The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
Barry Schwartz
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 0060005696
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Whether we're buying a pair of jeans, ordering a cup of coffee, selecting a long-distance carrier, applying to college, choosing a doctor, or setting up a 401(k), everyday decisions—both big and small—have become increasingly complex due to the overwhelming abundance of choice with which we are presented.
As Americans, we assume that more choice means better options and greater satisfaction. But beware of excessive choice: choice overload can make you question the decisions you make before you even make them, it can set you up for unrealistically high expectations, and it can make you blame yourself for any and all failures. In the long run, this can lead to decision-making paralysis, anxiety, and perpetual stress. And, in a culture that tells us that there is no excuse for falling short of perfection when your options are limitless, too much choice can lead to clinical depression.
In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz explains at what point choice—the hallmark of individual freedom and self-determination that we so cherish—becomes detrimental to our psychological and emotional well-being. In accessible, engaging, and anecdotal prose, Schwartz shows how the dramatic explosion in choice—from the mundane to the profound challenges of balancing career, family, and individual needs—has paradoxically become a problem instead of a solution. Schwartz also shows how our obsession with choice encourages us to seek that which makes us feel worse.
By synthesizing current research in the social sciences, Schwartz makes the counter intuitive case that eliminating choices can greatly reduce the stress, anxiety, and busyness of our lives. He offers eleven practical steps on how to limit choices to a manageable number, have the discipline to focus on those that are important and ignore the rest, and ultimately derive greater satisfaction from the choices you have to make.
always better to have a way to back out of a decision than not. What I hope to show is that the conventional wisdom is wrong, at least when it comes to what satisfies us in the decisions we make. As I mentioned, we will examine choice overload as it affects a number of areas in human experience that are far from trivial. But to build the case for what I mean by “overload,” we will start at the bottom of the hierarchy of needs and work our way up. We’ll begin by doing some more shopping. When We
first, reasoning that some of what they had learned in the first experiment might transfer to the second. The third group of animals, also in a different setting, had been given a series of shocks that could not be escaped by any response. Remarkably, this third group failed to learn at all. Indeed, many of them essentially had no chance to learn because they didn’t even try to escape from the shocks. These animals became quite passive, lying down and taking the shocks until the researchers
impair our ability to do just the kind of thinking that is necessary. Opportunity Costs, Trade-offs, and Exploding Options W E’VE SEEN THAT AS THE NUMBER OF OPTIONS UNDER CONSIDERA - tion goes up and the attractive features associated with the rejected alternatives accumulate, the satisfaction derived from the chosen alternative will go down. This is one reason, and a very important one, why adding options can be detrimental to our wellbeing. Because we don’t put rejected options out of our
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those funds in a way that benefits employees. That is, employers can, like the government, be looking over their employees’ shoulders to protect them from really bad decisions. As the number of options increases, the work involved in employer oversight goes up. Moreover, I think the adding of options brings with it a subtle shift in the responsibility that employers feel toward their employees. When the employer is providing only a few routes to retirement security, it seems important to take