The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

by Barry Schwartz

clinging tenaciously to all the choices available to us contributes to bad decisions, to anxiety, stress, and dissatisfaction—even to clinical depression.

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.

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.

Most good decisions will involve these steps: Figure out your goal or goals. Evaluate the importance of each goal. Array the options. Evaluate how likely each of the options is to meet your goals. Pick the winning option. Later use the consequences of your choice to modify your goals, the importance you assign them, and the way you evaluate future possibilities.

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. This “peak-end” rule of Kahneman’s is what we use to summarize the experience, and then we rely on that summary later to remind ourselves of how the experience felt. The summaries in turn influence our decisions about whether to have that experience again, and factors such as the proportion of pleasure to displeasure during the course of the experience or how long the experience lasted, have almost no influence on our memory of it.

The discrepancy between logic and memory suggests that we don’t always know what we want.

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.

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.

our most fundamental sense of well-being crucially depends on our having the ability to exert control over our environment and recognizing that we do.

There are too many life choices…without concern for the resulting overload…and the lack of constraint by custom…that is, demands to discover or create an identity rather than to accept a given identity.

when we are in a good mood, we think better. We consider more possibilities; we’re open to considerations that would otherwise not occur to us; we see subtle connections between pieces of information that we might otherwise miss.

Even decisions as trivial as renting a video become important if we believe that these decisions are revealing something significant about ourselves.

Or, to raise the stakes, consider the possible difference between those who regard marital vows as sacred and unbreakable and those who regard them as agreements that can be reversed or undone by mutual consent. 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.

And what counterfactual thinking does is establish a contrast between a person’s actual experience and an imagined alternative.

UNLIKE OTHER NEGATIVE EMOTIONS—ANGER, SADNESS, DISAPPOINTMENT, even grief—what is so difficult about regret is the feeling that the regrettable state of affairs could have been avoided and that it could have been avoided by you, if only you had chosen differently.

Janet Landman, in her excellent book Regret, sums it up this way: “Regret may threaten decisions with multiple attractive alternatives more than decisions offering only one or a more limited set of alternatives…. Ironically, then, the greater the number of appealing choices, the greater the opportunity for regret.”

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.

Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell labeled the hedonic treadmill. No matter how fast you run on this kind of machine, you still don’t get anywhere.

So the more choices we have, the more effort goes into our decisions, and the more we expect to enjoy the benefits of those decisions. Adaptation, by dramatically truncating the duration of those benefits, puts us into a state of mind where the result just wasn’t worth the effort. The more we invest in a decision, the more we expect to realize from our investment. And adaptation makes agonizing over decisions a bad investment.

WHEN PEOPLE EVALUATE AN EXPERIENCE, THEY ARE PERFORMING one or more of the following comparisons: Comparing the experience to what they hoped it would be Comparing the experience to what they expected it to be Comparing the experience to other experiences they have had in the recent past Comparing the experience to experiences that others have had

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.

Indeed, social psychologists have found that upward comparisons produce jealousy, hostility, negative mood, frustration, lowered self-esteem, decreased happiness, and symptoms of stress. By the same token, downward comparisons have been found to boost self-esteem, increase positive mood, and reduce anxiety. But it needn’t be this way. At times, people engaging in social comparison respond positively to upward comparisons and negatively to downward comparisons. Learning that others are worse off can lead you to consider that you yourself can become worse off. When you compare yourself with others who are worse off, you may take pleasure in your superiority, but you may also experience guilt, embarrassment, the need to cope with other people’s envy or resentment, and the fear that their fate could happen to you. And when you compare yourself with others who are better off, you may feel envy or resentment, but you may also be motivated or inspired. For example, in one study, encountering information about other cancer patients who were in better shape improved the mood of cancer patients, probably because it gave them hope that their condition also could improve.

In his book Choosing the Right Pond, economist Robert Frank exposes just how much of social life is determined by our desire to be big fish in our own ponds. 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. So 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. Better to be the third-highest-paid lawyer in a small firm and make $120,000 a year than to be in the middle of the pack in a large firm and make $150,000. The way to be happy—the way to succeed in the quest for status—is to find the right pond and stay in it.

This essentially universal and unrealistically high standard of comparison decreases the satisfaction of those of us who are in the middle or below, even as the actual circumstances of our lives improve.

economist Fred Hirsch argued in his book Social Limits to Growth

The moods of happy people improved when they got positive feedback and worsened when they got negative feedback, but whether they heard or didn’t hear the feedback given to their partner made no difference. Unhappy people, on the other hand, were very much affected by the feedback their partner received. If a participant got positive feedback, but her partner got better feedback, the participant’s mood worsened. If a participant got negative feedback, but her partner got worse feedback, the participant’s mood improved. 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.

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

In his book Bowling Alone, political scientist Robert Putnam focused attention on the deterioration of social connection in contemporary life. And in this context it is relevant that the incidence of depression among the Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, is less than 20 percent of the national rate. The Amish are a tightly knit traditional community, one in which social ties are extremely strong and life choices are rather meager.

There are some strategies you can use to help you avoid the disappointment that comes from thinking about opportunity costs: Unless you’re truly dissatisfied, stick with what you always buy. Don’t be tempted by “new and improved.” Don’t “scratch” unless there’s an “itch.” And don’t worry that if you do this, you’ll miss out on all the new things the world has to offer.

We can mitigate regret by Adopting the standards of a satisficer rather than a maximizer. Reducing the number of options we consider before making a decision. Practicing gratitude for what is good in a decision rather than focusing on our disappointments with what is bad.

So, to be better prepared for, and less disappointed by adaptation: As you buy your new car, acknowledge that the thrill won’t be quite the same two months after you own it. Spend less time looking for the perfect thing (maximizing), so that you won’t have huge search costs to be “amortized” against the satisfaction you derive from what you actually choose. Remind yourself of how good things actually are instead of focusing on how they’re less good than they were at first.

So to make the task of lowering expectations easier: Reduce the number of options you consider. Be a satisficer rather than a maximizer. Allow for serendipity.