Researchers have known for years about the harmful effects of negative emotion on thinking and decision making. More recent evidence has shown that positive emotion has the opposite effect—when we are in a good mood, we think better. We consider more possibilities; we’re open to considerations that would otherwise not occur to us; we see subtle connections between pieces of information that we might otherwise miss. Something as trivial as a little gift of candy to medical residents improves the speed and accuracy of their diagnoses. In general, positive emotion enables us to broaden our understanding of what confronts us.
This creates something of a paradox. We seem to do our best thinking when we’re feeling good. Complex decisions, involving multiple options with multiple features (like “Which job should I take?”) demand our best thinking. Yet those very decisions seem to induce in us emotional reactions that will impair our ability to do just the kind of thinking that is necessary.
Opportunity Costs, Trade-offs, and Exploding Options
WE’VE SEEN THAT AS THE NUMBER OF OPTIONS UNDER CONSIDERATION goes up and the attractive features associated with the rejected alternatives accumulate, the satisfaction derived from the chosen alternative will go down. This is one reason, and a very important one, why adding options can be detrimental to our well-being. Because we don’t put rejected options out of our minds, we experience the disappointment of having our satisfaction with decisions diluted by all the options we considered but did not choose.
In light of these cumulative, negative effects of opportunity costs, it is tempting to recommend that in making decisions, we ignore opportunity costs altogether. If opportunity costs complicate the decision and they make us miserable, why think about them? Unfortunately, it is very difficult to judge whether a potential investment is a good one without knowing about the attractiveness of the alternatives. The same is true of a job or a vacation or a medical procedure or almost anything else. And once we start considering alternatives, the matter of opportunity costs is bound to come up. Only rarely is one option clearly better in every way than the rest. Choosing almost always involves giving up something else of value. So thinking about opportunity costs is probably an essential part of wise decision making. The trick is to limit the set of possibilities so that the opportunity costs don’t add up to make all the alternatives unattractive.
Appreciating the cumulative burden posed by opportunity costs can help us better understand the findings of the study mentioned in Chapter 1 in which two sets of participants encountered a variety of different flavors of a brand of high-quality jam at a sample table set up in a gourmet food store. Some people were presented with six different samples on the table, while others saw twenty-four. They could taste as many as they wanted, and then were given a coupon for a $1 discount on any jam they purchased. The larger display of samples attracted more shoppers, but these individuals did not sample more different jams. Remarkably, shoppers who saw the larger display were less likely actually to buy jam than those who saw the smaller display. Much less likely.
In another study, students were offered either six or thirty different topics to choose from for an extra-credit essay. The students offered six topics were more likely to write essays, and wrote better essays, than the students offered thirty topics.
In a third study, students evaluated either six or thirty gourmet chocolates on their visual appeal, then picked one to taste and evaluate, and were then offered a small box of the chocolates in lieu of payment for participating in the study. Students who were exposed to thirty chocolates gave lower ratings to the chocolate they tasted and were less likely to take a box of chocolates rather than money after the experiment than students who were exposed to only six.
This set of results is counterintuitive. Surely, you are more likely to find something you like from a set of twenty-four or thirty options than from a set of six. At worst, the extra options add nothing, but in that case, they should also take away nothing. But when there are twenty-four jams to consider, it is easy to imagine that many of them will have attractive features: novelty, sweetness, texture, color, and who knows what else. As the chooser closes in on a decision, the various attractive features of the jams not chosen can mount up to make the preferred jam seem less exceptional. It may still be the one that wins the competition, but its “attractiveness score” is no longer high enough to warrant a purchase. Similarly, with regard to essay topics, some may be attractive because students already know a lot about them, others because they are provocative, others because they have personal relevance, and still others because they relate to ideas students are discussing in another course. But the potential attractiveness of each will subtract from the attractiveness of all of the others. The net result, after the subtractions, is that none of the topics will be attractive enough to overcome inertia and get the student to sit down at the word processor. And if he does sit down, as he tries to write about the topic he’s chosen, he may be further distracted by other appealing but rejected topics. It may prevent him from thinking clearly. Or perhaps the negative emotion aroused by having had to consider trade-offs will narrow his thinking. Either way, the quality of the essay will suffer.
Some years ago, when my wife and I made a trip to Paris for a long weekend, I had an experience that I couldn’t understand until I began to write this chapter. We arrived from London on a gorgeous, sunny afternoon. We took a leisurely stroll along one of the city’s magnificent boulevards and looked for a place to eat a much-anticipated lunch. At each restaurant we studied the menu posted outside. The first place we saw held out all sorts of enticing possibilities, and I was ready to halt the search right then. But how could we be in Paris and just walk into the first restaurant we encountered? So we kept walking and checked out another. And another. And another. Just about every place we saw seemed wonderful. But after about an hour, and a dozen menus, I found myself losing my appetite. The restaurants we encountered seemed less and less attractive. By the end of an hour, I would have been perfectly happy to skip lunch all together.
I appeared to have discovered a great new dieting technique—satiation by simulation. You just imagine yourself eating dishes you love, and after you’ve imagined enough of them, you start to get full. When the time finally comes to sit down and eat, you don’t have much appetite. In fact what was happening was the buildup of opportunity costs. As I encountered one attractive alternative after another, each new alternative just reduced the potential pleasure I would feel after I made my choice. By the end of the hour, there was no pleasure left to be had.
Clearly, the cumulative opportunity cost of adding options to one’s choice set can reduce satisfaction. It may even make a person miserable. But I think there’s another reason for this decline, one that I can illustrate with the following example: Until recently, I lived in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, the beautiful suburban community that houses the college where I teach. This community had a lot going for it. It was densely green, with many old and magnificent trees. It was peaceful and quiet. It was safe. The schools were good. I could walk to work. In short, it was a fine place to live. But one thing it decidedly did not have going for it was a good video store. There was only a branch of a national chain, and while it offered about a million copies of the latest box-office smash, there were rather slim pickings among less commercial movies or older movies. And the pickings among movies made in a language other than English were almost nonexistent. This created a problem for me, especially when I had to be the one to choose a movie that my family or friends would watch together.
Choosing a movie for others is not my favorite activity (you’ll remember, perhaps, that it’s one of the questions on the Maximization Scale that I showed you in Chapter 4). There is pressure to choose a film that will surprise and delight people. And in my circle, it had become something of a parlor game to make fun of a bad selection and the person responsible for it. On the other hand, the critics back home were only kidding. And more important, even if they were serious, the
y were fully aware that the options at the local video store were profoundly impoverished. So, back in Swarthmore, nobody had high expectations, and nobody seriously faulted the chooser for whatever he came home with.
Then I moved to the heart of downtown Philadelphia. Three blocks from my house is a video store that has everything. Movies from every era, every genre, every country. So now what’s at stake when I go to rent a video for the group? Now whose fault will it be if I bring back something that people regard as a waste of time? Now it is no longer a reflection of the quality of the store. Now it’s a reflection of the quality of my taste. So the availability of many attractive options means that there is no longer any excuse for failure. The blame for a bad choice will rest squarely with me, and the stakes involved in my video choice have escalated.
Even decisions as trivial as renting a video become important if we believe that these decisions are revealing something significant about ourselves.
Choices and Reasons
AS THE STAKES OF DECISIONS RISE, WE FEEL AN INCREASED NEED TO justify them. We feel compelled to articulate—at least to ourselves—why we made a particular choice. This need to search for reasons seems useful; it ought to improve the quality of our choices. But it doesn’t necessarily.
It may seem self-evident that every choice requires a reason, but several recent studies suggest that this simple and straightforward model of decision making isn’t always accurate. In one such study, participants were asked to taste and rank five different kinds of jam. One group was given no instructions to follow. A second group was told to think about their reasons as they were determining their rankings. After the tasting, the experimenters compared the participants’ rankings to those of experts that had been published in Consumer Reports. What the researchers found is that participants who weren’t given instructions produced rankings that were closer to those of experts than participants instructed to think about their reasons. While this result doesn’t necessarily show that thinking about reasons for decisions makes them worse, it does show that thinking about reasons can alter the decisions. This implies that people are not always thinking first and deciding second.
In another study, college students were asked to evaluate five posters of the sort that often decorate dorm rooms. Two represented works of fine art: a Monet and a van Gogh. The other three featured captioned cartoons or photos of animals. Pretesting with other students had determined that most people preferred the van Gogh and the Monet to the kitschy posters of cartoons and animals. In this particular study, half of the people were asked to write a brief essay explaining why they liked or disliked each of the five. They were assured that no one would read what they wrote. The others weren’t given this instruction. The students then rated each of the posters. In addition, when the session was over, the experimenter told them that they could take one of the posters home. Copies of each poster were sitting rolled up in bins, blank side facing out, so that the students didn’t have to worry about their taste being judged by others. Several weeks later, each participant received a phone call. Each was asked how satisfied he or she was with the poster. Did they still have it? Was it hanging on the wall? Were they planning to take it home with them for the summer? Could they be talked into selling it?
The first interesting result of this study was that people asked to write down their thoughts preferred the funny posters to those featuring fine art. In contrast, those who were not asked to write preferred the fine art. Inducing people to give reasons for their preferences, even if only to themselves, seemed to change their preferences. Consistent with this effect, participants who wrote down reasons were more likely to choose a funny poster to take home than those who did not give reasons. But most important, in the follow-up phone call, participants who had written down their reasons were less satisfied with the poster they had chosen than those who did not. They were less likely to have kept the poster, less likely to have it hanging, less likely to want to take it home, and more willing to sell it.
What these studies show is that when people are asked to give reasons for their preferences, they may struggle to find the words. Sometimes aspects of their reaction that are not the most important determinants of their overall feeling are nonetheless easiest to verbalize. People may have less trouble expressing why one poster is funnier than another than why the van Gogh print is more beautiful than the Monet. So they grasp at what they can say, and identify it as the basis for their preference. But once the words are spoken, they take on added significance to the person who spoke them. At the moment of choice, these explicit, verbalized reasons weigh heavily in the decision. As time passes, the reasons that people verbalized fade into the background, and people are left with their unarticulated preferences, which wouldn’t have steered them to the poster they chose. As the salience of the verbalized reasons fades, so, too, does people’s satisfaction with the decision they made.
In a final example, college couples were recruited to participate in a study of the effects of romantic relationships on the college experience. After an initial session in the laboratory, participants filled out a questionnaire about their relationship each week, for four weeks. In the laboratory session, half of the people were asked to fill up a page analyzing the reasons why their relationship with their dating partner was the way it was. The other half filled up a page explaining why they had chosen their major. As you can probably guess, writing about their relationship changed people’s attitudes about it. For some, attitudes became more positive; for others, they became more negative. But they changed. Again, the likely explanation is that what is most easily put into words is not necessarily what is most important. But once aspects of a relationship are put into words, their importance to the verbalizer takes on added significance.
A more optimistic view of this last result is that the process of analyzing a relationship actually produces insight, so that we better understand the true nature of our relationship. But the evidence suggests otherwise. When students who had been asked to analyze their relationships were compared to students not asked to do so, the researchers found that unanalyzed attitudes about the relationship were a better predictor of whether the relationship would still be intact months later than analyzed attitudes. Those who were asked to supply reasons and expressed positive feelings about their relationship were not necessarily still in the relationship six months later. As in the poster study, being asked to give reasons can make unimportant considerations salient temporarily and produce a less, not a more, accurate assessment of how people really feel.
In discussing these studies, I am not suggesting that we will always, or even frequently, be better off “going with our gut” when making choices. What I am suggesting is there are pitfalls to deciding after analyzing. My concern, given the research on trade-offs and opportunity costs, is that as the number of options goes up, the need to provide justifications for decisions also increases. And though this struggle to find reasons will lead to decisions that seem right at the moment, it will not necessarily lead to decisions that feel right later on.
I’m fortunate to teach at a college that attracts some of the most talented young people in the world. While students at many colleges are happy to discover a subject to study that not only do they enjoy but that will enable them to make a living, many of the students I teach have multiple interests and capabilities. These students face the task of deciding on the one thing that they want to do more than anything else. Unconstrained by limitations of talent, the world is open to them. Do they exult in this opportunity? Not most of the ones I talk to. Instead, they agonize: Between making money and doing something of lasting social value. Between challenging their intellects and exercising their creative impulses. Between work that demands single-mindedness and work that will enable them to live balanced lives. Between work they can do in a beautifully pastoral location and work that brings them to a bustling city. Between any work at all and further study. With a decision as important as this, they struggle to fi
nd the reasons that make one choice stand out above all the others.
In addition, because of the flexibility that now characterizes relations among family, friends, and lovers, my students can’t even use obligations to other people as a way to limit their possibilities. Where the people they love are located and how close to them they want to be are just more factors to be entered into the decision, to be traded off against various aspects of the jobs themselves. Everything is up for grabs; almost anything is possible. And each possibility they consider has its attractive features, so that the opportunity costs associated with those attractive options keep mounting up, making the whole decision-making process decidedly unattractive. What, they wonder, is the right thing to do? How can they know?
As this chapter has shown, decisions like these arouse discomfort, and they force indecision. Students take time off, take on odd jobs, try out internships, hoping that the right answer to the “What should I be when I grow up?” question will emerge. One quickly learns that “What are you going to do when you graduate?” is not a question many students are eager to hear, let alone answer. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that my students might be better off with a little less talent or with a little more of a sense that they owed it to their families to settle down back home, or even a dose of Depression-era necessity—take the secure job and get on with it! With fewer options and more constraints, many trade-offs would be eliminated, and there would be less self-doubt, less of an effort to justify decisions, more satisfaction, and less second-guessing of the decisions once made.
The anguish and inertia caused by having too many choices was described in the book Quarterlife Crisis: The Unique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties. Through interviews, the book captures the doubts and regrets that seem to be overwhelming successful young adults. No stability, no certainty, no predictability. Intense self-doubt. People taking longer to settle down.
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