The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

by Barry Schwartz

Imagine instead that you tend to identify global, chronic, and personal causes for your failures. If your résumé is unimpressive and you choke at interviews, if you’re a passive kind of person, and if you believe that the last job was really available for the “right” person (not you), then your expectations for the future are pretty bleak. Not only did you not get this job, but you’re going to have trouble getting any job. The revised theory of helplessness and depression argued that helplessness induced by failure or lack of control leads to depression if a person’s causal explanations for that failure are global, chronic, and personal. It is only then, after all, that people will have good reason to expect one failure to be followed by another, and another, and another. What’s the point of getting out of bed, getting dressed, and trying again if the results are foreordained. Tests of this revised theory thus far have yielded impressive results. People do differ in the types of predispositions they display. “Optimists” explain successes with chronic, global, and personal causes and failures with transient, specific, and universal ones. “Pessimists” do the reverse. Optimists say things like “I got an A” and “She gave me a C.” Pessimists say things like “I got a C” and “He gave me an A.” And it is the pessimists who are candidates for depression.