Too many options paralyze us: Why we are all victims of the Paradox of Choice.

With so many choices to choose from, the simple task of choosing becomes extremely difficult.

At a lecture at TED Talks, psychologist Barry Schwartz told a funny story of when he went to a store to buy new jeans:

“I wear jeans almost all the time.

There was a time when jeans came in one flavor, and you bought them, and they fit like crap, and they were incredibly uncomfortable, and if you wore them long enough and washed them enough times, they started to feel OK.

So I went to replace my jeans after years and years of wearing these old ones, and I said, you know, “I want a pair of jeans. Here’s my size.”

And the shopkeeper said “Do you want slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit? Do you want button fly or zipper fly? Do you want stonewashed or acid-washed? Do you want them distressed? Do you want bootcut, do you want tapered, blah blah blah …”

On and on he went.

My jaw dropped, and after I recovered, I said, “I want the kind that used to be the only kind.”

He had no idea what that was, so I spent an hour trying on all these damn jeans, and I walked out of the store — truth! — with the best-fitting jeans I had ever owned.

I did better. All those choices made it possible for me to do better.

But then I felt worse. Why?

I wrote a whole book to try to explain this to myself.”

The book is titled The Paradox of Choice and couldn’t be more current.

In it, the author explores one problem that affects all of us: the excessive number of choice at our disposal.

Does freedom mean having more choices?

According to the author, the official dogma of all western industrial societies is the certainty that, in order to maximize welfare, we have to maximize freedom.

And as nobody can decide for themselves, we think that the best way to ensure freedom is to maximize the number of choices. That way, the more choices people have, the more freedom they’ll have — thus, more welfare.

That notion is so rooted in our culture that it doesn’t occur to us to question it.

Take portable technology.

Although we’re blessed with the possibility to work remotely, that also means we must decide whether to be working or not at every moment of our day.

Picture yourself, in every minute of your resting hours, wondering: “Should I send that email? Should I answer that call? Should I finish that report right now?”

And even if your answer is “no”, the experience you’re having right now would probably be very different than if you didn’t have to ask yourself those questions in the first place.

Everywhere we look, life is a matter of choice.

Paralysis instead of liberation.

Have you ever felt indecisive in front of a large number of options, to the point where you’ve postponed the decision for another moment?

And ended up not making that choice after all?

Here’s a more serious example than the shopping for jeans situation, given by the author:

“A colleague of mine got access to investment records from Vanguard, the gigantic mutual fund company, of about a million employees and about 2,000 different workplaces.

And what she found is that 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.

Why? Because with 50 funds to choose from, it’s so damn hard to decide which fund to choose that you’ll just put it off until tomorrow. And then tomorrow, and then tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and of course tomorrow never comes. (…)

By not participating, they are passing up as much as 5,000 dollars a year from the employer, who would happily match their contribution.”

Too many options cause paralysis instead of liberation.

With so many choices to choose from, the simple task of choosing becomes extremely difficult.

Even when we choose, the results are less satisfactory.

When we finally break the paralysis and make a decision, we end up less satisfied with the result of our choice than if we had fewer options available.

The reasons for that are:

1. With a lot of options to choose from, if your choice isn’t perfect, it’s easy to imagine that you could have made a different choice that would have been better. That way, the imagined alternative makes you regret the decision you’ve already made, even if it was a good decision. With so many options, it’s easy to regret every little thing that’s disappointing about the chosen option.
2. When there are a lot of alternatives to consider, it’s also easy to imagine the attracting features of the rejected options, and this makes us less satisfied with the chosen one. The “fear of missing out”, a.k.a. FOMO seems to be a constant in our lives.
3. Escalation of expectations: the reason Barry felt worst with so many types of jeans available is that his expectations about how good the new jeans would be escalated. He didn’t have any expectation when there was only one type of jeans. But now, when there are dozens of it, he expects it to be perfect! The jeans he got were good, but they weren’t perfect. Then he compared what he got with what he expected to be, and became disappointed with the comparison.

Adding options to people’s lives will inevitably raise their expectations about how good these options are.

What will it produce? Less satisfaction with the results, even if they’re good results.

Barry mentions that when everything was “worse” (meaning when there were fewer options), it was actually possible to have experiences that became pleasant surprises.

But today, the maximum you can expect is that things will be as good as we expect them to be.

You’ll never have pleasant surprises when your expectations are too high.

The consequences? Guilt, anxiety, and depression.

Before this explosion of choice, there were one or only a few options for every product, service, or path in our daily lives.

Think about everything, from little details of everyday life to choices that change the course of our destiny: jeans, salad dressings, retirement programs, travel destinations, smartphones, choosing a career…

Some time ago, in case you weren’t satisfied with something, whose fault was it? Of the world, of course! What could you do about it? It was the only choice available!

Today, with hundreds of options to choose from, if you pick something that disappoints you, whose fault is it?

Yours! You could’ve chosen better! With so many alternatives, there’s no excuse for failing!

It seems reasonable that one contributor to the increasing anxiety, depression, and suicide rates in the last couple of generations is the guilt felt from unpleasant experiences that originate from badly perceived decisions.

Conclusion.

The notion that more choice is always better than less choice is far from correct. Of course, there’s no easy formula to evaluate that.

But the author of The Paradox of Choice is certain that we have already passed the point where having more choices increases our welfare.

From an economic and political perspective, what enables all this choice in our industrial societies is material affluence. There are several places on Earth where the problem is exactly the opposite: the lack of options.

What is so frustrating is that the complicated and expensive choices not only don’t help, but they make us worse as human beings.

All this energy and resources could be better utilized by changing the lives of the least privileged, which would indirectly change our lives for the better.

“Everybody needs a fishbowl.

The absence of a metaphorical fishbowl is a recipe for misery, and, I suspect, disaster.”

Any comments and suggestions? Let me know in the comments below!

Your choice…