The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

by Barry Schwartz

When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable. As the number of available choices increases, as it has in our consumer culture, the autonomy, control, and liberation this variety brings are powerful and positive. But as the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear. As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.

there is a cost to having an overload of choice.

Negative liberty is “freedom from”—freedom from constraint, freedom from being told what to do by others. Positive liberty is “freedom to”—the availability of opportunities to be the author of your life and to make it meaningful and significant. Often, these two kinds of liberty will go together. If the constraints people want “freedom from” are rigid enough, they won’t be able to attain “freedom to.” But these two types of liberty need not always go together.

he distinguishes the importance of choice, in and of itself, from the functional role it plays in our lives. He suggests that instead of being fetishistic about freedom of choice, we should ask ourselves whether it nourishes us or deprives us, whether it makes us mobile or hems us in, whether it enhances self-respect or diminishes it, and whether it enables us to participate in our communities or prevents us from doing so. Freedom is essential to self-respect, public participation, mobility, and nourishment, but not all choice enhances freedom. In particular, increased choice among goods and services may contribute little or nothing to the kind of freedom that counts. Indeed, it may impair freedom by taking time and energy we’d be better off devoting to other matters.

The United States was founded on a commitment to individual freedom and autonomy, with freedom of choice as a core value. And yet it is my contention that we do ourselves no favor when we equate liberty too directly with choice, as if we necessarily increase freedom by increasing the number of options available.

I believe that we make the most of our freedoms by learning to make good choices about the things that matter, while at the same time unburdening ourselves from too much concern about the

Part I discusses how the range of choices people face every day has increased in recent years. Part II discusses how we choose and shows how difficult and demanding it is to make wise choices. Choosing well is especially difficult for those determined to make only the best choices, individuals I refer to as “maximizers.” Part III is about how and why choice can make us suffer. It asks whether increased opportunities for choice actually make people happier, and concludes that often they do not. It also identifies several psychological processes that explain why added option...

Part IV, I offer a series of recommendations for taking advantage of what is positive, and avoiding what is negative, in our modern freedom of choice.

We would be better off if we embraced certain voluntary constraints on our freedom of choice, instead of rebelling against them.

We would be better off seeking what was “good enough” instead of seeking the best

We would be better off if we lowered our expectations about the results of decisions.

We would be better off if the decisions we made were nonreversible.

We would be better off if we paid less attention to what others a...

These conclusions fly in the face of the conventional wisdom that the more choices people have, the better off they are, that the best way to get good results is to have very high standards, and that it’s always better to have a way to back out of a decision than not. What I hope to show is that the conventional wis...

A typical supermarket carries more than 30,000 items. That’s a lot to choose from. And more than 20,000 new products hit the shelves every year, almost all of them doomed to failure.

Education was not just about learning a discipline—it was a way of raising citizens with common values and aspirations.

But more important, this course was intended to teach students how to use their college education to live a good and an ethical life, both as individuals and as members of society.

There is no attempt to teach people how they should live, for who is to say what a good life is?

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.

“tyranny of small decisions.”

people won’t ignore alternatives if they don’t realize that too many alternatives can create a problem. And our culture sanctifies freedom of choice so profoundly that the benefits of infinite options seem self-evident.

FILTERING OUT EXTRANEOUS INFORMATION IS ONE OF THE BASIC functions of consciousness.

Much of human progress has involved reducing the time and energy, as well as the number of processes we have to engage in and think about, for each of us to obtain the necessities of life.

In the past few decades, though, that long process of simplifying and bundling economic offerings has been reversed. Increasingly, the trend moves back toward time-consuming foraging behavior, as each of us is forced to sift for ourselves through more and more options in almost every aspect of life.

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.

What this means is that whether employees are making wise decisions depends entirely on the options that are being provided for them by their employers.

perturbations

perfunctory

What patients really seem to want from their doctors, Gawande believes, is competence and kindness. Kindness of course includes respect for autonomy, but it does not treat autonomy as an inviolable end in itself.

Being able to move around, changing employers and even careers, opens doors to challenging and fulfilling options. But it comes at a price, and the price is the daily burden of gathering information and making decisions. People can never relax and enjoy what they have already achieved.

SECULAR

Identity is much less a thing people “inherit” than it used to be.

But as with marriage, choice of identity has been moving from a state in which the default option was extremely powerful and the fact of choice had little psychological reality to a state in which choice is very real and salient.

Existence, at least human existence, is defined by the choices people make.

The burden of having every activity be a matter of deliberate and conscious choice would be too much for any of us to bear. The transformation of choice in modern life is that choice in many facets of life has gone from implicit and often psychologically unreal to explicit and psychologically very real.

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.

THE PROCESS OF GOAL-SETTING AND DECISION MAKING BEGINS WITH the question: “What do I want?”

But knowing what we want means, in essence, being able to anticipate accurately how one choice or another will make us feel, and that is no simple task.

The way that the meal or the music or the movie makes you feel in the moment—either good or bad—could be called experienced utility.

So choices are based upon expected utility. And once you have had experience with particular restaurants, CDs, or movies, future choices will be based upon what you remember about these past experiences, in other words, on their remembered utility. To say that we know what we want, therefore, means that these three utilities align, with expected utility being matched by experienced utility, and experienced utility faithfully reflected in remembered utility.

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.

Because whereas both noises were unpleasant and had the same aversive peak, the second had a less unpleasant end, and so was remembered as less annoying than the first.

In the same way, we evaluate positive experiences on the basis of how good they feel at their best, and how good they feel at the end.

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.

“familiarity breeds liking.”

do we really know how to analyze, sift, weigh, and evaluate it to arrive at the right conclusions and make the right choices?

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.

people’s tendency to give undue weight to some types of information in contrast to others. They called it the availability heuristic.

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.