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The
Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less by Barry Schwartz Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Satisficer In
his new book, The
Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz explores the reasons why the
proliferation of choices in our lives doesn’t make us feel any better. Counter-intuitive
as that may be, after a few dozen page, it’s easy to understand the paradox,
but harder to discover how to deal with it. Part of Schwartz’ advice is to
avoid being a maximizer, one who seeks the best
choice, but become more often a satisficer, one who
chooses something that’s “good enough” and moves on. Here’s an excerpt from
the beginning of Chapter 11, “What to Do About Choice,” (pp. 221-226): The
news I’ve reported is not good. Here we are, living at the pinnacle of human
possibility, awash in material abundance. As a society, we have achieved what
our ancestors could, at most, only dream about, but it has come at a great price.
We get what we say we want, only to discover that
what we want doesn’t satisfy us to the degree that we expect. We are
surrounded by modern, time-saving devices, but we never seem to have enough
time. We are free to be the authors of our own lives, but we don’t know
exactly what kind of lives we want to “write.” The
“success” of modernity turns out to be bittersweet, and everywhere we look it
appears that a significant contributing factor is the overabundance of
choice. Having too many choices produces psychological distress, especially
when combined with regret, concern about status, adaptation, social
comparison, and perhaps most important, the desire to have the best of
everything—to maximize. I
believe there are steps we can take to mitigate—even eliminate—many of these
sources of distress, but they aren’t easy. They require practice, discipline,
and perhaps a new way of thinking. On the other hand, each of these steps
will bring its own rewards. 1. Choose When to Choose As
we have seen, having the opportunity to choose is essential for well-being,
but choice has negative features, and the negative features escalate as the
number of choices increases. The benefits of having options are apparent with
each particular decision we face, but the costs are subtle and cumulative. In
other words, it isn’t this or that particular choice that creates the
problem: it’s all the choices, taken together. It
isn’t easy to pass up opportunities to choose. The key thing to appreciate,
though, is that what is most important to us, most
of the time, is not the objective results of decisions, but the subjective
results. If the ability to choose enables you to get a better car, house,
job, vacation, or coffeemaker, but the process of choice makes you feel worse
about what you’ve chosen, you really haven’t gained anything from the
opportunity to choose. And much of the time, better objective results and
worse subjective results are exactly what our overabundance of options
provides. To
manage the problem of excessive choice, we must decide which choices in our
lives really matter and focus our time and energy there,
letting many other opportunities pass us by. But by restricting our options,
we will be able to choose less and feel better. Try
the following: 1. Review some recent decisions that
you’ve made, both small and large (a clothing purchase, a new kitchen appliance,
a vacation destination, a retirement pension allocation, a medical procedure,
a job or relationship change). 2. Itemize the steps, time, research, and
anxiety that went into making those decisions. 3. Remind yourself how it felt to do that
work. 4. Ask yourself how much your final
decision benefited from that work. This
exercise may help you better appreciate the costs associated with the
decisions you make, which may lead you to give up some decisions altogether
or at least to establish rules of thumb for yourself about how many options
to consider, or how much time and energy to invest in choosing. For example,
you could make it a rule to visit no more than two stores when shopping for
clothing or to consider no more than two locations when planning a vacation. Restricting
yourself in this way may seem both difficult and arbitrary, but actually,
this is the kind of discipline we exercise in other aspects of life. You may
have a rule of thumb never to have more than two glasses of wine at a
sitting. The alcohol tastes good and it makes you feel good and the
opportunity for another drink is right at your elbow, yet you stop. And for
most people, it isn’t that hard to stop. Why? One
reason is that you get insistent instructions from society about the dangers
of too much alcohol. A second reason is that you may have had the experience
of drinking too much, and discovered that it isn’t pretty. There’s no
guarantee that the third glass of wine will be the one that sends you over
the edge, but why risk it? Unfortunately, there are no insistent instructions
from society about shopping too much. Nor, perhaps, has it been obvious to
you that choice overload gives you a hangover. Until now. But if you’ve been
convinced by the arguments and the evidence in this book, you now know that
choice has a downside, an awareness that should make it easier for you to
adopt, and live with, a “two options is my limit” rule. It’s worth a try. 2.
Be a Chooser, Not a Picker Choosers
are people who are able to reflect on what makes a decision important, on
whether, perhaps, none of the options should be chosen, on whether a new
option should be created, and on what a particular choice says about the
chooser as an individual. It is choosers who create new opportunities for
themselves and everyone else. But when faced with overwhelming choice, we are
forced to become “pickers.” which is to say, relatively passive selectors
from whatever is available. Being a chooser is better, but to have the time
to choose more and pick less, we must be willing to rely on habits, customs,
norms, and rules to make some decisions automatic. Choosers
have the time to modify their goals; pickers do not. Choosers have the time
to avoid following the herd; pickers do not. Good decisions take time and
attention, and the only way we can find the needed time and attention is by
choosing our spots. As
you go through the exercise of reviewing recent choices you’ve made, not only
will you become more aware of associated costs, you’ll discover that there
are some things you really care about, and others you don’t. This will allow
you to 1 Shorten or eliminate deliberations
about decisions that are unimportant to you; 2. Use some of the time you’ve freed up
to ask yourself what you really want in the areas of your life where
decisions matter; 3. And if you discover that none of the
options the world presents in those areas meet your needs, start thinking
about creating better options that do. 3. Satisfice
More and Maximize Less It
is maximers who suffer most in a culture that
provides too many choices. It is maximizers who
have expectations that can’t be met. It is maximizers
who worry most about regret, about missed opportunities, and about social
comparisons, and it is maximizers who are most
disappointed when the results of decisions are not as good as they expected. Learning
to accept “good enough” will simplify decision making and increase
satisfaction. Though satisficers may often do less
well than maximizers according to certain objective
standards, nonetheless, by settling for “good enough” even when the “best”
could be just around the corner, satisficers will
usually feel better about the decisions they make. Admittedly,
there are often times when it is difficult to embrace good enough.” Seeing
that you could have done better may be irritating. In addition, there is a
world of marketers out there trying to convince you that “good enough” isn’t
good enough when “new and improved” is available. Nonetheless, everybody satisfices in at least some areas of life, because even
for the most fastidious, it’s impossible to be a maximizer
about everything. The trick is to learn to embrace and appreciate satisficing, to cultivate it in more and more aspects of
life, rather than merely being resigned to it. Becoming a conscious,
intentional satisficer makes comparison with how
other people are doing less important. It makes regret less likely. In the
complex, choice-saturated world we live in, it makes peace of mind possible. To
become a satisficer, however, requires that you
think carefully about your goals and aspirations, and that you develop well-defined
standards for what is “good enough” whenever you face a decision. Knowing
what’s good enough requires knowing yourself and what you care about. So: 1. Think about occasions in life when you
settle, comfortably, for “good enough”: 2. Scrutinize how you choose in those
areas: 3. Then apply that strategy more broadly. I
remember quite vividly going through this process myself several years ago
when competitive long-distance phone services first became available. Because
I make a fairly large number of long-distance phone calls and because I was
being deluged with unsolicited advertisements from various companies, I found
it hard to resist the temptation to try to find the absolute best company and
plan for my calling habits. Making the various needed comparisons was
difficult, time-consuming, and confusing, because different companies
organized their services and charges in different ways. Furthermore, as I
worked on the problem, new companies and new plans kept on coming. I knew I
didn’t want to spend all this time solving my telephone problem, but it was
like an itch that I couldn’t resist scratching. Then, one day I went out to
replace a toaster. One store, two brands, two models, done. As I walked home,
it occurred to me that I could, if I wanted to, pick my long-distance service
in the same way. I breathed a sigh of relief, I did it, and I haven’t thought
about it since. There
are more recommendations in The
Paradox of Choice, as well as an interesting exploration of when enough
choices become too many, and how we respond. Steve
Hopkins, February 23, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the March 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Paradox of Choice.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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