The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

by Barry Schwartz

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

social comparison does nothing to improve one’s satisfaction with the choices one makes.

If you think about what maximizing requires of people, this result is not surprising. Maximizers want the best, but how do you know that you have the best, except by comparison?

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. But the more social comparison you do, the more likely you are to be affected by it, and the direction of such effects tends to be negative. So by forcing us to look around at what others are doing before we make decisions, the world of bountiful options is encouraging a process that will often, if not always, leave us feeling worse about our decisions than we would if we hadn’t engaged in the process to begin with.

Unlimited choice, I believe, can produce genuine suffering. When the results of decisions—about trivial things or important ones, about items of consumption or about jobs and relationships—are disappointing, we ask why. And when we ask why, the answers we come up with frequently have us blaming ourselves.

Seligman speculated that at least some instances of clinical depression were the result of individuals’ having experienced one significant loss of control over their lives and then coming to believe that they were helpless, that they could expect this helplessness to persist into the future and to be present across a wide range of different circumstances. According to Seligman’s hypothesis, therefore, having control is of crucial importance to psychological well-being.

Young infants have little control over anything. They can’t move their bodies toward things they want or away from things that are unpleasant. They don’t have very good control over their hands, so that grasping and manipulating objects is not easy. They get poked, prodded, picked up, and put down at unpredictable and inexplicable times. The world is just a set of things that happen to them, leaving them completely at the mercy of others. It is perhaps for just this reason that the occasional bits of evidence that they can control certain things are so salient and so exciting.

The nursing home residents given a small measure of control over their daily lives were more active and alert, and reported a greater sense of well-being than the residents without such control. Even more dramatically, the residents who had control lived several years longer, on average, than the residents who did not. Thus, from cradle to grave, having control over one’s life matters.

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.

With group after group of people—varying in age, gender, educational level, geographical location, race, and socioeconomic status—we have found a strong positive relation between maximizing and measures of depression.

Try the following: Review some recent decisions that you’ve made, both small and large (a clothing purchase, a new kitchen appliance, a vacation destination, a retirement pension allocation, a medical procedure, a job or relationship change). Itemize the steps, time, research, and anxiety that went into making those decisions. Remind yourself how it felt to do that work. Ask yourself how much your final decision benefited from that work.

Think about occasions in life when you settle, comfortably, for “good enough”; Scrutinize how you choose in those areas; Then apply that strategy more broadly.

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.

Make Your Decisions Nonreversible

We can vastly improve our subjective experience by consciously striving to be grateful more often for what is good about a choice or an experience, and to be disappointed less by what is bad about it.

Chances are good that if you give yourself that general directive, you won’t actually follow it. Instead you might consider adopting a simple routine: 1. Keep a notepad at your bedside. 2. Every morning, when you wake up, or every night, when you go to bed, use the notepad to list five things that happened the day before that you’re grateful for. These objects of gratitude occasionally will be big (a job promotion, a great first date), but most of the time, they will be small (sunlight streaming in through the bedroom window, a kind word from a friend, a piece of swordfish cooked just the way you like it, an informative article in a magazine). 3. You will probably feel a little silly and even self-conscious when you start doing this. But if you keep it up, you will find that it gets easier and easier, more and more natural.

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. It also pays to remember just how complex life is and to realize how rare it is that any single decision, in and of itself, has the life-transforming power we sometimes think.

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.

Remember that “He who dies with the most toys wins” is a bumper sticker, not wisdom. Focus on what makes you happy, and what gives meaning to your life.

I think that in modern America, we have far too many options for breakfast cereal and not enough options for president.

You may not always be conscious of this, but your effort to get the best car will interfere with your desire to be a good friend. Your effort to get the best job will intrude on your duty to be the best parent. And so, if the time you save by following some of my suggestions is redirected to the improvement of your relationships with other people in your life, you will not only make your life happier, you will improve theirs. It’s what economists call “Pareto efficient,” a change that benefits everybody.