FREE TO CHOOSE (FROM LIMITED OPTIONS):

SELECT ALL: Can you have too many choices? (CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL, 2004-02-23, The New Yorker)

A radio producer in Washington, D.C., got a promotion a few years ago on the grounds that he was a “good decision-maker.” Self-deprecating to a fault, he reminded his bosses that many of the decisions he’d made since joining the station hadn’t exactly worked out. They didn’t care. “Being a good decision-maker means you’re good at making decisions,” one executive cheerily told him. “It doesn’t mean you make good decisions.”

This boss figured that the station had less to fear from periodic screwups than from the day-in, day-out paralysis of someone too cowed by choice to choose at all. He had a point. A few decades of research has made it clear that most people are terrible choosers—they don’t know what they want, and the prospect of deciding often causes not just jitters but something like anguish. The evidence is all around us, from restaurant-goers’ complaints that “the menu is too long” to Michael Jackson’s face. [...]

Researchers of cognitive dissonance in the nineteen-fifties found that consumers would continue to read ads for a new car after they’d bought it but would avoid information about other brands, fearing post-purchase misgivings. And in the early eighties the social thinker Albert O. Hirschman, in Shifting Involvements, sought to introduce the concept of “disappointment” into mainstream economic theory. “The world I am trying to understand,”he wrote (and the desperate italics are in the original), “is one in which men think they want one thing and then upon getting it, find out to their dismay that they don’t want it nearly as much as they thought or don’t want it at all and that something else, of which they were hardly aware, is what they really want.”

Mischoosing of this kind is what Barry Schwartz, a social scientist at Swarthmore, has in mind in his new book, The Paradox of Choice. In his view, “unlimited choice” can “produce genuine suffering.” Schwartz makes his case mostly through research in psychology and behavioral economics—research that shows how far real people are from the perfectly rational “utility maximizers” posited by classical economists. [...]

Given that we’re so bad at choosing what will make us happy, we seem to be faced with two options: mending the way we choose, or limiting our choices. Schwartz, in an effort to help us mend our ways, applies to individual shoppers Simon’s distinction between maximizing and satisficing. A maximizer is someone who “can’t be certain that she has found the best sweater unless she’s looked at all the sweaters,” Schwartz writes. “She can’t know that she is getting the best price until she’s checked out all the prices.” Instead, he says, one should become a satisficer, “content with the merely excellent as opposed to the absolute best.” It’s not obvious that you can simply decide to convert from maximizing to satisficing. But Schwartz, though he distrusts American abundance, has a deeply American faith in our ability to refashion ourselves.

What about the other approach—trying to choose less? In some measure, we all do this, using a strategy that the Columbia social theorist Jon Elster calls “self-binding.” Like Ulysses lashing himself to the mast of his ship in order to prevent himself from succumbing to the Sirens’ song, people make the choice of limiting their choices. [...]

All the abstract arguments against choice become harder to make when they are translated into concrete terms. When Schwartz notes that young Americans are unduly troubled by their choice of career, because they are “remarkably unconstrained by what their parents did before them,” he sounds kindhearted and sincerely concerned. But he also sounds a bit like an English nob defending the class system while he sits in a leather armchair in Boodle’s in about 1926. And if Schwartz’s book is really about the anguish of choice in general—and not merely about choice as a facet of shopping—there is no reason for any such argument to stop before it reaches, say, “a woman’s right to choose.”

This must be some kind of ingenious self-parody, for morality is of course nothing more than the limitation of choice, a binding, though not a self-binding in the final analysis. And abortion is precisely the kind of choice it constrains:

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
-Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics

Unlimited choice is anti-civilizational.

MORE:
The perils of living in a consumer paradise: With so many things to choose from, why aren't Americans happier than ever? (Jonathon Keats, 1/06/04, CS Monitor)

Time is only one of many hidden costs of abundance to our society, according to Swarthmore social psychologist Barry Schwartz in his intermittently brilliant sixth book, "The Paradox of Choice."

"As a culture, we are enamored of freedom, self-determination, and variety, and we are reluctant to give up any of our options," he writes with characteristic directness. "But clinging tenaciously to all the choices available to us contributes to bad decisions, to anxiety, stress, and dissatisfaction - even to clinical depression."

Were life limited to shopping for chocolate chip cookies and Cheerios, such a claim might seem exaggerated, if not absurd. But, as Schwartz ably documents, we enter an equivalent supermarket of options when deciding where we want to live, for whom we want to work, and even how we want to look. While few have complete autonomy, a combination of technological efficiency and laissez-faire morality have opened more choices to more Americans than ever before.

The report that more Americans are also more unhappy than ever before might simply be a perverse coincidence. We may even question the statistics: As the social stigma associated with depression decreases, people may be more open about their listlessness. They may even feel encouraged to consider themselves depressed as the subject receives so much attention in the media.

Yet, the case Schwartz makes for a correlation between our emotional state and what he calls the "tyranny of choice" is compelling, the implications disturbing. From unmet expectations to regret over the road not taken, the perils of living in a multiple-choice society rival in number the variety of snacks in the largest grocery store.

Driving this malaise is the problem that "everything suffers from comparison." Schwartz describes a simple experiment in which people are asked whether they'd rather be given $100 outright, or gamble on winning $200 at the toss of a coin. That the vast majority would prefer the $100 may seem strange at first: A 50 percent chance of earning $200 is mathematically equivalent to a 100 percent chance of earning $100. Half the people asked ought to opt for the coin toss. However, the alternatives are not psychologically equivalent: Getting twice the money is not twice as pleasurable. The distance between zero and 100 is subjectively greater than the distance between 100 and 200.

Economists capture this phenomenon in the law of diminishing marginal utility (and provide us the formulae to calculate that, psychologically, we'd need winnings of $240 to be equally tempted by the coin toss). How, though, does this asymmetry relate to real-life choices? If losses subjectively weigh more heavily than gains, the advantages of any chocolate chip cookie or career path we select will count for less than those of the options we pass up.

"Ultimately, the quality of choices that matters to people is the subjective experience that the choices afford," Schwartz points out. "And if, beyond a certain point, adding options diminishes our subjective experience, we are worse off for it."

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 2, 2004 9:31 AM