Building on his past research, Schwartz is currently studying how young children learn to make choices and how adults choose medical care. He is also researching how individuals choose their romantic partners. Schwartz lives with his wife in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
About the book
Q&A with Barry Schwartz
Since The Paradox of Choice was originally published in January 2004, I have had many opportunities to discuss the book. I’ve given perhaps twenty lectures, I’ve done about fifty radio and television interviews, and I’ve talked with even more print journalists. Reactions from audiences have been gratifyingly positive. Again and again people tell me that I’ve put my finger on the source of some of their own difficulties, and many have their own version of my shopping for jeans story. Many have follow-up questions, which continue to pour in. I want to share some of the most frequently asked questions and do my best to answer them.
What prompted you to think about the possibility that there is too much choice?
BARRY SCHWARTZ: For many years, I have worried about the enthusiastic embrace of the free market as the magic bullet that will enable people to get exactly what they want in life. I don’t believe the assumptions economists make about how people make decisions. The main virtue of the market, from my point of view, is that it caters to individual freedom of choice. But people are not perfect, “rational choosers” as the economists claim, and that means that we all make bad decisions at least some of the time. In addition, I don’t think the most vital choices—such as education, meaningful work, social relations, medical care, civic life, to name a few—are best addressed by markets. So, in some cases, markets should be restrained, not encouraged. The market has its place, but that place isn’t every place. I wrote a book that made these arguments, The Costs of Living: How Market Freedom Erodes the Best Things in Life, in 1994. It was in the course of writing it that I started thinking seriously about what was good and bad about unlimited freedom of choice. Then, about five years later, I was asked to write a paper for a distinguished psychology journal on the value of autonomy. This got me thinking once again about freedom and choice as they relate to autonomy. Again, I concluded that it might not be true that more choice and more autonomy imply better results. And then one day I went shopping for jeans. The Paradox of Choice started there.
“The market has its place, but that place isn’t every place.”
What percentage of the population consists of maximizers?
BARRY SCHWARTZ: I can’t answer this question. The way our scale works, the higher a person’s score, the greater that person’s tendency to maximize. Because there is no sharp line separating maximizers from satisficers, it is impossible to say what percentage of the population is one or the other.
“And then one day I went shopping for jeans. The Paradox of Choice started there.”
What makes people maximizers?
BARRY SCHWARTZ: We don’t know the answer to this question. It is possible that overwhelming choice contributes to maximizing tendencies. If this is true, individuals in societies that offer less choice might exhibit a lesser tendency to maximize.
How do children learn to make choices?
BARRY SCHWARTZ: I suggest in the book that for most of our history as a species, the kinds of choices we had to make were “Should I approach it or run away from it?” or “Do I eat it or does it eat me?” The idea of multiple, attractive beckoning options is something that is specific to modernity. As adults we have learned (not all too well) how to say no to things we find attractive. Knowing the best way to teach kids how to pass up attractive options would make a real contribution to our understanding of modern parenting and its challenges. We are currently doing research on this very topic.
“Perhaps age and experience teach people to have realistic expectations and to be satisfied with good enough.”
Are men or women more prone to maximizing?
BARRY SCHWARTZ: Though for the most part we have not found gender differences in maximizing, in a few studies, males were shown to have higher maximizing scores than females. This tends to surprise people, mostly because when they think about choice overload they think about shopping and presume that women are fussier than men. First, women may not be fussier than men, despite the stereotype. Also, shopping represents only a fraction of the decisions people are faced with every day.
The one reliable demographic difference we find has to do with age, not gender. The older you are, the less likely you are to be a maximizer. This may help explain a finding that has always surprised me—that older people tend to be happier than those who are younger. Perhaps age and experience teach people to have realistic expectations and to be satisfied with good enough.
Do maximizers maximize about everything? Or do they maximize on only the important things?
BARRY SCHWARTZ: No one is a maximizer when it comes to everything. There are just too many options, too many decisions, and too little time. The people we call “maximizers” simply maximize about more things than “satisficers” do. It might make sense, given that one can’t maximize all the time, that one would elect to be a maximizer about the important things (job, spouse, children, retirement investments, etc.) and be a satisficer when it comes to everything else. We don’t have systematic information with which to evaluate this possibility, but from anecdotal reports I’ve collected from hundreds of people who have communicated with me, it doesn’t seem that maximizing works this way. Many people struggle to find the best cell phone plan, or video rental, and make really big decisions without even considering many alternatives. It may just be too hard to take a maximizing approach to deciding where to go to college, or which job to take.
It’s good news, by the way, that even the most extreme maximizers satisfice about many things. This means that if you want to satisfice more and maximize less, you already know how to do so. You simply need to take decision-making strategies that you already use effectively in some areas of your life and apply them to others.
Is it really true that feeling better about decisions is more important than doing better?
BARRY SCHWARTZ: It may surprise you, but I think the answer is yes, at least for members of the middle and upper middle classes. Once basic needs are taken care of, most of what we do and what we buy is about deriving satisfaction. It doesn’t do much for us to purchase the “best” luxury car if we’re disappointed with it. And getting into the “best” college will not mean much if the experience falls short of expectations. To illustrate this point, I recently completed a study with psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Rachael Elwork in which we followed college seniors over the course of their search for jobs. We discovered that maximizers found better jobs, with higher starting salaries, than satisficers. But we also found that they were less satisfied with their jobs, less satisfied with the job search process, and less happy, less optimistic, more anxious, more stressed, and more depressed than satisficers. Would you rather be happy starting at $37,000 a year or unhappy starting at $45,000? I know what I would choose.
Is the problem of choice overload just a problem for the wealthy?
BARRY SCHWARTZ: It is pretty much true that the more money you have, the more choice overload you face. In the United States, wealth is a proxy for freedom of choice. If you don’t have any discretionary income, it really doesn’t matter how many options there are out there because exercising them is not an option for you. This also pertains to choices that don’t involve money, for if you work to near exhaustion every day just to make ends meet, you don’t have the time or energy to be making many lifestyle improvement decisions. The only reason, I think, the relation between choice overload and wealth isn’t even stronger is that very wealthy people can hire others to make their choices for them, thus reducing the burden.
Would we be better off if most decisions were made for us?
BARRY SCHWARTZ: No. What I am suggesting is that we would be better off if many decisions were made for us. But it is up to us
to decide which ones. We have to “choose when to choose,” as I put it in the book, and choose when to put ourselves in the hands of other people, those who care about our well-being and have the expertise to make good decisions on our behalf.
For example, consider a recent study conducted by my colleague Sheena Iyengar. She studied the rate of participation in voluntary 401(k) plans of more than 750,000 employees at almost one thousand companies. What she found was that for every ten mutual funds offered by the employer, the rate of participation went down 2% percent. At many of these companies, by choosing not to participate, employees were not only creating serious repercussions for their retirement, they were passing up employer-matching funds, which in some cases exceeded $5,000. I have no doubt that employers thought they were doing employees a favor by offering them so many different options. But they weren’t. Most of the employees would have been better off with just a few retirement funds from which to choose than they were with ten, or twenty, or even a hundred. They would have been better off, in other words, if their employers had made some decisions for them to limit the set of investment possibilities.
Is there an “ideal” amount of choice?
BARRY SCHWARTZ: The answer to this question is probably yes, but I don’t know what it is. The optimal amount of choice will no doubt vary from person to person and from situation to situation. I think that in modern America, we have far too many options for breakfast cereal and not enough options for president.
“I think that in modern America, we have far too many options for breakfast cereal and not enough options for president.”
How do we decide which choices to eliminate?
BARRY SCHWARTZ: For the most part, given the society we live in, it is up to us as individuals to decide when, where, and how to simplify our lives and reduce the options we face. As a society, we should be skeptical of policies that promise to improve our lives simply by giving us more options. We may be better off being able to choose where we invest our retirement money, where we send our kids to school, which health insurance or prescription drug plan we sign up for, and so on. But we may be worse off with all these choices. We may lack the expertise to make them wisely, we make lack the time to develop that expertise, and we may already be so overburdened with decisions that adding more will send us over the edge.
“I readily agree that happiness isn’t everything. It isn’t even the most important thing. But all other things being equal, it’s better to be happy than not.”
Your book emphasizes how too much choice reduces happiness. Are we as a society overemphasizing the importance of happiness as a goal?
BARRY SCHWARTZ: I readily agree that happiness isn’t everything. It isn’t even the most important thing. But all other things being equal, it’s better to be happy than not. And happiness isn’t just about feeling good. Despite our romantic images of suffering geniuses who have enriched our civilization, creative by day and tormented by night, there is a growing body of evidence that people think more creatively and expansively when they’re happy than when they’re not. Giving medical residents a little bag of candy unexpectedly before they engage in a difficult differential diagnosis task improves both the speed and the accuracy of their diagnoses (you may want to keep this in mind the next time you visit your doctor). Happy people are more energetic and physically healthier than those who are not. And happiness adds about nine years to life expectancy. So even if you don’t think that happiness is such a big deal in itself, it seems to serve a useful instrumental function. Happy people are more likely than unhappy ones to change the world in positive ways.
Perhaps most important, if you limit the number of choices you make and the number of options you consider, you’re going to have more time available for what’s important than people who are plagued by one decision after another, always in search of the best. You could use that time wisely by getting to know more deeply your lovers, your children, your parents, your friends, your patients, your clients, your students. The real challenge in life is doing the right thing in social interactions. It is knowing how to balance honesty with kindness, courage with caution, encouragement with criticism, empathy with detachment, paternalism with respect for autonomy. We have to figure this balance out case by case, person by person. And the only way to do so is by getting to know the other people you are most closely linked to—by taking the time to listen to them, to imagine life through their eyes, and to allow yourself to be changed—even transformed—by them. In a hurried world that forces you to make decision after decision, each involving almost unlimited options, it’s hard to find the time. You may not always be conscious of this, but your effort to get the best car will interfere with your desire to be a good friend. Your effort to get the best job will intrude on your duty to be the best parent. And so, if the time you save by following some of my suggestions is redirected to the improvement of your relationships with other people in your life, you will not only make your life happier, you will improve theirs. It’s what economists call “Pareto efficient,” a change that benefits everybody.
“You may not always be conscious of this, but your effort to get the best car will interfere with your desire to be a good friend.”
Read on
Further Reading
THE PARADOX OF CHOICE is hardly the last word on the topic of choice and its relation to freedom, autonomy, and well-being. Indeed, in some respects it is the “first word,” and I hope others will scrutinize and evaluate the effects that continued increases in choice have on well-being and on freedom in greater detail than I have been able to do in my book. In writing it, I was influenced by the important work of others, and I recommend several books if you wish to continue reading and thinking about this topic.
On the latest research and thinking about well-being and what promotes it, I suggest Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, edited by Daniel Kahneman, Ed Diener, and Norbert Schwarz. More than thirty leading authorities on this subject from all over the world contributed to this comprehensive collection, and they offer wide-ranging views on the subject.
For a discussion of the relation between material and psychological well-being, I recommend two books: The American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty, by David G. Myers, and The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, by Robert E. Lane. Both books focus on the apparent disconnection between material prosperity and well-being. Myers emphasizes materialism and individualism as sources of many of the problems we face in our modern society. Lane endorses this view but also focuses on how the free market, as our dominant social institution, contributes to them.
For an in-depth, provocative look at the connection between freedom, choice, and economic development, take a look at Development as Freedom, by Amartya Sen. Sen argues that freedom requires more than choice, and that sometimes, excessive choice may be the enemy of freedom, especially when it gets in the way of important economic and social development.
The Practice of Autonomy: Patients, Doctors, and Medical Decisions, by Carl E. Schneider, offers an insightful analysis of choice and autonomy, specifically with respect to the field of medical treatment. Schneider provides a critical evaluation of the reasons behind the ethic of “patient autonomy” that currently dominates our medical establishment, and he provides evidence that patients do not, in general, want all this autonomy when making decisions about their health and the health of their loved ones.
If you are interested in the subject of how excessive choice negatively affects our lives as individuals and want to explore and learn more about how this theory applies to society as a whole, I recommend a book that I wrote before The Paradox of Choice—The Costs of Living: How Market Freedom Erodes the Best Things in Life. In it, I argue—as Robert E. Lane similarly argues in The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies—that embracing the free market as our dominant social institution undermines our own well-being and chips away at what is good about many of the best things in life. On the same subject, readers sho
uld consult Social Limits to Growth, by Fred Hirsch, Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action, by Albert O. Hirschman, and Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets, by Robert Kuttner.
I also want to recommend a book that would have influenced my own except that it was published only a month or so before Paradox of Choice came out. In The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse, Gregg Easterbrook argues that by almost every imaginable measure of well-being, both material and social, Americans should be getting happier and happier. The “paradox” is that while these objective measures keep going up, subjective well-being seems to be going down. Easterbrook’s analysis of this paradox suggests that we “should” be happier than we are, but perhaps not as happy as objective indices might lead us to predict.
Finally, for those who are still looking for a possible explanation of why we are not feeling as happy as we should be given all that we have, I recommend Authentic Happiness, by Martin E.P. Seligman. This book is an accessible introduction to a new movement in psychology known as “positive psychology,” which seeks to understand and make use of human strengths and satisfactions rather than human weaknesses and miseries.
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