The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

by Barry Schwartz

So the more choices we have, the more effort goes into our decisions, and the more we expect to enjoy the benefits of those decisions. Adaptation, by dramatically truncating the duration of those benefits, puts us into a state of mind where the result just wasn’t worth the effort. The more we invest in a decision, the more we expect to realize from our investment. And adaptation makes agonizing over decisions a bad investment.

when we are making decisions, we should think about how each of the options will feel not just tomorrow, but months or even years later.

Long term visualisation

Comparisons are the only meaningful benchmark.

Comparing the experience to what they hoped it would be Comparing the experience to what they expected it to be Comparing the experience to other experiences they have had in the recent past Comparing the experience to experiences that others have had

Each of these comparisons makes the evaluation of an experience relative, and this may diminish the experience or enhance it.

“the gap between what one has and wants, the gap between what one has and thinks others like oneself have, and the gap between what one has and the best one has had in the past.” Michalos found that much of the individual variation in life satisfaction could be explained in terms not of differences in objective experience, but in terms of differences in these three perceived gaps.

As our material and social circumstances improve, our standards of comparison go up.

As long as expectations keep pace with realizations, people may live better, but they won’t feel better about how they live.

evaluations are relative to a baseline. A given experience will feel positive if it’s an improvement on what came before and negative if it’s worse than what came before. To understand how we will judge an experience, it is necessary first to find out where we set our hedonic zero point.

What contributes to high expectations, above and beyond the quality of past experience, is, I think, the amount of choice and control we now have over most aspects of our lives. When

The lesson here is that high expectations can be counterproductive. We probably can do more to affect the quality of our lives by controlling our expectations than we can by doing virtually anything else.

The way to be happy—the way to succeed in the quest for status—is to find the right pond and stay in it.

In most cases, more than half of the respondents chose the options that gave them better relative position.

Hirsch calls goods like these positional goods, because how likely anyone is to get them depends upon his position in society. No matter how many resources a person has, if everyone else has at least as much, his chances of enjoying these positional goods are slim.

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

tendency to ruminate traps unhappy people in a downward psychological spiral that is fed by social comparison.

THE MORE OPTIONS WE HAVE, THE more difficulty we have gathering the information necessary to make a good decision. The more difficult information gathering is, the more likely it is that you will rely on the decisions of others.

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.

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.

Thus, from cradle to grave, having control over one’s life matters.

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.

“Optimists” explain successes with chronic, global, and personal causes and failures with transient, specific, and universal ones.

Tied to Mindset book

There is much to be gained by arriving at causal explanations that are accurate, whatever the psychological cost, because it is accurate explanations that offer the best chance of producing better results the next time.

excessive self-blame has bad psychological consequences. And as we’ll see, it is much easier to blame yourself for disappointing results in a world that provides unlimited choice than in a world in which options are limited.

FIRST, I THINK INCREASES IN EXPERIENCED CONTROL OVER THE YEARS have been accompanied, stride for stride, by increases in expectations about control. The more we are allowed to be the masters of our fates, the more we expect ourselves to be.

The key fact about psychological life in societies in which you have little control over these aspects of life is that you also have little expectation of control.

Significant social involvement requires subordinating the self. So the more we focus on ourselves, the more our connections to others weakens.

factors that seem best correlated with national differences in youth suicide rates involve cultural attitudes toward personal freedom and control. Those nations whose citizens value personal freedom and control the most tend to have the highest suicide rates.

CHOOSERS ARE PEOPLE WHO ARE ABLE TO REFLECT ON WHAT MAKES a decision important, on whether, perhaps, none of the options should be chosen, on whether a new option should be created, and on what a particular choice says about the chooser as an individual.

Choosers have the time to modify their goals; pickers do not. Choosers have the time to avoid following the herd; pickers do not. Good decisions take time and attention, and the only way we can find the needed time and attention is by choosing our spots.

Shorten or eliminate deliberations about decisions that are unimportant to you; Use some of the time you’ve freed up to ask yourself what you really want in the areas of your life where decisions matter; And if you discover that none of the options the world presents in those areas meet your needs, start thinking about creating better options that do.

The trick is to learn to embrace and appreciate satisficing, to cultivate it in more and more aspects of life, rather than merely being resigned to it. Becoming a conscious, intentional satisficer makes comparison with how other people are doing less important.

Ignoring these “opportunity costs” can lead us to overestimate how good the best option is. On the other hand, the more we think about opportunity costs, the less satisfaction we’ll derive from whatever we choose.

WE ADAPT TO ALMOST EVERYTHING WE EXPERIENCE WITH ANY regularity. When life is hard, adaptation enables us to avoid the full brunt of the hardship. But when life is good, adaptation puts us on a “hedonic treadmill,” robbing us of the full measure of satisfaction we expect from each positive experience.

We can’t prevent adaptation. What we can do is develop realistic expectations about how experiences change with time.

So what may be the easiest route to increasing satisfaction with the results of decisions is to remove excessively high expectations about them.

WE EVALUATE THE QUALITY OF OUR EXPERIENCES BY COMPARING ourselves to others. Though social comparison can provide useful information, it often reduces our satisfaction. So by comparing ourselves to others less, we will be satisfied more.

Because it is easier for a satisficer to avoid social comparison than for a maximizer, learning that “good enough” is good enough may automatically reduce concern with how others are doing.

AS THE NUMBER OF CHOICES WE FACE INCREASES, FREEDOM OF choice eventually becomes a tyranny of choice. Routine decisions take so much time and attention that it becomes difficult to get through the day.

This kind of rule-following frees up time and attention that can be devoted to thinking about choices and decisions to which rules don’t apply.

Choice within constraints, freedom within limits, is what enables the little fish to imagine a host of marvelous possibilities.