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In the spirit of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, a social critique of our obsession with choice, and how it contributes to anxiety, dissatisfaction and regret. This paperback includes a new P.S. section with author interviews, insights, features, suggested readings, and more.
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.
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 counterintuitive 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 the important ones and ignore the rest, and ultimately derive greater satisfaction from the choices you have to make.
| Prologue: The Paradox of Choice: A Road Map | 1 | |
| Pt. I | When We Choose | |
| Ch. 1 | Let's Go Shopping | 9 |
| Ch. 2 | New Choices | 23 |
| Pt. II | How We Choose | |
| Ch. 3 | Deciding and Choosing | 47 |
| Ch. 4 | When Only the Best Will Do | 77 |
| Pt. III | Why We Suffer | |
| Ch. 5 | Choice and Happiness | 99 |
| Ch. 6 | Missed Opportunities | 117 |
| Ch. 7 | "If Only...": The Problem of Regret | 147 |
| Ch. 8 | Why Decisions Disappoint: The Problem of Adaptation | 167 |
| Ch. 9 | Why Everything Suffers from Comparison | 181 |
| Ch. 10 | Whose Fault Is It? Choice, Disappointment, and Depression | 201 |
| Pt. IV | What We Can Do | |
| Ch. 11 | What to Do About Choice | 221 |
| Notes | 237 | |
| Index | 257 |
A Day at the Supermarket
Scanning the shelves of my local supermarket recently, I found 85 different varieties and brands of crackers. As I read the packages, I discovered that some brands had sodium, others didn't. Some were fat-free, others weren't. They came in big boxes and small ones. They came in normal size and bite size. There were mundane saltines and exotic and expensive imports.
My neighborhood supermarket is not a particularly large store, and yet next to the crackers were 285 varieties of cookies. Among chocolate chip cookies, there were 21 options. Among Goldfish (I don't know whether to count them as cookies or crackers), there were 20 different varieties to choose from.
Across the aisle were juices -- 13 "sports drinks," 65 "box drinks" for kids, 85 other flavors and brands of juices, and 75 iced teas and adult drinks. I could get these tea drinks sweetened (sugar or artificial sweetener), lemoned, and flavored.
Next, in the snack aisle, there were 95 options in all -- chips (taco and potato, ridged and flat, flavored and unflavored, salted and unsalted, high fat, low fat, no fat), pretzels, and the like, including a dozen varieties of Pringles. Nearby was seltzer, no doubt to wash down the snacks. Bottled water was displayed in at least 15 flavors.
In the pharmaceutical aisles, I found 61 varieties of suntan oil and sunblock, and 80 different pain relievers -- aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen; 350 milligrams or 500 milligrams; caplets, capsules, and tablets; coated or uncoated. There were 40 options for toothpaste, 150 lipsticks, 75 eyeliners, and 90 colors of nail polish from one brand alone. There were 116 kinds of skin cream, and 360 types of shampoo, conditioner, gel, and mousse. Next to them were 90 different cold remedies and decongestants. Finally, there was dental floss: waxed and unwaxed, flavored and unflavored, offered in a variety of thicknesses.
Returning to the food shelves, I could choose from among 230 soup offerings, including 29 different chicken soups. There were 16 varieties of instant mashed potatoes, 75 different instant gravies, 120 different pasta sauces. Among the 175 different salad dressings were 16 "Italian" dressings, and if none of them suited me, I could choose from 15 extra-virgin olive oils and 42 vinegars and make my own. There were 275 varieties of cereal, including 24 oatmeal options and 7 "Cheerios" options. Across the aisle were 64 different kinds of barbecue sauce and 175 types of tea bags.
Heading down the homestretch, I encountered 22 types of frozen waffles. And just before the checkout (paper or plastic; cash or credit or debit), there was a salad bar that offered 55 different items.
This brief tour of one modest store barely suggests the bounty that lies before today's middle-class consumer. I left out the fresh fruits and vegetables (organic, semi-organic, and regular old fertilized and pesticized), the fresh meats, fish, and poultry (free-range organic chicken or penned-up chicken, skin on or off, whole or in pieces, seasoned or unseasoned, stuffed or empty), the frozen foods, the paper goods, the cleaning products, and on and on and on.
A typical supermarket carries more than 30,000 items. That's a lot to choose from. And more than 20,000 new products hit the shelves every year, almost all of them doomed to failure.
Comparison shopping to get the best price adds still another dimension to the array of choices, so that if you were a truly careful shopper, you could spend the better part of a day just to select a box of crackers, as you worried about price, flavor, freshness, fat, sodium, and calories. But who has the time to do this? Perhaps that's the reason consumers tend to return to the products they usually buy, not even noticing 75% of the items competing for their attention and their dollars. Who but a professor doing research would even stop to consider that there are almost 300 different cookie options to choose among?
Supermarkets are unusual as repositories for what are called "nondurable goods," goods that are quickly used and replenished. So buying the wrong brand of cookies doesn't have significant emotional or financial consequences. But in most other settings, people are out to buy things that cost more money, and that are meant to last. And here, as the number of options increases, the psychological stakes rise accordingly.
Shopping for Gadgets
Continuing my mission to explore our range of choices, I left the supermarket and stepped into my local consumer electronics store. Here I discovered:
And if you didn't have the budget or the stomach for configuring your own stereo system, there were 63 small, integrated systems to choose from.
Unlike supermarket products, those in the electronics store don't get used up so fast. If we make a mistake, we either have to live with it or return it and go through the difficult choice process all over again. Also, we really can't rely on habit to simplify our decision, because we don't buy stereo systems every couple of weeks and because technology changes so rapidly that chances are our last model won't exist when we go out to replace it. At these prices, choices begin to have serious consequences.
The Paradox of ChoiceAnonymous
Posted May 8, 2007
As someone constantly plauged with indecision, this book opened my eyes to what I'm doing and how it makes me unhappy. It was a relief to know that I'm not the only one who takes 30 minutes to decide between metal or wicker baskets to hold my DVDs in. It was also disturbing to see that my inability to decide will only lead me away from happiness. I had never thought in those terms before and this book made mre realize that I needed to make a change. This book is great for people who can't make a decision and wish they could!
4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted December 6, 2005
I was surprised to find a book about choice in the psychology section of the bookstore. As an avid reader in Economics, it was a unique experience to see how a pyschologist views utility and opportunity cost. The book moves the reader from the basics of satisfiers and maximizers thorough buyers regret. It is a good introduction to a complex topic. It was quite comical to see what the gold, silver and bronze medalists are thinking on the awards stand. Technically, the book is written at an 8th grade level, easy reading. Nonetheless, the book could use better editing where it drags at points. I give it a c+ because of editing problems.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted May 31, 2012
Highly recommended
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted May 25, 2012
There's not a tremendous amount that's groundbreaking in terms of what we know about choice, but the book's information is well written and presented in a way that the layman can understand the psychology behind it.
It's worth the read if you're interesting in why you make the decisions you do, and how you make them.
Anonymous
Posted May 20, 2012
Basically it's the law of diminishing marginal utility applied to the consumption of alternatives. But choosing what matters to invest time in (by going through the alternatives) is a choice in itself. The new question is: is this worth thinking about? Not groundbreaking, but a helpful reminder.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.On the advice of a friend, I picked this up, and am glad I did. The author does an excellent job of supporting his hypothesis that "less is more" and that an abundance of choice has made our lives harder instead of easier.
I learned a lot from the book. I learned about maximizers versus satisficers, what drives us to make decisions, and tools for simplifying dealing with the abundance of choices we face.
The writing style can be a bit wordy, and at times I found myself reading and re-reading sentences and paragraphs in order to fully understand the meaning. It's not overly complex, but some sections can be a reading workout. However, the author does support all his arguments in a logical style, and the extra effort required for me to understand some of the more involved points was worth the effort.
Worth the read, and hard not to learn something from this.
Kurt-Luce-Van3
Posted November 4, 2010
Paradox of Choice is an intriguing book that explores the minds of the consumer. Barry Schwartz creates 3 main points; those who are called Maximizers, Satisficers, and giving consumers too many options lessens their satisfaction. Maximizers are people who, given a choice, will exhaustively search all the options, seeking all possible information, in order to make the best possible choice. This behavior generally consumes a lot of time, and often leads to nagging doubts, perhaps where no one clear winner emerged. Satisficers are those who settle for a choice that is "good enough" for them these people are generally happier with their choice, and spend less time choosing, leaving them free to enjoy other things. It is in my best opinion that someone should read this book because it effectively displays how the consumer should choose the choice that is "good enough". This increases the satisfaction of the consumer which in turn makes it easier. Although there wasn't much that I didn't like in this reading, the majority of the book put the blame on the producers. It made it very hard to accept the fact that producers where to blame when it was the consumer that needed the reality check. If the consumer could do this, then everyone would be able to enjoy their choice and spend less time stressing. Barry Schwartz aptly demonstrates that having too many things to choose from often leads to the consumer feeling bewildered when facing the choice and less satisfied even after taking a decision. He cites studies that indicate people are less likely to buy a product when faced with too many choices. One of the more important examples cited is that of 401k plans. The more fund choices offered by employers offering matching 401k plans, the fewer people actually selected any fund at all, even though that meant foregoing 'free' money. If you know exactly what you want - you know prior to searching precisely what characteristics you want - then more choices are likely to be better, because you are more likely to find something that most closely matches what you desire. It is, however, unlikely that most people search for products that way. Beyond choice paralysis caused by too many choices, an abundance of choice is also likely to produce worse decisions because people attempt to simplify the choice to a point where the simplification impedes their ability to make a good choice. His conclusions are that people should aim to be satisficers, rather than maximizers, and that by having standards to live by, rather, than, say, rigidly enforced rules from some higher authority, we can eliminate some choice in our lives that isn't really needed. Overall this book should receive 4.5 out of 5, but since Barnes and Noble cannot do that, I give it 5 out of 5.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Erikson98
Posted November 4, 2010
The Paradox of Choice is about Martin Seligman, a man who has seen a problem in the US that no one else has addressed. He saw that the amount of increasing choices can be confusing and actually limit people rather than give them more freedom. In our fast paced society the number of choices are growing rapidly, what once used to be a regular whopper from burger king now can be created over 200 different ways. This is good because now we can get exactly what we want, but at what cost? we must put a huge amount of time into picking what we think is perfect for us.
This book is really inspirational, it enlightens us to an increasing problem in the US that no one seems to realize. I like the way the book is written and recommend this to anyone who likes to buy things but cant decide what to buy until they have already bought something else. The amount of choices we have can seem good, but they can make us question our decisions before we even make them. These choices can lead us to blame ourselves for any and all failures. Weather we are choosing something small like what to have for lunch, or choosing something like a career we are faced with more choices than we think.
Everyday we are faced with so many choices, and these choices are becoming more and more as time goes on. The amount of choices are time consuming and can be extremely stressful. As we think and rethink our choices we can make so many decisions that are not what we really wanted, this is a waist of our time and can possibly be the waist of our money. Choice is a very good thing to an extent, when we put more choices than are necessary we waist time and effort that we could be spending doing other things.
This was an interesting book with a lot of good points to make about the way we make decisions, how the way we do that might be causing us more harm than good, and what we can do to make our decisions both better and faster. I enjoyed this book and recommend it, but I do have one concern. This book is 240 pages, which isn't long, but it is very repetitive. It reads like a research paper that's been expanded on too much. Much of the information repeats over the course of the book. Still, I give it 4 out of 5 stars, I enjoyed reading it, and I recommend it to everyone else.
P.S.: I now realize that I'm a "maximizer," but I'm looking forward to beginning my journey towards becoming a "satisficer."
Anonymous
Posted June 11, 2009
No useful information.
0 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Posted May 31, 2009
I loved it.
0 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted April 26, 2004
By opening with a story of his trip to the store for jeans, Barry Schwartz writes a guide to America now, a country enslaved by choice. According to Schwartz the world we live in today has far to many choices and people are suffering because of it. When I started reading the book I must admit I thought his ideas were outdated, and some may still be, but after reading the entire book I can agree with much of what he says. Though I still might not think that less choice in some goods would be a good thing I do agree with his points on decisions that might need more education. Things like retirement plans and medical care programs that might or might not be the best plans for some are hurting people. This is an excellent book illustrating in four parts: when we make our decisions and examples of the over abundance of choices there are, how we choose what we feel is best and the flaws in our thought process, why it is that we suffer, and what we can do about it. Parts I found the most interesting included the section on 'anchoring' which is when we compare something we intend to buy to an 'anchored price,' or the price for the same product we saw elsewhere. Another was the tendency to 'adapt' to the things we buy, making the experiences we get from them seem less and less satisfying. A main point of the work is whether or not we are Maximizers or Satisficers. Schwartz says that more and more people are becoming Maximizers because of the more choices we have and that they suffer more because for a Maximzer only the best will do. I recommend this book for anyone old enough to go out and make their own shopping decisions. With scientific tests, relevant cartoons, and a new look on the freedoms we experience everyday this will make one evaluate their life. In the end you might find that you would sometimes wonder if less were more.
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Posted May 10, 2009
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Overview
In the spirit of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, a social critique of our obsession with choice, and how it contributes to anxiety, dissatisfaction and regret. This paperback includes a new P.S. section with author interviews, insights, features, suggested readings, and more.
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 ...