The Paradox Of Choice

The Paradox Of Choice shows you how today’s vast amount of choice makes you frustrated, less likely to choose, more likely to mess up, and less happy overall, before giving you concrete strategies and tips to ease the burden of decision-making.

You can’t argue that we don’t have enough choice nowadays. Between 1975 and 2008, the average number of products in a supermarket has risen from under 9,000 to over 47,000.

When trying to combine speakers, a tuner, an amplifier, a CD player, and a bunch of other components into a stereo system, just one electronics store will give you a massive 6.5 million different combinations – to set up a stereo system!

We always claim we want freedom, but Barry Schwartz suggest it might have gotten a little too much. For 2 reasons:

Having so much choice makes it extremely hard to choose at all. Having so much choice makes it extremely likely you’ll make a mistake.

The research necessary to buy a pair of shoes these days is mind-boggling and could easily be a full time job. While researching a lot might just be a waste of time for shoes, for health insurance or retirement plans, it’s necessary.

Some of our choices have big consequences, and sadly the government doesn’t make these choices for us any more. 50 years ago there was exactly one health insurance in the US, Blue Cross.

You got your electricity from one company, heat from another, and that’s it. The government pre-selected these for you.

But now, they don’t. The crushing burden of choosing the exact right one is now left to you, the individual.

Similarly, this study showed that when students have to choose from an array of snacks 3 weeks in advance, they’ll make wrong assumptions about the future, and therefore choose snacks they end up don’t liking.

Okay, let’s say you do take on that shoe research internship and dive into the task, ready to find the perfect pair of running shoes. But the more you research, the more you’ll come to the conclusion that: It’s impossible to find the perfect pair. You can never look at all options. This is because as soon as you start comparing 2 pairs, you’ll probably notice one has benefits the other hasn’t and vice versa. Instantly, you imagine a hypothetical pair, which has both good qualities, but none of the bad ones. But this pair doesn’t exist. What adds to your stress is that just by looking at other pairs, you value the one you favor less. A study by the University of Florida has shown that when consumers are told to put a dollar value on magazines, they’ll automatically value a magazine…