The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

by Barry Schwartz

Many years ago, the distinguished political philosopher Isaiah Berlin made an important distinction between “negative liberty” and “positive liberty.” 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. Nobel Prize–winning economist and philosopher Amartya Sen has also examined the nature and importance of freedom and autonomy and the conditions that promote it. In his book Development as Freedom 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.

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.

Perhaps that’s the reason consumers tend to return to the products they usually buy, not even noticing 75% of the items competing for their attention and their dollars. Who but a professor doing research would even stop to consider that there are almost 300 different cookie options to choose among?

A century ago, a college curriculum entailed a largely fixed course of study, with a principal goal of educating people in their ethical and civic traditions. Education was not just about learning a discipline—it was a way of raising citizens with common values and aspirations. Often the capstone of a college education was a course taught by the college president, a course that integrated the various fields of knowledge to which the students had been exposed. 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.

Whites only. Men only.

You could be fairly certain, if you ran into a fellow student you didn’t know, that the two of you would have at least a year’s worth of courses in common to discuss.

And a lot of adjectives. This is a good point otherwise.

Until very recently, important ideas reflecting the values, insights, and challenges of people from different traditions and cultures had been systematically excluded from the curriculum. The tastes and interests of the idiosyncratic students had been stifled and frustrated. In the modern university, each individual student is free to pursue almost any interest, without having to be harnessed to what his intellectual ancestors thought was worth knowing. But this freedom may come at a price. Now students are required to make choices about education that may affect them for the rest of their lives.

So the TV experience is now the very essence of choice without boundaries. In a decade or so, when these boxes are in everybody’s home, it’s a good bet that when folks gather around the watercooler to discuss last night’s big TV events, no two of them will have watched the same shows. Like the college freshmen struggling in vain to find a shared intellectual experience, American TV viewers will be struggling to find a shared TV experience.

AMERICANS SPEND MORE TIME SHOPPING THAN THE MEMBERS OF any other society. Americans go to shopping centers about once a week, more often than they go to houses of worship, and Americans now have more shopping centers than high schools.

But more than anything else, we get information from advertising. The average American sees three thousand ads a day. As advertising professor James Twitchell puts it, “Ads are what we know about the world around us.”

This.

The benefits of multi-individual information assessment is nicely illustrated by a demonstration that financial analyst Paul Johnson has done over the years. He asks students to predict who will win the Academy Award in several different categories. He tabulates the predictions and comes up with group predictions—the nominees chosen by the most people for each category. What he finds, again and again, is that the group predictions are better than the predictions of any individual. In 1998, for example, the group picked eleven out of twelve winners, while the average individual in the group picked only five out of twelve, and even the best individual picked only nine.

What seems to be the most important factor in providing happiness is close social relations. People who are married, who have good friends, and who are close to their families are happier than those who are not. People who participate in religious communities are happier than those who do not. Being connected to others seems to be much more important to subjective well-being than being rich. But a word of caution is in order. We know with certainty that there is a relation between being able to connect socially and being happy.

FOR MOST OF HUMAN HISTORY, PEOPLE WERE NOT REALLY FACED with an array of choices and opportunity costs. Instead of “Should I take A or B or C or…?” the question people asked themselves was more like “Should I take it or leave it?” 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. We can assume that having a good sense of this—of what’s good and what’s bad—was essential for survival. But distinguishing between good and bad is a far simpler matter than distinguishing good from better from best. After millions of years of survival based on simple distinctions, it may simply be that we are biologically unprepared for the number of choices we face in the modern world.

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. Our challenge is to remember that the high-quality sound system, the luxury car, and the ten-thousand-square-foot house won’t keep providing the pleasure they give when we first experience them. Learning to be satisfied as pleasures turn into mere comforts will ease disappointment with adaptation when it occurs.

Not only do we adapt to a given experience so that it feels less good over time, but we can also adapt to a given level of feeling good so that it stops feeling good enough. Here the habit of gratitude can be helpful too. Imagining all the ways in which we could be feeling worse might prevent us from taking for granted (adapting to) how good we actually feel.

My thinking about this topic was clarified and advanced a great deal by an empirical research project (supported in part by funds from the Positive Psychology Network and Swarthmore College) I conducted in collaboration with colleagues Andrew Ward, John Monterosso, Darrin Lehman, Sonja Lyubomirsky, and Katherine White. I am deeply grateful to these colleagues (especially Ward, whose office is next door to mine and who thus must put up with almost daily discussions) for the role they played in the research and for the many illuminating conversations we had in the course of completing the project. Their insights are reflected throughout the book. I have also learned much from collaborators on related empirical projects that are still under way: Dov Cohen, Jane Gillham, Jamin Halberstadt, Tim Kasser, Mary Frances Luce, and Ken Sheldon.

In the course of presenting some of my ideas at meetings and conferences, I have also learned much from conversions with many, especially Jon Haidt, Dacher Keltner, Jonathan Schooler, and Susan Sugarman.

BARRY SCHWARTZ is the Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College. He is the author of several books, including The Battle for Human Nature: Science, Morality and Modern Life and The Costs of Living: How Market Freedom Erodes the Best Things in Life. His articles have appeared in many national publications, among them the New York Times, USA Today, Scientific American, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He lives in Philadelphia, PA.