The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

by Barry Schwartz

But once the words are spoken, they take on added significance to the person who spoke them. At the moment of choice, these explicit, verbalized reasons weigh heavily in the decision. As time passes, the reasons that people verbalized fade into the background, and people are left with their unarticulated preferences, which wouldn’t have steered them to the poster they chose. As the salience of the verbalized reasons fades, so, too, does people’s satisfaction with the decision they made.

what is most easily put into words is not necessarily what is most important. But once aspects of a relationship are put into words, their importance to the verbalizer takes on added significance.

there are pitfalls to deciding after analyzing. My concern, given the research on trade-offs and opportunity costs, is that as the number of options goes up, the need to provide justifications for decisions also increases. And though this struggle to find reasons will lead to decisions that seem right at the moment, it will not necessarily lead to decisions that feel right later on.

With fewer options and more constraints, many trade-offs would be eliminated, and there would be less self-doubt, less of an effort to justify decisions, more satisfaction, and less second-guessing of the decisions once made.

“What happens when you have too many options is that you are responsible for what happens to you.”

In a world of scarcity, opportunities don’t present themselves in bunches, and the decisions people face are between approach and avoidance, acceptance or rejection.

But distinguishing between good and bad is a far simpler matter than distinguishing good from better from best.

Learning to choose is hard. Learning to choose well is harder. And learning to choose well in a world of unlimited possibilities is harder still, perhaps too hard.

encourage people to approach their decisions as reversible and their mistakes as fixable. The door stays open. The account stays active. Facing decisions—large or small—with this attitude should mitigate many of the stresses and negative emotions we’ve been examining.

those who had the option to change their minds were less satisfied with their choices than participants who did not have that option.

So keeping options open seems to extract a psychological price. When we can change our minds, apparently we do less psychological work to justify the decision we’ve made, reinforcing the chosen alternative and disparaging the rejected ones.

“Good enough” can survive thinking about opportunity costs.

“good enough” standard likely will entail much less searching and inspection of alternatives than the maximizer’s “best” standard. With fewer alternatives under consideration, there will be fewer opportunity costs to be subtracted.

the pain of making trade-offs will be especially acute for maximizers. Indeed, I believe that one of the reasons that maximizers are less happy, less satisfied with their lives, and more depressed than satisficers is precisely because the taint of trade-offs and opportunity costs washes out much that should be satisfying about the decisions they make.

postdecision regret,

anticipated regret,

Anticipated regret is in many ways worse, because it will produce not just dissatisfaction but paralysis.

Both types of regret—anticipated and postdecision—will raise the emotional stakes of decisions. Anticipated regret will make decisions harder to make, and postdecision regret will make them harder to enjoy.

Individuals are not all equally susceptible to regret.

We also found that people with high regret scores tend to be maximizers. Indeed, we think that concern about regret is a major reason that individuals are maximizers.

And once again, the more options you have, the more likely it is that you will experience regret, either in anticipation of decisions or after them.

we regret actions that don’t turn out well more than we regret failures to take actions that would have turned out well. This is sometimes referred to as an omission bias, a bias to downplay omissions (failures to act) when we evaluate the consequences of our decisions.

The omission bias undergoes a reversal with respect to decisions made in the more distant past.

We tend to regret any incorrect decision of action in the short terms but in the long term we regret more when we fail to act. For ex: Regret more if we bought a stock that tanked in price this past week, regret more if we decided against buying a stock that grew astronomically over time. Failures to act impact long term regret!

we don’t close the psychological door on the decisions we’ve made, and as time passes, what we’ve failed to do looms larger and larger.

When you miss your objective by a lot, it is hard to imagine that small differences would have led to a successful result. But when you miss by a little, ouch.

bad results make people regretful only if they bear responsibility.

powerful. If we are responsible for an action that turns out badly and if it almost turned out well, then we are prime candidates for regret.

the more that our experiences result from our own choices, the more regret we will feel if things don’t turn out as we had hoped. So although adding options may make it easier for us to choose something we really like, it will also make it easier for us to regret choices that don’t live up to our hopes or expectations.

WHAT MAKES THE PROBLEM OF REGRET MUCH WORSE IS THAT such thinking is not restricted to objective reality.

This ability to conjure up ideal scenarios provides a never-ending supply of raw material for experiencing regret.

Thinking about the world as it isn’t, but might be or might have been, is called counterfactual thinking.

downside of counterfactual thinking is that it fuels regret, both postdecision regret and anticipated regret.

counterfactual thinking is usually triggered by the occurrence of something unpleasant, something that itself produces a negative emotion.

The fact that counterfactual thinking seems to hone in on the controllable aspects of a situation only increases the chances that a person will experience regret when engaging in counterfactual thinking.

generating downward counterfactuals might engender not only a sense of satisfaction, but a sense of gratitude that things didn’t turn out worse. What studies have shown, however, is that people rarely produce downward counterfactuals unless asked specifically to do so.

While upward counterfactual thinking may inspire us to do better the next time, downward counterfactual thinking may induce us to be grateful for how well we did this time. The right balance of upward and downward counterfactual thinking may enable us to avoid spiraling into a state of misery while at the same time inspiring us to improve our performance.

But an event also can be negative in relative terms—relative either to aspirations or expectations.

And what counterfactual thinking does is establish a contrast between a person’s actual experience and an imagined alternative.

Taking the sure thing is a way to guarantee that you won’t regret your decision—you won’t regret it because you’ll never know how the alternative would have turned out.

Again, in both of these cases, what “should” matter are the prospects for future performance—of the business or of the player. But what also seems to matter is the level of previous investment.

What leads me to believe that sunk-cost effects are motivated by the desire to avoid regret rather than just the desire to avoid a loss is that sunk-cost effects are much bigger when a person bears responsibility for the initial decision

This is thinking in terms of the past, not the future.

Perfection is the only weapon against regret, and endless, exhaustive, paralyzing consideration of the alternatives is the only way to achieve perfection.

anticipating that we may regret a decision may induce us to take the decision seriously and to imagine the various scenarios that may follow it. This anticipation may help us to see consequences of a decision that would not have been evident otherwise.

Third, regret may mobilize or motivate us to take the actions necessary to undo a decision or ameliorate some of its unfortunate consequences.

This ubiquitous feature of human psychology is a process known as adaptation. Simply put, we get used to things, and then we start to take them for granted.

Because of adaptation, enthusiasm about positive experiences doesn’t sustain itself. And what’s worse, people seem generally unable to anticipate that this process of adaptation will take place. The waning of pleasure or enjoyment over time always seems to come as an unpleasant surprise.

it. In general, human beings are remarkably bad at predicting how various experiences will make them feel.

Even with adaptation in mind, the predictors substantially overestimated how good a positive decision would make them feel and how bad a negative decision would make them feel in the long run.

Almost every decision we make involves a prediction about future emotional responses.