Too Many Choices
By: Source: AARP Bulletin Today Date Posted: 2007-05-17 14:33:46.318334-04:00
About 10 years ago, I went to the Gap to buy a pair of jeans. I tend to wear my jeans until they’re falling apart, so it had been a while since my last purchase. A nice young saleswoman greeted me.
"I want a pair of jeans—32-28," I said.
"Do you want them slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit, baggy or extra baggy?" she replied. "Do you want them stone-washed, acid-washed or distressed? Do you want them button-fly or zipper-fly? Faded or regular?"
I was stunned. I sputtered out something like, "I just want regular jeans. You know, the kind that used to be the only kind."
The trouble was that there was no such thing as "regular" jeans anymore. Besides, with all these options before me, I was no longer sure that I wanted "regular" jeans. Perhaps the easy fit or the relaxed fit would be more comfortable. So I decided to try them all.
The jeans I ended up with turned out just fine, but what occurred to me on that day is that buying a pair of pants should not be a daylong project.
By creating all these options, the industry undoubtedly had done a favor for customers with varied tastes and body types. However, it had also created a new problem. In the past a buyer like me might have had to settle for an imperfect fit, but at least purchasing jeans was a five-minute affair. Now it had become a complex decision in which I was forced to invest time, energy and no small amount of self-doubt, anxiety and dread over the ordeal.
It’s not just jeans. Eighty-five types of crackers. Two hundred eighty-five types of cookies. Eighty pain relievers. Thousands of mutual funds. Hundreds of cell phones, dozens of calling plans. So many TV shows that people tape the ones they don’t have time to watch—and never have time to watch the ones they tape. Wherever we turn, we face mind-boggling choices.
Choice is an especially burning issue now. The Medicare prescription drug plan passed in 2003 and the current proposal to privatize a portion of Social Security are both initiatives justified, in part, by celebrating the virtues of choice. Instead of imposing a government plan on everyone, let people choose; it’s bound to make everyone better off. Boomers like me embraced this logic, and in the ’60s we demanded freedom of choice in all aspects of our social and cultural lives. In the ’80s, President Reagan extended this thinking as he tried to reduce the role of government in various aspects of our lives, and let the market rather than the state provide for our individual needs.
The upside of having all these choices is obvious: Choice equals freedom, and freedom is among America’s most dearly held values. Economists tell us there can never be too much choice. If you don’t care about variety in cell phones, you can always just ignore it. But if you do care, abundant choice means that you ought to be able to find the phone that is just right for you.
Compelling as this may sound, however, there’s growing evidence that this logic is flawed. For many of us, increased choice means decreased satisfaction. The fact that some choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better. There’s a cost: Too many options can produce paralysis, not liberation. Studies show that:
- As a store increases the varieties of jams or chocolates on its shelves, shoppers are more likely to leave without buying either product.
- As the number of mutual funds in a 401(k) plan offered to employees goes up, the likelihood that they will choose a fund — any fund — goes down. For every 10 funds added to the list of options, the rate of participation drops 2 percent — even though many employees may be passing up matching money from employers.
- Patient satisfaction goes down when the choice of medical treatments goes up — people generally don’t want to make their own decisions. The disconnect between theory — what people think they want — and reality can be illustrated by a study of people who were asked if they would want to choose their own cancer treatment. Some 64 percent of people surveyed said that if they were to get cancer, they would want to choose their own treatment. However, only 12 percent of those who had cancer said the same thing.
Even though choice may enable people to improve their lives by some objective measure—quality of jam or rate of return on investment—it often makes them feel worse. This may help explain why there has been a 75 percent increase in Americans being treated for clinical depression over the last 25 years.
Why does more choice generate these paradoxical effects? For starters, people feel an enormous burden to get enough information to make a good decision. Who has the time to find the best digital camera, the best cell phone plan, the best 401(k), the best health insurance, the best school for the kids?
Even when the choice is relatively simple, getting the right information is not easy. We’re influenced by the way in which options are presented, or "framed." For example, we accept a "discount for paying cash" but reject a "surcharge for using credit cards," even though the two mean the same thing. We might spring for a "bargain" sweater that is marked down from $200 to $100 when normally we would never dream of spending so much for a sweater. We instantly turned against the inheritance tax when it was relabeled as a "death tax," even though most of us will not be leaving enough behind to be affected. Such instances of framing are pervasive, and they become harder to see through as choices become more complex.
The more choices we have, the more we seem to regret the decisions we make. Sheer abundance seems to raise our expectations. So, we wonder, did we get what we want? Could the alternatives have been better?
Those who suffer most are the "maximizers" among us—people whose goal in making decisions is to get "the best." At the opposite end of the scale are "satisficers," who seek only what is good enough. Maximizers must check out all the alternatives in order to feel they got the best. And in a world of 80 pain relievers and thousands of mutual funds, that’s just not possible. So maximizers often make a selection and end up miserable, convinced that if they had looked a little longer, they would have done better.
It is sometimes said that you can’t know how much is enough until you experience too much. Well, we may now be experiencing too much—too much "freedom" and too much choice brought to us by a heady mix of political and cultural ideology and material affluence.
Older people seem to have learned this lesson from life experience. They are less inclined to be maximizers, which may be one reason why they are in general happier than their children and grandchildren. Perhaps with age comes the wisdom of learning that "good enough" is good enough.
There’s another lesson that older people have learned: Limited options can be liberating, and we should value at least some constraints on our freedom of choice instead of rebelling against them. Having to wear a seat belt or never indulging in a second dessert means not having to settle the same issue again and again—and saving the time and energy needed to make intelligent choices when required.
Our children and grandchildren—full of doubt, stressed out and anxious in a world of unprecedented wealth and opportunity—could surely profit from the same lesson.
While it’s true that a life without any freedom of choice would not be worth living, more choice doesn’t necessarily mean greater happiness.
Barry Schwartz, professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, is the author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (HarperCollins, 2004).
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