The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

by Barry Schwartz

The truth is that maximizing and satisficing orientations tend to be “domain specific.” Nobody is a maximizer in every decision, and probably everybody is in some. Perhaps what distinguishes maximizers from satisficers is the range and number of decisions in which an individual operates as one or the other.

it is certainly possible that choice and maximizing are not independent of each other. It is possible that a wide array of options can turn people into maximizers. If this is true, then the proliferation of options not only makes people who are maximizers miserable, but it may also make people who are satisficers into maximizers.

Choice is what enables us to tell the world who we are and what we care about. This is true of something as superficial as the way we dress. The clothes we choose are a deliberate expression of taste, intended to send a message.

Every choice we make is a testament to our autonomy, to our sense of self-determination. Almost every social, moral, or political philosopher in the Western tradition since Plato has placed a premium on such autonomy.

choice enables people to be actively and effectively engaged in the world, with profound psychological benefits.

people in rich countries are happier than people in poor countries. Obviously, money matters. But what these surveys also reveal is that money doesn’t matter as much as you might think. 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.

What seems likely to me is that the causality works both ways: happy people attract others to them, and being with others makes people happy.

Lane writes that we are paying for increased affluence and increased freedom with a substantial decrease in the quality and quantity of social relations. We earn more and spend more, but we spend less time with others. More than a quarter of Americans report being lonely, and loneliness seems to come not from being alone, but from lack of intimacy. We spend less time visiting with neighbors. We spend less time visiting with our parents, and much less time visiting with other relatives. And once again, this phenomenon adds to our burden of choice.

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?

Time spent dealing with choice is time taken away from being a good friend, a good spouse, a good parent, and a good congregant.

following rules eliminates troublesome choices in your daily life, each time you get into a car or each time you go to a cocktail party.

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 buyers leave out of this line of reasoning is the opportunity cost of putting that $50,000 into the house. What else could you do with it? You could put that $50,000 into stocks or Treasury Bills,

even decisions that appear to be no-brainers carry the hidden costs of the options declined. Thinking about opportunity costs may not change the decision you make, but it will give you a more realistic assessment of the full implications of that decision.

the only opportunity costs that should figure into a decision are the ones associated with the next-best alternative.

The options under consideration usually have multiple features. If people think about options in terms of their features rather than as a whole, different options may rank as second best (or even best) with respect to each individual feature. So going to the movies may be the best way to stimulate the intellect. Listening to jazz may be the best way to relax. Dancing may be the most enjoyable way to get some exercise. Going to the ball game may be the best way to blow off some steam. Dinner at home with friends may be the best way to experience intimacy.

If there were some way to say, objectively, what was the best vacation or the best job or the best way to spend a Saturday night, then adding options could only make people better off. Any new option might turn out to be the best one. But there is no objective best vacation, job, or Saturday night activity. Ultimately, the quality of choices that matters to people is the subjective experience that the choices afford.

this suggests that whenever we are forced to make decisions involving trade-offs, we will feel less good about the option we choose than we would have if the alternatives hadn’t been there.

My concern, given the research on trade-offs and opportunity costs, is that 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.

But distinguishing between good and bad is a far simpler matter than distinguishing good from better from best. After millions of years of survival based on simple distinctions, it may simply be that we are biologically unprepared for the number of choices we face in the modern world.

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.

We would expect that those who see marriage as a nonreversible commitment will be more inclined to do psychological work that makes them feel satisfied with their decision than will those whose attitude about marriage is more relaxed. As a result, individuals with “nonreversible” marriages might be more satisfied than individuals with “reversible” ones. As we see reversible marriages come apart, we may think to ourselves, how fortunate the couple was to have a flexible attitude toward marital commitment, given that it didn’t work out. It might not occur to us that the flexible attitude might have played a causal role in the marriage’s failure.

When asked about what they regret most in the last six months, people tend to identify actions that didn’t meet expectations. But when asked about what they regret most when they look back on their lives as a whole, people tend to identify failures to act.

When you miss your objective by a lot, it is hard to imagine that small differences would have led to a successful result. But when you miss by a little, ouch.

Related to this “nearness” effect, who do you think is happier, an athlete who wins a silver medal in the Olympics (second place) or an athlete who wins a bronze medal (third place)? It seems obvious that second is better than third, so silver medalists should be happier than bronze medalists. But this turns out, on average, not to be true. Bronze medalists are happier than silver medalists.

counterfactual thinking is usually triggered by the occurrence of something unpleasant, something that itself produces a negative emotion. Counterfactual thoughts are generated in response to experiences such as poor exam grades, trouble in romantic relationships, and the illness or death of loved ones. And when the counterfactual thoughts begin to occur, they trigger more negative emotions, like regret,

Any actual seaside vacation suffers by contrast with an imagined, perfect alternative, and with that counterfactual contrast comes regret, more acutely for people who are maximizers than for people who are satisficers.

Many people persist in very troubled relationships not because of love or what they owe the other person or because they feel a moral obligation to honor vows, but because of all the time and effort they’ve already put in.

First, anticipating that we may regret a decision may induce us to take the decision seriously and to imagine the various scenarios that may follow it. This anticipation may help us to see consequences of a decision that would not have been evident otherwise. Second, regret may emphasize the mistakes we made in arriving at a decision, so that, should a similar situation arise in the future, we won’t make the same mistakes. Third, regret may mobilize or motivate us to take the actions necessary to undo a decision or ameliorate some of its unfortunate consequences. Fourth, regret is a signal to others that we care about what happened, are sorry that it happened, and will do what we can to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.

This ubiquitous feature of human psychology is a process known as adaptation. Simply put, we get used to things, and then we start to take them for granted.

I got used to—adapted to—each of these sources of pleasure, and they stopped being sources of pleasure. Because of adaptation, enthusiasm about positive experiences doesn’t sustain itself. And what’s worse, people seem generally unable to anticipate that this process of adaptation will take place. The waning of pleasure or enjoyment over time always seems to come as an unpleasant surprise.

In 1973, 13 percent of Americans thought of air-conditioning in their cars as a necessity. Today, 41 percent do. I know the earth is getting warmer, but the climate hasn’t changed that much in thirty years. What has changed is our standard of comfort. Even though we don’t expect it to happen, such adaptation to pleasure is inevitable, and it may cause more disappointment in a world of many choices than in a world of few.

adaptation can be especially disappointing when we’ve put much time and effort into selecting, from a myriad of possibilities, the items or experiences we end up adapting to.

I’m not suggesting here that, as far as subjective experience goes, in the long run there’s no difference between winning a lottery and being paralyzed in an accident. But what I am arguing is that the difference is much smaller than you would expect, and much smaller than it appears to be at the moment at which these life-changing events occur.

Human beings, Scitovsky said, want to experience pleasure. 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. It’s a thrill to drive your new car for the first few weeks; after that, it’s just comfortable. It certainly beats the old car, but it isn’t much of a kick. Comfort is nice enough, but people want pleasure. And comfort isn’t pleasure.

Faced with this inevitable disappointment, what do people do? Some simply give up the chase and stop valuing pleasure derived from things. Most are driven instead to pursue novelty, to seek out new commodities and experiences whose pleasure potential has not been dissipated by repeated exposure.

we adapt to almost everything, but ignore or underestimate adaptation effects in predicting the future. When asked to imagine being, say, $25,000 per year richer, it’s easy to conjure up what it will feel like at the moment you get the raise. The mistake is to assume that the way it feels at that moment is the way it will feel forever.

Time, effort, opportunity costs, anticipated regret, and the like are fixed costs that we “pay” up front in making a decision, and those costs then get “amortized” over the life of the decision. If the decision provides substantial satisfaction for a long time after it is made, the costs of making it recede into insignificance. But if the decision provides satisfaction for only a short time, those costs loom large.

simply by being aware of the process we can anticipate its effects, and therefore be less disappointed when it comes. This means that when we are making decisions, we should think about how each of the options will feel not just tomorrow, but months or even years later.

But individuals who regularly experience and express gratitude are physically healthier, more optimistic about the future, and feel better about their lives than those who do not.

Real hedonic charge comes when an experience exceeds expectations. And hedonic distress comes when experience fails to live up to expectations.

instead of comparing ourselves to everyone, we try to mark off the world in such a way that in our pond, in comparison with our reference group, we are successful.

Lyubomirsky found that happy people were only minimally affected by whether the person working next to them was better or worse at the anagram task than they were. When asked to assess their ability to unscramble anagrams, and how they felt about it, happy people gave higher ratings after doing the task than before

Thus it seemed as though the only thing that mattered to the unhappy people was how they did in comparison to their partner. Better to be told that you’re a pretty bad teacher but that others are even worse than to be told that you’re a pretty good teacher, but others are better.

The inference here is that distraction versus rumination is the critical distinction. Happy people have the ability to distract themselves and move on, whereas unhappy people get stuck ruminating and make themselves more and more miserable.

maximizers were much more affected by the presence of another person than satisficers were. Solving anagrams alongside someone who seemed to be doing it better produced in maximizers both a deterioration of mood and a lowered assessment of their anagram-solving ability. The social comparison information had no such effect on satisficers.

Maximizers want the best, but how do you know that you have the best, except by comparison?

A “good enough” salary is one that enables them to afford a decent place to live, some nice clothes, an occasional night out, and so on. It doesn’t matter that others may earn more.

It is maximizers who have the relative standards and satisficers who have the absolute ones. While, in theory, “the best” is an ideal that exists independent of what other people have, in practice, determining the best is so difficult that people fall back on comparisons with others. “Good enough” is not an objective standard that exists out there for all to see. It will always be relative to the person doing the judging. But critically, it will not, or need not, be relative to either the standards or the achievements of others.

Even if you are not after the best wallpaper for your kitchen, when faced with a choice among hundreds or thousands of possibilities, the search for something good enough can be enormously simplified by knowing what others have chosen. So overwhelming choice is going to push you in the direction of looking over your shoulder at what others are doing.