The Paradox of Choice

We have so much to choose from, but is that a good thing?

Day 24 / 365

The more choices people have, the more freedom they would have. And the more freedom they have, the better their lives would be. That’s the official dogma of most modern industrial societies. In this Ted talk, Barry Schwartz argues why more choices might actually be leaving us worse off.

Why choices make people miserable

Today we are offered more choices than ever in every aspect of our lives. Just walk into a nearby supermarket and you’ll realize how true that is. There was a time when you got to choose from a handful of television channels, and you had to watch whatever was on. Now you have thousands of tv series over dozens of streaming apps right on your smartphone.

But how many times have you found yourself going through these endless options, frustratingly trying to find something to watch. You want the best entertainment option to fill 20 minutes of your free time, so you waste an hour trying to find it. Are we really better off?

Barry lists four reasons why the increased choices are making us miserable

Too much choice causes paralysis, not liberation

For every 10 mutual funds the employer offered, rate of participation went down two percent. You offer 50 funds — 10 percent fewer employees participate than if you only offer five.

When we have too many options, it makes it that much difficult to take a decision. We don’t want to rush and make the wrong decision, so we just keep putting it off.

Opportunity costs

The more options there are, the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option that you chose.

If we do overcome the paralysis and make a choice, the joy we get from the choice will definitely be lessened by the regrets of not choosing the other options.

The thought would always be in our minds that another option might have been better.

Increased expectations

Adding options to people’s lives can’t help but increase the expectations people have about how good those options will be. And what that’s going to produce is less satisfaction with results, even when they’re good results.

The secret to happiness is lowering your expectations. As pessimistic as that might sound, it does have some truth in it. When people had fewer options and therefore fewer expectations, they used to be satisfied when things lived up to their expectations and surprised when they exceeded it.

Now even though the overall quality of our options have surely improved, we have less and less satisfaction and more disappointment.

Self-blame

A significant contributor to this explosion of depression, and also suicide, is that people have experiences that are disappointing because their standards are so high, and then when they have to explain these experiences to themselves, they think they’re at fault.

When you had limited choices or no choice at all if you weren’t satisfied with the outcome you obviously blamed the outside world. With an increased number of options, you put more and more thought when making the choice. And consequently, you end up blaming yourself if you are disappointed with the outcome. Unfortunately, as we saw earlier, the chances of getting disappointed are even higher now.

All this doesn’t mean that any choice is bad. Some choice is definitely better than no choice. But more choice is not always better than some choice. It's about finding the right balance.

This story is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — What’s special about a human brain?