Can you have too many choices?

[Harry Veeder <eo200@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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April 1, 2004 | home


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by CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
Can you have too many choices?
Issue of 2004-03-01
Posted 2004-02-23


A radio producer in Washington, D.C., got a promotion a few years ago on the
grounds that he was a ³good decision-maker.² Self-deprecating to a fault, he
reminded his bosses that many of the decisions he¹d made since joining the
station hadn¹t exactly worked out. They didn¹t care. ³Being a good
decision-maker means you¹re good at making decisions,² one executive
cheerily told him. ³It doesn¹t mean you make good decisions.²

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 don¹t 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-goers¹ complaints
that ³the menu is too long² to Michael Jackson¹s face.

The phenomenon isn¹t new. ³The ordinary man believes he is free when he is
permitted to act arbitrarily, but in this very arbitrariness lies the fact
that he is unfree,² Hegel wrote. ³Negative infinity² was his term for how
the man without a well-anchored sense of self would perceive the
marketplace. There can even be common ground between those who recoil from
choice and those who have no choice at all, or so Louis MacNeice implied in
a poem from the nineteen-forties about drunks:

Those Haves who cannot bear making a choice,
Those Have-nots who are bored with having nothing to choose,
Call for their drinks in the same tone of voice,
Find a factitious popular front in booze.


Researchers of cognitive dissonance in the nineteen-fifties found that
consumers would continue to read ads for a new car after they¹d 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 ³Shifting Involvements,² sought to introduce the concept of
³disappointment² into mainstream economic theory. ³The world I am trying to
understand,²he wrote (and the desperate italics are in the original), ³is
one in which men think they want one thing and then upon getting it, find
out to their dismay that they don¹t want it nearly as much as they thought
or don¹t want it at all and that something else, of which they were hardly
aware, is what they really want.²

Mischoosing of this kind is what Barry Schwartz, a social scientist at
Swarthmore, has in mind in his new book, ³The Paradox of Choice² (Ecco;
$23.95). In his view, ³unlimited choice² can ³produce genuine suffering.²
Schwartz makes his case mostly through research in psychology and behavioral
economics?research that shows how far real people are from the perfectly
rational ³utility maximizers² posited by classical economists.

In the real world, neither people nor firms maximize utility. Life is
complicated, the options of the marketplace are numerous, and the human
intellect is frail. As Herbert Simon, the 1978 Nobel laureate in economics,
observed, any firm that tried to make decisions that would ³maximize² its
returns would bankrupt itself in a never-ending search for the best option.
What firms do instead is ³satisfice,² to use Simon¹s term: they content
themselves with results that are ³good enough.² Schwartz, who is a close
reader of Simon, worries that the profusion of choices we face?a hundred
varieties of bug spray, breakfast cereal, extra-virgin olive oil?is turning
us into maximizers, and maximizers, he thinks, are prone to misery and
depression.

Schwartz looks at the particular patterns of our irrationality, relying on
the sort of research pioneered by two Israeli-American psychologists, Daniel
Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky. It turns out, for instance, that people
will often consciously choose against their own happiness. Tversky and a
colleague once asked subjects whether they¹d prefer to be making thirty-five
thousand dollars a year while those around them were making thirty-eight
thousand or thirty-three thousand while those around them were making thirty
thousand. They answered, in effect, that it depends on what the meaning of
the word ³prefer² is. Sixty-two per cent said they¹d be happier in the
latter case, but eighty-four per cent said they¹d choose the former.

Research in the wake of Kahneman and Tversky has unearthed a number of
conundrums around choice. For one thing, choice can be ³de-motivating.² In a
study conducted several years ago, shoppers who were offered free samples of
six different jams were more likely to buy one than shoppers who were
offered free samples of twenty-four. This result seems irrational?surely
you¹re more apt to find something you like from a range four times as
large?but it can be replicated in a variety of contexts. Students who are
offered six topics they can write about for extra credit, for instance, are
more likely to write a paper than students who are offered thirty.

Why should this be? Schwartz suggests that it has to do with the irrational
way people measure ³opportunity costs.² Instead of calculating opportunity
cost as the value of the single most attractive foregone alternative, we
seem to assemble an idealistic composite of all the options foregone. A
wider range of slightly inferior options, then, can make it harder to settle
on one you¹re happy with. Similarly, when people direct their wants toward
³classes² of goals, they tend to figure they¹ll get a better-than-average
example of the class. When a person says, ³I feel like a plate of
spaghetti,² he envisions a particularly good plate of spaghetti. And, as the
psychologists Daniel Gilbert, of Harvard, and Timothy Wilson, of the
University of Virginia, have observed, ³If it is difficult to know whether
we will be happy fifteen minutes after eating a bite of spaghetti, it is all
the more difficult to know whether we will be happy fifteen months after a
divorce or fifteen years after a marriage.²

There are even cases, as Schwartz notes, where just one additional choice
can produce outright paralysis. Tversky and the young Princeton psychologist
Eldar Shafir asked experimental subjects how they would react to a desirable
Sony appliance placed in a shopwindow, radically marked down. The offer met
with predictable enthusiasm. When a second appliance, similarly marked down,
was placed alongside the bargain Sony, enthusiasm?and sales?dropped. Some
hypothetical customers were evidently frozen by indecision.

You might wonder how much these sorts of findings should really concern us.
Even if there were some raging epidemic of buyer¹s remorse, strangers to the
mall hardly need worry. But who is a stranger to the mall nowadays? Ours is
a consumer culture that promises to liberate us to the extent that we can
buy what we please; any evidence that we are poor choosers is a blow to its
foundations.

Nor is the ³paradox of choice² limited to the shopping aisle. It helps
explain why so many people at age thirty are still flailing about, trying to
choose a career?and why so many marriageable singles wind up alone. You
await a spouse who combines the kindness of your mom, the wit of the
smartest person you met in grad school, and the looks of someone you dated
in 1983 (as she was in 1983) . . . and you wind up spending middle age by
yourself, watching the Sports Channel at 2 a.m. in a studio apartment strewn
with pizza boxes.


A central problem of choice is what Wilson and Gilbert call ³miswanting.²
Wanting, in their definition, is ³a prediction of liking.² Predictions are
often biased, and predictions of one¹s feelings are more biased than most.
Current preferences ³contaminate² future plans?so that, on weekly trips to
the supermarket, customers who have just eaten tend to buy too little food,
and hungry ones too much. You might try to draw on experience to help you
choose, but your memories aren¹t to be trusted. As Kahneman has shown, our
minds focus on the peak and the final moments of a past experience while
crowding out memories of its duration.

Given that we¹re 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 Simon¹s distinction between maximizing and satisficing. A maximizer
is someone who ³can¹t be certain that she has found the best sweater unless
she¹s looked at all the sweaters,² Schwartz writes. ³She can¹t know that she
is getting the best price until she¹s checked out all the prices.² Instead,
he says, one should become a satisficer, ³content with the merely excellent
as opposed to the absolute best.² It¹s 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
³self-binding.² Like Ulysses lashing himself to the mast of his ship in
order to prevent himself from succumbing to the Sirens¹ song, people make
the choice of limiting their choices. Gilbert and Wilson note that there is
one exception to the rule that hungry people overbuy and sated people
underbuy at supermarkets: it¹s people who bring a grocery list, which the
two psychologists call ³a copy of A Theory About What I Will Want in the
Future.² Strategies like this can be carried out at the level of society, by
rules or social sanction, and surely help to explain Americans¹
extraordinary flight from addictive behavior in recent years?so sudden that
it resembles a concert-hall panic. In 1965, even after the Surgeon General¹s
report linking smoking to lung cancer, forty-two per cent of Americans
smoked. Today, the figure has been cut roughly in half. Societal
self-binding, rather than just new information, deserves much of the credit.
(Or, if you like, the blame.)

Elster rightly insists that an individual¹s binding of himself is a very
different kind of ³pre-commitment² from lawmakers¹ binding of others?as
different as resolution and coercion. But if choice is as painful as social
scientists claim (Schwartz says it ³tyrannizes² us)?and if miswanting is as
prevalent?then a root-and-branch means of liberating us from it will always
tempt policymakers and political thinkers. Some will advocate having others,
perhaps the state, choose for people; for these advocates, behavioral
economics provides a rationale for paternalism. The economist George
Loewenstein, of Carnegie Mellon, has said that anyone studying happiness was
bound to end up leaning left. Indeed, miswanting can be seen as a version of
Marxism¹s ³false consciousness,² only in a more alluring guise?no longer
just an oratorical ruse to sidestep the expressed wishes of the working
class but a hard datum of social science. In a recent law-review article,
the Chicago legal and political theorist Cass Sunstein and the behavioral
economist Richard H. Thaler elaborate on a doctrine they call ³libertarian
paternalism²: ³Libertarian paternalists,² they write, ³want to promote
freedom of choice, but they need not seek to provide bad options, and among
the set of reasonable ones, they need not argue that more is necessarily
better.²


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 ³remarkably
unconstrained by what their parents did before them,² 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 Boodle¹s
in about 1926. And if Schwartz¹s 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, ³a woman¹s
right to choose.² Once you stop taking people¹s expressed preferences at
face value, pretty much every single contentious political, economic,
sexual, familial, social, and labor issue can be opened up to unpredictable
renegotiation.

There are less disruptive remedies. Robert Reich, in his recent book ³The
Future of Success,² notes that modern consumers, like corporations, respond
to the marketplace by ³outsourcing² choice. They hire experts?critics, in
the old way of looking at things. While many experts, such as interior
decorators, offer personalized service and charge a mint, the masses have
access to choosing services that are essentially free. That, in effect, is
what a ³brand² is.

One function of certain New Economy innovations is to make choosing easier
by automating it. TiVo, in theory, allows television addicts to lose
themselves in ever more programming choices, but it can also be used as a
filter, a means of allowing viewers to dispense with choosing altogether.
Internet grocery services, such as Peapod, allow shoppers to fill out a
template that protects them from having to rechoose every week. In practical
terms, the Peapod shopper is confronted with far fewer new brands and
choices than was a suburban housewife pushing her cart down a grocery aisle
during the Kennedy Administration.

It¹s also true that in a consumer society the most widespread of the
misjudgments that humans bring to choice may also be a productive one.
Researchers can tell us why someone can quickly become bored with a new
Jaguar, or revert to thinking that life is meaningless two weeks after
receiving a promotion he¹s sought for a decade. But the phenomenon?sometimes
called the ³hedonic treadmill²?can also explain why disaster, whether
bankruptcy or incapacitation, seldom burdens our spirits for very long.

Strangely, we lose sight of our human resilience when we make big choices.
People are consistently puzzled that so many things they had dreaded?from
getting fired to being ditched by a spouse?³turned out for the best.²
Gilbert and Wilson even speculate (in a diplomatic way) that our inability
to forecast this adaptive capacity spurs some people to a belief in God.
³Because people are largely unaware that their internal dynamics promote
such positive change,² they write, ³they look outward for an explanation.² A
tendency to overestimate the joy we¹ll get from buying baubles and winning
honors is only half of a complex predisposition. The other half is our
enormous capacity for happiness, even in the absence of such things. The
surprise isn¹t how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom
they defeat us.