The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

by Barry Schwartz

As the number of available choices increases, as it has in our consumer culture, the autonomy, control, and liberation this variety brings are powerful and positive. But as the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear. As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.

the fact that some choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better.

increased choice may actually contribute to the recent epidemic of clinical depression affecting much of the Western world.

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.

Third, we may suffer from what economist Fred Hirsch referred to as the “tyranny of small decisions.” We say to ourselves, “Let’s go to one more store” or “Let’s look at one more catalog,”

In the past few decades, though, that long process of simplifying and bundling economic offerings has been reversed. Increasingly, the trend moves back toward time-consuming foraging behavior, as each of us is forced to sift for ourselves through more and more options in almost every aspect of life.

According to a survey conducted by Yankelovich Partners, a majority of people want more control over the details of their lives, but a majority of people also want to simplify their lives. There you have it—the paradox of our times.

Moreover, I think the adding of options brings with it a subtle shift in the responsibility that employers feel toward their employees. When the employer is providing only a few routes to retirement security, it seems important to take responsibility for the quality of those routes. But when the employer takes the trouble to provide many routes, then it seems reasonable to think that by providing options, the employer has done his or her part. Choosing wisely among those options becomes the employee’s responsibility.

WE HAVE ANOTHER KIND OF FREEDOM OF CHOICE IN MODERN SOCIETY that is surely unprecedented. We can choose our identities.

And, as society becomes more tolerant, it permits racial identification from the inside to be more flexible. Furthermore, because most of us possess multiple identities, we can highlight different ones in different contexts.

NOVELIST AND EXISTENTIALIST PHILOSOPHER ALBERT CAMUS POSED the question, “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”

it is the cumulative effect of these added choices that I think is causing substantial distress.

And it made a difference. It turned out that, over a five-year period after this exam, patients in the second group were more likely to comply with calls for follow-up colonoscopies than patients in the first group. Because they remembered their experiences as less unpleasant, they were less inclined to avoid them in the future.

In the same way, we evaluate positive experiences on the basis of how good they feel at their best, and how good they feel at the end.

So it seems that neither our predictions about how we will feel after an experience nor our memories of how we did feel during the experience are very accurate reflections of how we actually do feel while the experience is occurring. And yet it is memories of the past and expectations for the future that govern our choices.

Vivid interviews with people have profound effects on judgment even when people are told, in advance of seeing the interviews, that the subjects of the interview are atypical.

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.

Technological innovation may enable us to feed more and more people with an acre of land, but it won’t enable us to provide more and more people with an acre of land, near where they work, to live on. Hirsch suggested that the more affluent a society becomes, and the more basic material needs are met, the more people care about goods that are inherently scarce.

Remarkably, this third group failed to learn at all. Indeed, many of them essentially had no chance to learn because they didn’t even try to escape from the shocks. These animals became quite passive, lying down and taking the shocks until the researchers mercifully ended the experiment. Seligman and his colleagues suggested that the 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 the second group, they had also transferred to the hurdle-jumping situation lessons they had learned before—in this case, learned helplessness.

But if money doesn’t do it for people, what does? 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.

There are too many life choices…without concern for the resulting overload…and the lack of constraint by custom…that is, demands to discover or create an identity rather than to accept a given identity.

The anguish and inertia caused by having too many choices was described in the book Quarterlife Crisis: The Unique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties.

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.

Another way of making this point is in terms of contrast effects. If a person comes right out of a sauna and jumps into a swimming pool, the water in the pool feels really cold, because of the contrast between the water temperature and the temperature in the sauna. Jumping into the same pool after having just come indoors on a sub-zero winter day will produce sensations of warmth. And what counterfactual thinking does is establish a contrast between a person’s

So if your perch is high, you have much further to fall than if your perch is low. “Fear of falling,” as Barbara Ehrenreich put it, is the curse of high expectations.

Given Frank’s “choosing the right pond” idea, what is the right pond? When we engage in our inevitable social comparisons, to whom do we compare ourselves? In earlier times, such comparisons were necessarily local. We looked around at our neighbors and family members. We didn’t have access to information about people outside our immediate social circle. But with the explosion of telecommunications—TV, movies, the Internet—almost everyone has access to information about almost everyone else. A person living in a blue-collar urban neighborhood forty years ago might have been content with his lower-middle-class-income because that brought him a life comparable to what he saw around him. There would have been little to incite his status-enhancing aspirations. But not anymore. Now this person gets to see how the wealthy live countless times every day. We all seem to be swimming in one giant pond nowadays, and anyone’s life could be ours. This essentially universal and unrealistically high standard of comparison decreases the satisfaction of those of us who are in the middle or below, even as the actual circumstances of our lives improve.

While the American gross domestic product, a primary measure of prosperity, more than doubled in the last thirty years, the proportion of the population describing itself as “very happy” declined. The decline is about 5 percent. This might not seem like much, but 5 percent translates into about 14 million people—people who would have said in the seventies they were very happy would not say so today. The same pattern is present when respondents are asked more specific questions—about how happy they are with their marriages, their jobs, their financial circumstances, and their places of residence.

The different reactions of the two groups caused researchers to conclude that it is not dancing toy animals that are an endless source of delight for infants, but rather having control. Infants kept smiling and cooing at the display because they seemed to know that they made it happen. “I did this. Isn’t it great. And I can do it again whenever I want.” The other infants, those who got the display for “free,” did not have this exhilarating experience of control.

And in this context it is relevant that the incidence of depression among the Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, is less than 20 percent of the national rate.

The problem also may be exacerbated by what Robert Lane refers to as hedonic lag. Lane says that there is “a tendency of every culture to persist in valuing the qualities that made it distinctively great long after they have lost their hedonic yield.” This, he says, “explains a lot of the malaise currently afflicting market democracies.” The combination of hedonic lag with the mixture of psychological benefits and ecological costs of the culture’s emphasis on autonomy and control makes it extremely difficult for a society to get things right.

The “success” of modernity turns out to be bittersweet, and everywhere we look it appears that a significant contributing factor is the overabundance of choice. Having too many choices produces psychological distress, especially when combined with regret, concern about status, adaptation, social comparison, and perhaps most important, the desire to have the best of everything—to maximize.