I watched a TED video of Barry Schwartz and was interested to learn more about his book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less and learn the downside (and unhappiness) of abundance. Have you noticed as of late that almost everything is available…in too many overwhelming choices?
As Schwartz points out consider the types of choice in your local grocery store: 285 cookie options, 85 types of crackers, 95 types of chips, 75 iced teas, 29 chicken soups, 175 salad dressings and 275 boxes of cereal. Welcome to The Paradox of Choice. Try shopping for a new pair of jeans as he described in his TED presentation and the introduction to this book.
In my childhood things seemed simple. There were just three television channels…plus a PBS station. When the new school started I would receive two or three pairs of stiff denim jeans. Every kid in my school would wear the same dark blue demin and would not feel comfortable until the third week of school. By then our clothes were finally broken in via the wash cycle.
Don’t consider this book the opposite of Chris Anderson‘s The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. It would be more accurate to describe the book as what happens to individuals overwhelmed by choice.
How do consumers secure a feeling of satisfaction with overwhelming numbers of choice? Do we have that ability? Schwartz brings very interesting testing and research to demonstrate how consumers are unhappy with abundant choices. Schwartz notes how consumer ‘maximizers’ can become obsessive about our purchasing habits. But he also discusses how emotion within organizations can lead to bad decision making … even when everyone ‘feels’ right about the choice.
Its very interesting to see how this has been applied in your own work environment. So many choices within a technology environment, yet many times the choices made are really, really off the wall wrong. This book will help you understand why choices will derail your process.
Schwartz provides a closing chapter on how consumers can begin to break long standing, old habits. And old habits die hard!
For some it will be too late, but you can make the change with hard work and determination to live better and happier.
One reply on “Latest read: The Paradox of Choice”
I recently read some article or blog about a study done with a simple game where there were three doors to click on and you got 50 clicks before the game ended. Each door clicked once would open it and a subsequent click would give you points within some pre-determined range. The best way to get the highest score is to determine which door gave points in the highest range and then keep clicking on that door until you’re out of clicks. In one version of the game when you start continually clicking on one of the doors the other two doors start shrinking and disappear. When this happens people playing the game would click on the shrinking doors because of the perceived badness of losing those choices, even though this behavior resulted in fewer points at the end of the game.
Interesting that people want to keep options open even though that may be bad for them…