The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

by Barry Schwartz

OUR STUDIES SHOW THAT MAXIMIZERS PAY A SIGNIFICANT PRICE IN terms of personal well-being. But does their quest for perfection lead, at least, to better decisions?

Whereas maximizers might do better objectively than satisficers, they tend to do worse subjectively.

So we have to ask ourselves what counts when we assess the quality of a decision. Is it objective results or subjective experiences? What matters to us most of the time, I think, is how we feel about the decisions we make.

Conviction that they have found a good fit makes students more confident, more open to experience, and more attentive to opportunities. So while objective experience clearly matters, subjective experience has a great deal to do with the quality of that objective experience.

maximizing is not a measure of efficiency. It is a state of mind. If your goal is to get the best, then you will not be comfortable with compromises dictated by the constraints imposed by reality. You will not experience the kind of satisfaction with your choices that satisficers will. In every area of life, you will always be open to the possibility that you might find something better if you just keep looking.

maximizing and perfectionism are not interchangeable.

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.

those who score high on perfectionism, unlike maximizers, are not depressed, regretful, or unhappy.

Perfectionists may not be as happy with the results of their actions as they should be, but they seem to be happier with the results of their actions than...

The truth is that maximizing and satisficing orientations tend to be “domain specific.” Nobody is a maximizer in every decision, and probably everybody is in some. Perhaps what distinguishes maximizers from satisficers is the range and number of decisions in which an individual operates as one or the other.

It is possible that a wide array of options can turn people into maximizers. If this is true, then the proliferation of options not only makes people who are maximizers miserable, but it may also make people who are satisficers into maximizers.

FREEDOM AND AUTONOMY ARE CRITICAL TO OUR WELL-BEING, AND choice is critical to freedom and autonomy.

CHOICE HAS A CLEAR AND POWERFUL INSTRUMENTAL VALUE; IT enables people to get what they need and want in life. Whereas many needs are universal (food, shelter, medical care, social support, education, and so on), much of what we need to flourish is highly individualized.

Choice is what enables each person to pursue precisely those objects and activities that best satisfy his or her own preferences within the limits of his or her financial resources.

Any time choice is restricted in some way, there is bound to be someone, somewhere, who is deprived of the opportunity to pursue something of personal value.

Adam Smith observed that individual freedom of choice ensures the most efficient production and distribution of society’s goods.

Freedom to choose has what might be called expressive value. Choice is what enables us to tell the world who we are and what we care about.

To express yourself, you need an adequate range of choices.

Every choice we make is a testament to our autonomy, to our sense of self-determination.

And each new expansion of choice gives us another opportunity to assert our autonomy, and thus display our character.

But choices have expressive functions only to the extent that we can make them freely.

Autonomy is what gives us the license to hold one another morally (and legally) responsible for our actions. It’s the reason we praise individuals for their achievements and also blame them for their failures.

But beyond our political, moral, and social reliance on the idea of autonomy, we now know that it also has a profound influence on our psychological well-being.

animals in this third group had learned from being exposed to inescapable shocks that nothing they did made a difference; that they were essentially helpless when it came to controlling their fate. Like

Seligman’s discovery of learned helplessness has had a monumental impact in many different areas of psychology. Hundreds of studies leave no doubt that we can learn that we don’t have control.

Learned helplessness can affect future motivation to try. It can affect future ability to detect that you do have control in new situations.

So it is not an exaggeration to say that 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.

we have choices in a particular situation, then we should be able to exert control over that situation, and thus we should be protected from helplessness. Only in situations where there is no choice should vulnerability to helplessness appear.

choice enables people to be actively and effectively engaged in the world, with profound psychological benefits.

The first is that, as the experience of choice and control gets broader and deeper, expectations about choice and control may rise to match that experience.

more choice may not always mean more control.

opportunities become so numerous that we feel overwhelmed. Instead of feeling in control, we feel unable to cope. Having the opportunity to choose is no blessing if we feel we do not have the wherewithal to choose wisely. Remember

What looks attractive in prospect doesn’t always look so good in practice.

To avoid the escalation of such burdens, we must learn to be selective in exercising our choices. We must decide, individually, when choice really matters and focus our energies there, even if it means letting many other opportunities pass us by. The choice of when to be a chooser may be the most important choice we have to make.

The benefit of this technique—known as the “experience sampling method”—is that rather than relying on people to be able to look back accurately on how they’ve been feeling over a period of months, the computer asks them to assess how they’re feeling at that very moment. Their answers to the questions over the course of the study—days, weeks, or even months—are then aggregated.

What seems to be the most important factor in providing happiness is close social relations.

Being connected to others seems to be much more important to subjective well-being than being rich.

happy people attract others to them, and being with others makes people happy.

you. To be someone’s friend is to undertake weighty responsibilities and obligations that at times may limit your own freedom.

That work strongly suggests that the more control people have, the less helpless, and thus the less depressed, they will be.

Lane writes that we are paying for increased affluence and increased freedom with a substantial decrease in the quality and quantity of social relations.

“What was once given by neighborhood and work now must be achieved; people have had to make their own friends…and actively cultivate their own family connections.” In other words, our social fabric is no longer a birthright but has become a series of deliberate and demanding choices.

Time is the ultimate scarce resource, and for some reason, even as one “time-saving” bit of technology after another comes our way, the burdens on our time seem to increase. Again, it is my contention that a major contributor to this time burden is the vastly greater number of choices we find ourselves preparing for, making, reevaluating, and perhaps regretting.

ESTABLISHING AND MAINTAINING MEANINGFUL SOCIAL RELATIONS requires a willingness to be bound or constrained by them, even when dissatisfied.

people have two general classes of responses available when they are unhappy. They can exit the situation, or they can protest and give voice to their concerns.

Most people find it extremely challenging to balance the conflicting impulses of freedom of choice on the one hand and loyalty and commitment on the other. Each person is expected to figure out this balance individually. Those who value freedom of choice and movement will tend to stay away from entangling relationships; those who value stability and loyalty will seek them. Many will cobble together some mixture of these two modes of social engagement. If we fail in establishing exactly the kinds of social relations we want, we will feel that we have only ourselves to blame. And many times we will fail.

With clearer “rules of the game” for us to live by—constraints that specify how much of life each of us should devote to ourselves and what our obligations to family, friends, and community should be—much of the onus for making these decisions would be lifted.

But the price of accepting constraints imposed by social institutions is a restriction on individual freedom. Is it a price worth paying? A society that allows us to answer this question individually has already given us an answer, for by giving people the choice, it has opted for freedom.

But if unrestricted freedom can impede the individual’s pursuit of what he or she values most, then it may be that some restrictions make everyone better off. And if “constraint” sometimes affords a kind of liberation while “freedom” affords a kind of enslavement, then people would be wise to seek out some measure of appropriate constraint.

A WAY OF EASING THE BURDEN THAT FREEDOM OF CHOICE IMPOSES IS to make decisions about when to make decisions.