The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

The summary

Barry Schwartz walked into the Gap for a pair of jeans and got a question back: slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit, baggy, or extra baggy? Stonewashed, acid-washed, or distressed? Button-fly or zipper? He carried one of each into the dressing room and finally picked easy fit, because “relaxed” sounded like an admission he was going soft in the middle. The jeans fit better than any he had owned. Buying them had also eaten most of a day and come with a side of dread. That gap — better result, worse experience — is the argument. Some choice is essential. More choice is not automatically better. Past a certain point, added options stop liberating you and start grinding you down.

The evidence that more options leave people worse off

Schwartz counted what one supermarket asked him to sort through: 285 varieties of cookies, 175 salad dressings, 275 cereals, 360 kinds of shampoo, conditioner, gel and mousse. A typical store carries more than 30,000 items. The economist’s reply is that if you don’t care, you can ignore the extras. The evidence says otherwise. At a gourmet food store, researchers set out a tasting table of exotic jams. When six were on display, 30 percent of the people who stopped bought a jar. When twenty-four were on display, 3 percent did. Students offered thirty essay topics for extra credit wrote fewer essays than students offered six — and worse ones.

Maximizers pay for their standards

The people who suffer most are the ones chasing the best. Schwartz calls them maximizers, and their problem is structural: to know a sweater is the best sweater you would have to see every sweater, so the search never really closes. A satisficer has standards too, often high ones, but stops when something meets them. Schwartz and his colleagues built a thirteen-item scale to tell them apart — Do you keep an eye out for a better job no matter how satisfied you are? — and gave it to several thousand people. Maximizers took longer to decide, compared more, regretted more, savored good events less, and took longer to recover from bad ones. They scored lower on happiness, optimism and satisfaction with life, and the most extreme scorers landed in the borderline clinical depression range. He calls this a correlation, not a cause. And nobody maximizes everywhere: he picked his phone plan the way he picked a toaster, then falls apart at a buffet.

Every option you turn down charges you rent

The alternatives you reject don’t vanish. Each carries an opportunity cost, and its attractive features get subtracted from whatever you chose. Trade-offs sharpen it. Offered a $99 Sony CD player on sale, 66 percent of people said they would buy it; add an equally attractive $169 Aiwa and only 27 percent took the Sony while 46 percent decided to keep looking. Conflict makes every option look worse, and enough of it makes people stop choosing.

Then the thing you chose stops feeling good

Regret needs responsibility. Ask who feels worse — the man who held a stock that underperformed, or the man who switched into it — and 92 percent name the switcher, because he acted. The more an outcome is yours, the more regret is on the table. Adaptation takes what regret leaves. People who had won between $50,000 and $1 million in state lotteries rated themselves no happier than people in general, and rated everyday pleasures lower than everyone else did. Pleasure decays into comfort, and comfort isn’t pleasure. Expectations ratchet up to match the options: in a small Oregon store with a dozen wines, Schwartz bought a mediocre bottle and was satisfied, because he hadn’t expected better. In a store with a thousand, it would have been a letdown.

Whose fault is it

Here the book stops being about shopping. American GDP more than doubled over thirty years while the share of people calling themselves very happy fell about 5 percent — roughly 14 million people. By some estimates depression was ten times as common in 2000 as in 1900. That should be impossible: Martin Seligman showed that helplessness breeds depression, and Americans have never had more control. Schwartz’s answer is that expectations of control ran ahead of control itself, and a culture this individualistic hands you the bill when perfection fails to arrive. With unlimited options, a disappointing result has nobody else to belong to. Depression among the Amish of Lancaster County — dense social ties, meager choices — runs under a fifth of the national rate.

The cure is giving choice away on purpose

Decide in advance which decisions deserve your attention, then fence off the rest with rules, defaults and standards — the second-order decisions Cass Sunstein and Edna Ullmann-Margalit describe. Satisfice on purpose rather than as a defeat. Make the big decisions nonreversible: in one study, people who could swap the photograph they’d chosen liked it less than people who couldn’t, and almost none of them swapped. Keep a notepad by the bed and list five things from yesterday you’re grateful for; gratitude is the one lever here you can pull directly. And learn to love constraints — Schwartz closes on a cartoon of a fish telling its offspring, “You can be anything you want to be — no limits.” Outside the bowl there really are no limits, and the fish would spend all its time staying alive.

The bottom line

Having enough choice and having more choice are different things; only the first is worth chasing. The way to feel better about your life isn’t to get better at picking; it’s to pick carefully in the few places that matter, accept good enough everywhere else, and stop auditing what you passed up. Read it if decisions wear you out, or if you’ve noticed you can never quite enjoy the thing you finally chose.