The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

by Barry Schwartz

Consumer Reports makes its judgments about the reliability of cars by soliciting input from its thousands and thousands of readers. It compiles this input into an estimate of reliability for each make and model of car. So when Consumer Reports says that a car is reliable, it is basing its conclusion on the experience of thousands of people with thousands of cars. This doesn’t mean that every single Volvo driver will have the same story to tell. But on average, the reports of Volvo owners are more positive about reliability than the reports of the owners of other cars. Now along comes this friend to tell you about one particular Volvo owner and one particular Volvo. How much weight should you give this story? Should it undo conclusions based on the thousands of cases assessed by Consumer Reports? Of course not. Logically, it should have almost no influence on your decision. Unfortunately, most people give substantial weight to this kind of anecdotal “evidence,” perhaps so much so that it will cancel out the positive recommendation found in Consumer Reports. Most of us give weight to these kinds of stories because they are extremely vivid and based on a personal, detailed, face-to-face account. Kahneman and Tversky discovered and reported on people’s tendency to give undue weight to some types of information in contrast to others. They called it the availability heuristic.