers decide not to decide, and don’t buy the product. Or if they do, the effort that the decision requires detracts from the enjoyment derived from the results. Also, a large array of options may diminish the attractiveness of what people actually choose, the reason being that thinking about the attractions of some of the unchosen options detracts from the pleasure derived from the chosen one.

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.

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.

This reflects what might be called the “decreasing marginal disutility of losses.” Losing the first $100 hurts worse than losing the second $100. So although losing $200 may be twice as bad objectively as losing $100, it is not twice as bad subjectively. What that means is that taking the risk to perhaps avoid losing anything is a pretty good deal. Thus, as Kahneman and Tversky again point out, people embrace risk—they are “risk seeking”—in the domain of potential losses.

Some studies have estimated that losses have more than twice the psychological impact as equivalent gains. The fact is, we all hate to lose, which Kahneman and Tversky refer to as loss aversion.

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.

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.

Social scientist Alex Michalos, in his discussion of the perceived quality of experience, argued that people establish standards of satisfaction based on the assessment of three gaps: “the gap between what one has and wants, the gap between what one has and thinks others like oneself have, and the gap between what one has and the best one has had in the past.” Michalos found that much of the individual variation in life satisfaction could be explained in terms not of differences in objective experience, but in terms of differences in these three perceived gaps. To these three comparisons I have added a fourth: the gap between what one has and what one expects.