The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

by Barry Schwartz

One kind of second-order decision is the decision to follow a rule.

Having the discipline to live by the rules you make for yourself is, of course, another matter, but one thing’s for sure: following rules eliminates troublesome choices in your daily life, each time you get into a car or each time you go to a cocktail party.

Presumptions are less stringent than rules. Presumptions are like the default settings on computer applications.

Standards are even less rigorous than rules or presumptions. When we establish a standard, we are essentially dividing the world of options into two categories: options that meet the standard and options that don’t.

As we saw in the last chapter, it’s a lot easier to decide whether something is good enough (to satisfice) than it is to decide whether something is the best (to maximize). This is especially true if we combine standards with routines, or habits.

So by using rules, presumptions, standards, and routines to constrain ourselves and limit the decisions we face, we can make life more manageable, which gives us more time to devote ourselves to other people and to the decisions that we can’t or don’t want to avoid.

biology supplies the needed constraints on choice. It helps organisms recognize food, mates, predators, and other dangers, and it supplies them with a small set of activities appropriate for obtaining what they truly need.

GIVEN THE HIGH VALUE WE PLACE ON AUTONOMY AND FREEDOM OF choice, you would think that having it would make us happier. Usually, the things we want are the things we like, the things that give us pleasure.

But powerful evidence has recently appeared that “wanting” and “liking” are served by fundamentally different brain systems—systems that often do, but certainly need not, work together.

So wanting and liking can, under some circumstances, be dissociated, just as there is often a disconnect between our anticipated preferences and the options we actually choose.

Apparently we always think we want choice, but when we actually get it, we may not like it.

PART OF THE DOWNSIDE of abundant choice is that each new option adds to the list of trade-offs, and trade-offs have psychological consequences. The necessity of making trade-offs alters how we feel about the decisions we face; more important, it affects the level of satisfaction we experience from the decisions we ultimately make.

ECONOMISTS POINT OUT THAT THE QUALITY OF ANY GIVEN OPTION cannot be assessed in isolation from its alternatives. One of the “costs” of any option involves passing up the opportunities that a different option would have afforded.

Every choice we make has opportunity costs associated with it.

Failing to think about opportunity costs can lead people astray.

The point is, even decisions that appear to be no-brainers carry the hidden costs of the options declined. Thinking about opportunity costs may not change the decision you make, but it will give you a more realistic assessment of the full implications of that decision.

the only opportunity costs that should figure into a decision are the ones associated with the next-best alternative.

According to economists, that’s where your “cost accounting” should stop. Which is also excellent advice for managing our own psychological response to choice. Pay attention to what you’re giving up in the next-best alternative, but don’t waste energy feeling bad about having passed up an option further down the list that you wouldn’t have gotten to anyway.

This advice, however, is extremely difficult to follow, and here’s why: The options under consideration usually have multiple features. If people think about options in terms of their features rather than as a whole, different options may rank as second best (or even best) with respect to each individual feature.

Even though there may be a single, second-best option overall, each of the options you reject has some very desirable feature on which it beats its competition.

Ultimately, the quality of choices that matters to people is the subjective experience that the choices afford. And if, beyond a certain point, adding options diminishes our subjective experience, we are worse off for it.

being forced to confront trade-offs in making decisions makes people unhappy and indecisive.

low. Confronting any trade-off, it seems, is incredibly unsettling. And as the available alternatives increase, the extent to which choices will require trade-offs will increase as well.

Faced with one attractive option, two-thirds of people are willing to go for it. But faced with two attractive options, only slightly more than half are willing to buy. Adding the second option creates a conflict, forcing a trade-off between price and quality. Without a compelling reason to go one way or the other, potential consumers pass up the sale altogether. By creating the conflict, this second option makes it harder, not easier to make a choice.

Consumers need or want reasons to justify choices, as we see in a third hypothetical situation.

Difficult trade-offs make it difficult to justify decisions, so decisions are deferred; easy trade-offs make it easy to justify decisions. And single options lie somewhere in the middle.

Conflict induces people to avoid decisions even when the stakes are trivial.

People find decision making that involves trade-offs so unpleasant that they will clutch at almost anything to help them decide.

Respondents cling to the form of the question (“award” or “deny”) as a guide to the kinds of reasons they will be looking for.

If you’re looking only at the negatives, then you don’t have to worry about trade-offs with the positives.

whenever we are forced to make decisions involving trade-offs, we will feel less good about the option we choose than we would have if the alternatives hadn’t been there.

When magazines are evaluated as part of a group, each of them will both gain and lose from the comparisons. And because the losses will loom larger than the gains, the net result of the comparison will be negative. Bottom line—the options we consider usually suffer from comparison with other options.

JUST ABOUT EVERYONE SEEMS TO APPRECIATE THAT THINKING about trade-offs makes for better decisions.

We just don’t want to have to evaluate trade-offs ourselves. And we don’t want to do it because it is emotionally unpleasant to go through the process of thinking about opportunity costs and the losses they imply.

The emotional cost of potential trade-offs does more than just diminish our sense of satisfaction with a decision. It also interferes with the quality of decisions themselves. There is a great deal of evidence that negative emotional states of mind narrow our focus.

Negative emotion also distracts us, inducing us to focus on the emotion rather than on the decision itself. As the stakes of decisions involving trade-offs rise, emotions become more powerful, and our decision making can be severely impaired.

Researchers have known for years about the harmful effects of negative emotion on thinking and decision making.

when we are in a good mood, we think better. We consider more possibilities; we’re open to considerations that would otherwise not occur to us; we see subtle connections between pi...

In general, positive emotion enables us to broaden our understanding of what confronts us.

Complex decisions, involving multiple options with multiple features (like “Which job should I take?”) demand our best thinking. Yet those very decisions seem to induce in us emotional reactions that will impair our ability to do just the kind of thinking that is necessary.

WE’VE SEEN THAT AS THE NUMBER OF OPTIONS UNDER CONSIDERATION goes up and the attractive features associated with the rejected alternatives accumulate, the satisfaction derived from the chosen alternative will go down.

Because we don’t put rejected options out of our minds, we experience the disappointment of having our satisfaction with decisions diluted by all the options we considered but did not choose.

So thinking about opportunity costs is probably an essential part of wise decision making. The trick is to limit the set of possibilities so that the opportunity costs don’t add up to make all the alternatives unattractive.

But the potential attractiveness of each will subtract from the attractiveness of all of the others. The net result, after the subtractions, is that none of the topics will be attractive enough to overcome inertia

satiation by simulation.

Even decisions as trivial as renting a video become important if we believe that these decisions are revealing something significant about ourselves.

AS THE STAKES OF DECISIONS RISE, WE FEEL AN INCREASED NEED TO justify them. We feel compelled to articulate—at least to ourselves—why we made a particular choice. This need to search for reasons seems useful; it ought to improve the quality of our choices. But it doesn’t necessarily.

thinking about reasons can alter the decisions.

This implies that people are not always thinking first and deciding second.

What these studies show is that when people are asked to give reasons for their preferences, they may struggle to find the words. Sometimes aspects of their reaction that are not the most important determinants of their overall feeling are nonetheless easiest to verbalize.