An Interview on 'The Paradox of Choice' with Barry Schwartz

by Elizabeth Cosgriff

Barry Schwartz is the Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including his most recent book, The Paradox of Choice, which has generated a great deal of attention. A brief summary of this book is provided below, followed by an interview with Professor Schwartz.

Americans today are faced with a bewildering, not to say overwhelming, variety of choices in many areas of our lives. Food, electronics, entertainment, utilities, college courses, retirement plans, medical care, job choices, religious observance, love interests, -- even decisions about how we identify ourselves, and, with the advent of cosmetic surgery, about how we want to look -- all confront us with an unprecedented number of options. Although we have traditionally, and correctly, viewed having choices as essential to our well-being by improving the quality of our lives and enabling us to control our destinies, Professor Schwartz argues that we have reached the point where we have too much of a good thing. Americans' love of freedom, self-determination, and variety has a downside.

Making decisions is difficult, and the more choices we have, the more difficult it becomes. We come to feel overloaded by the number of options, unable to cope. Too many choices also increase our regret for all the options we didn't choose, and make us more disappointed with ourselves if our decisions turn out badly. Additionally, the time we devote to making decisions decreases the time we have to spend on other aspects of life, such as forming close relationships. Professor Schwartz prescribes some attitudinal adjustments that he says will help us deal with this overload, including "choosing when to choose," being satisfied with "good enough," and controlling our expectations. This is an unusual message for our society, but the enthusiastic reception of The Paradox of Choice indicates that it resonates with a number of people.

BARRY SCHWARTZ INTERVIEW

E Why did you write The Paradox of Choice?

B That's a simple question with a complicated answer. For 25 years I have been working on the ideology that the magic of the market is the solution to all problems. But what occurred to me was: why would anyone think that the market is such a wonderful device for achieving happiness? And more and more it seemed to me the central thing that people liked so much about it is the freedom of choice it provides. It's not the most efficient, but it lets everybody get what they want, and what could be more important than that? So I started asking whether this freedom of choice was just an unequivocal, unalloyed good, and then a paper came out about five years ago [by Drs. Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper] that reported on this study where they showed that when you give people lots of choices of jam to try they are very attracted, but they don't buy.

For about 40 years psychologists had studied the benefits of choice, comparing, say, two options to only one, and people were always happier when they had two rather than one. It never occurred to anyone to ask about three, or four, or five, but it turns out that if the options get large enough the good news turns to bad news. So that's what got me to focus specifically on choice and what it might be about choice that could produce negative rather than positive psychological consequences.

So my colleague and I devised a scale that measures people's orientation to making choices, whether they want the best or just good enough, and did some research on that. Meanwhile other research consistently showed that there's some number after which adding options makes it less likely people will choose anything.

E Do you have a specific number for that?

B No, there's no right number of choices. Two different things are going on: One of them is, the greater the number of options, the more likely you are to find something that suits your desires, so that's what's good about it. But probably a point is reached at which additional options don't add much. Because one of the eight is good enough. And when you add more options, you don't produce much more additional benefit in being able to select what you want, and all of the negative effects -- difficulty choosing, regret, missed opportunity -- add up, and you start to pay a price. This one guy did a study with pens, where people got to choose a pen from 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, or 20, and what he found was that optimum satisfaction with the choice seemed to occur between 8 and 12.. So that's a ballpark number for ballpoint pens, but for dishes on a restaurant menu, the number could be different.

E In the area of consumer goods, given that it is market-driven, is there any end in sight?

B Yes, actually. This may be optimistic on my part, but in the 2 1/2 years since The Paradox of Choice came out, I must have given talks at 30 or 40 commercial industry-type organizations, and every time I've given a talk almost everyone in the room agrees that I have identified a problem; they can see in their own lives and in what they sell. So the task then becomes, "How do we fix this? What do we do about it?" And that suggests to me that there will be entrants into the marketplace that actually try to make life easier for consumers rather than torturing them with lots of options. The model was customization: there should be a version of X for everyone, no matter how weird your taste is. Now there will be more and more sensitivity to making the decision easier for people. Which means more structuring of the possibilities so we don't have to look at all hundred of them; we can look at five. You can answer one question: "Do you want a fuel-efficient car or a powerful car? Then you answer another question: "Do you want an American car or a foreign car?" So you're always making binary decisions or decisions between two or three things, and not between the hundred. In that way you make the choice problem less acute. So I'm optimistic that people who do take initiative in that direction will start stealing business from places that don't, and over time, even in something like the marketplace, there will be a movement away from what we now experience toward something that's a little less insane.

E Do you know of any actual examples of this?

B I know of a few places where they're committed to doing this. The problem, of course, is that there are many slips between what I say, what they hear, and what they do. So what it will end up turning out to look like may not be what I would have designed. A very large consumer electronics chain is taken with the ideas, and thinks that it really needs to re-brand itself as the place that has the solution to your problem, rather than as the place that has everything under the sun. There's a large retailer of office supplies that is similarly committed now to reducing the number of options in paper clips, printer paper, etc.

E That's fascinating. Such a paradigm shift.

B It is a complete paradigm shift. The standard model of retailing is not to let anyone walk out of the store empty-handed, and that means you have to have something for everybody. And what people didn't appreciate is that, yes, if you don't have something for everybody some people will leave with nothing, but meanwhile, people who leave with something leave with greater satisfaction than they would if you made it so hard for them. There are some clear examples of this working. There's a supermarket chain called Trader Joe's -- it's the fastest-growing supermarket in the United States . One reason, I think, is that they have very limited selection. The big box store Costco is the store that people leave happiest. And they too, unlike Wal-Mart, have very limited selection. They only have two or three kinds of toilet paper. Plus you have to buy a package of 4,000 rolls! But people walk out of there happy, because they're getting good prices; they haven't gone to the fifteenth level of hell to go shopping; and so they find the experience positive. I don't think it occurred to people prior The Paradox of Choice that one of the reasons Costco makes people happy and the reason Trader Joe's is so successful is that limited variety. And with those as models, we might well see limited choice start to spread to others.

I've given talks to web and technology developers, and what they hear is that the task for the future of technology is designing intelligent filters for search engines -- Google on steroids. So that no matter how many things are out there in the world you can look at them through a filter that only shows you the four or five you ought to care about. So it's as if there only are four or five. The other ones will just be invisible. They've already done the job of making every imaginable piece of information accessible. Now the trick is to help you manage all of that information, including hiding a lot of it. If that actually comes to pass, at least for online retailers it will solve the problem.

E One thing you said that I found very interesting was that on a personal level people aren't necessarily good at making choices. You said one of the problems with having too many options is that it leads you to make choices that don't really reflect your highest values. Do you have any more examples of that?

B Yes, one is in the case of choosing romantic partners, where, when you meet a lot of people you end up choosing on the basis of the easiest to assess criteria, which is physical attractiveness, which you know is not what you care most about. Another is in choosing investment options. When there is a large number of alternatives of stock funds, people who know that it's foolish to choose none of them, or to choose not to invest, still manage to choose none of the stock funds, but put their money into a money market fund, which pays three-quarters of one percent interest, so it's certainly the worst investment you can make if you're 30 years old and putting money away for your retirement, but it's better than doing nothing.

The general point -- and it hasn't been well studied yet -- is that if it's a complicated decision you might be able to make it well if there aren't too many options -- Complicated meaning that there are many dimensions to the choice. But if there aren't many options you can maybe give a full assessment of all of the options, considering all of the criteria. If it's a simple decision, then it doesn't maybe matter how many options there are. You can just apply your standard, whatever it is, to everything. If all you care about is fuel efficiency, you can rank all of the cars in the world by that one thing. And the more cars there are, the better, because the more likelihood you'll find that one car that gets 80 miles to the gallon, and you just pick the most efficient one, no problem. But if there are many dimensions that matter and many options that matter it now becomes a task that exceeds our capacity. And either you reduce the choice set, which people tend not to do, or you reduce the features that you evaluate, which is what people tend to do, though they don't necessarily realize that they're doing it. So they'll make a decision that's the best they can do under the circumstances, but really not the best they can do, and not a reflection of the things they care most about. So they'll end up regretting the decision in the light of the next day.

E Do you think people in their 20s and 30s are having more problems than earlier generations in making some of these major life decisions -- are putting off choosing a career, a mate -- some of those really big decisions?

B The answer to that in my own personal experience is unequivocally yes. Whether there is systematic research data indicating that my impression is correct I don't know. But I find that kids have an incredibly hard time making important life decisions and the more talented they are the worse it is. Because if you're very talented and have cultivated many of those talents you are both interested in a lot of things and good at a lot of things. And that means you're going to have to say good-bye to things that you're good at and that you like, when you finally decide what your grown-up life's going to look like. I think it's totally debilitating, and people graduate from college and start what they think is going to be a year but often extends into the indefinite future trying to figure out what to do. And this is a reflection of all the choice that is available to people not in the domain of goods, but of lifestyle. "What kind of person am I going to be, where am I going to live, anything is possible. This is one of the benefits of freedom and affluence, I should take advantage of all that." But then the time comes to choose and people don't know how to choose.

E Do you think it's worse now?

B I think it's worse now than it's been since I've been teaching. It's a nice steady progression; it just keeps getting worse. Everyone just takes it for granted that they're going to make a living. The question is, which job? Where? A depression would change all of that and makes the question: Am I going to be able to pay my bills and support my family? You take the first thing that comes along. It's even possible that people would be more satisfied with the work they do, even though they've been almost coerced into doing, it than they are now, when they're always looking over their shoulders and thinking about whether this other career path would have been more satisfying.

E Looking at how we make decisions, it seems that in our political discourse things have gotten so polarized that people tend only to go to news sources that have the viewpoint they already believe in, and talk to persons of similar viewpoints.

B This is another consequence of choice that I think is a civic disaster. We have choice in media in a way that we didn't before, and what's good about that is clear -- you get to listen to just the kind of music you like, and just the kind of political commentary you like. What's bad about it is that people are no longer forced to encounter an idea they disagree with. And what that means is that where on earth are people ever going to change their minds about anything? Wherever are they going to find common ground with their opponents so that they can get to some agreement at a higher level? It's not going to happen; there's no need for it to happen. When everyone was watching the network news, conservatives and liberals alike get hit in the face with things that neither of them was happy about. And either a new understanding and a new set of aspirations come out of that, or they remain unhappy -- sometimes there are problems that can't be fixed. But now that just doesn't happen. And I think this is very bad news, and it creates a poorly informed public, and it creates polarization.

E There are interesting trends going on. Because there is a consolidation of media outlets in the hands of fewer owners. Yet on the other hand, you have this explosion of Internet blogs and websites.

B There's no question that there's massive concentration of ownership of traditional media. The only reason people are not completely distressed by this is they think the new technology provides an outlet that's much broader than ever existed before. There are no barriers to entry. You don't need three million dollars to set up a station; all you need is a web cam and the world can hear you. The problem is, when there are only a few web logs, people might notice them. When there are several million of them, there might just as well be none, and some research has been done that shows that as the number of these non-traditional outlets increases, people become more and more likely to go to the computer versions of mainstream outlets. So you will go to USAtoday.com, instead of some other source of news that you've not heard of. And where there are a million of these sources of news, USA Today gets a bigger share, because you use that as a way of filtering: "Which of these thousand web logs should I go to? Well, I'll go to one I've heard of; they must be more reliable, they've had a presence in the world of journalism for a long time." You get further concentration on this web outlet of traditional media. So it ends up that they're all out there, these million blogs, but the only people who read them are the parents of the people who write them.

E Why are there class differences in how people perceive choice?

B One possibility is that for people in the upper classes, choice is mostly a good thing, that is to say, the consequences of choosing. You get to make good choices among good alternatives. And so there's no down side, no loss of security, in choosing, and there's a huge upside. Among the working class the choices they get faced with are often choices among mediocre or worse alternatives so there's nothing great in being able to choose. And meanwhile the price they pay for having all of this choice is that their security, which is precarious, is compromised. Because there is a price for choice. No one is guaranteeing you what you need to survive. The choices are out there and if you make mistakes, you may fall through the bottom. Given that choice is among not really attractive alternatives, it's not a price worth paying. The other thing is that the aspirations of educated classes in this country are all about self-expression and self-individuation and self-actualization. That is the highest good, to be able to cultivate and to display my uniqueness. For the working class, uniqueness is not a good thing, necessarily. They're more interested in fitting in to a community with whom they have common values. So self-expression is just not what they think life is about. It's about being true to the things you think are important, and taking care of the people who are close to you. And they want freedom to do that -- that's why they want the government off their necks, so they can live according to the values that they aspire to. But they're happy, not sad, if the person living next to them shares the same values and wants the same things. It affirms their values, and uniqueness is just a non-issue.

I also think that this distinction between different senses of what freedom means goes a long way towards explaining this great big red state/blue state divide, or at least red voter/blue voter. Because this notion of self-expression, that's what captures this educated elite that tends to be Democratic. And the red state commitment to values and religious institutions, I think deep down what that's revealing is this freedom is about being able to live life the right way, and not about being able to express yourself.

E But we all value autonomy; we all want to be left alone to make these big decisions for ourselves, like who we're going to marry.

B Well, yes and no. Here's the problem: a liberal from New York might say, "Listen, I'm not telling the people in Montana how to live their lives; I just don't want them telling me how to live mine. So how about not legislating But I think what that under-appreciates is the extent to which the existence of certain practices threatens other practices. So it really is a threat if you live in Montana that there are large numbers of people living lives that are fundamentally different from the way you think people should live. It threatens the security, in your mind, of being able to live according to your values. And even if you're not so worried about its having an effect on you you're sure worried about its having an effect on your children. You've got to work harder to instill your values in your kids. So it's not really let's just leave each other alone. That's too simple. I don't know how you resolve it. It may be that you can stop the nuclear weapons, but the basic hostility will always be there. The only end in sight would be a real national crisis. These are the kinds of disagreements that people only have the luxury to express when the basic stuff is working. But I don't want the answer to this to be that the only way to reproduce a kind of national civil conversation is for us to suffer as a nation.

E I have one other major question. You said that what makes people happiest is close relationships, not having things, even though these relationships constrain our choices. But don't relationships also expand our choices -- in a superficial way, by people giving us information about movies to see, places to vacation, etc. -- and also in a more profound way, by giving us a chance to experience the world through other eyes, and see other ways of viewing things?

B I think you're right. That's sort of available to us anyway, but we don't take advantage of it. We live in a society with a lot of people, and we can see the world through other eyes without having a close relationship, but we don't. And we can't see the world in a detailed and subtle way through other eyes unless we know what's behind those other eyes pretty well. It does increase our appreciation of what else is out there. But it also really limits the possibilities that are open to us because we're not just deciding for ourselves, we're deciding for a larger unit, and we have to consider what's in the interest of this larger unit.

E So you're talking about family.

B Family, or community. You're really attached to your local community so you won't consider a job that requires you to relocate. And all of a sudden a set of job possibilities has been reduced from a very large number to a much smaller number. And I think in the modern world the constraint is much bigger than the expansion, and that the constraint is a blessing rather than a curse. In the olden days, I believe, the importance of close relations to other people, despite the fact that it limited choice, was testimony to how valuable those relationships are. But now I don't think I would use the word despite. I think some people appreciate the constraints that other people impose on them. It actually makes it possible for them to figure out what they're going to do tomorrow. It's the students who are closest to their families for whom the "What am I going to do when I graduate from college?" question is the easiest to answer. They're going to stay in the area, or their aspirations about what their lives are going to look like are very significantly influenced by what their family aspirations were, so they aren't considering all of the possibilities, or they are only considering a small subset of the possibilities that they know their parents would approve of, or value It's not, literally, "this is what my parents expect me to do so I'll do it." That may have been true 40 years ago, not now. It's more that there is a kind of model of what a good life is that your parents inculcate, and that you want to try and live out. And that reduces the set of possibilities dramatically, and you're not so much interested in self-expression as you are in living out a set of values. I don't have evidence that this is true, but that's what I think is going on. So in the modern world where everything is possible, constraints become a good thing and you don't resent being limited by your social entanglements, you appreciate being limited by them. I think that the expansion of the world that you're talking about is modest in comparison with the contraction of the world that I'm talking about. If your first question is, "How's my spouse, parents, whatever going to react if I move to the other side of the country?"

E You ended your book with some prescriptions for how to manage choice. Do you think it's realistic to expect that people will voluntarily limit themselves in these ways?

B I don't know the answer to that. I tend not to make these suggestions when I give talks, because they're a little facile. And the reason they're facile is that I don't know if they're implementable. For example, one of my main messages is learn that good enough is good enough, and that all by itself will make the impossibility of choosing much less acute a problem. I believe that's doable, because I think everyone chooses "good enough" some of the time. And the people who are tortured by choice are the ones who more often feel like they have to make the best decision. Nobody feels like they have to do it all of the time, and nobody feels like they don't have to do it any of the time. So we've got a whole distribution, and we know how to settle for good enough. And the task, then, is simply to take strategies we already use and apply them in other areas of our lives. That strikes me as not such a hard thing to do, although in the short run it will probably feel uncomfortable if you start settling for good enough in areas where you used to insist on the best. In the longer run you'll discover you get just as much satisfaction out of your choices, it takes less time, there's less looking over your shoulder, worrying that you might have made a mistake, and so on. I'm confident that it can work, but it's not like taking a pill. It takes practice, and in the short run a little bit of pain.

And this business of being grateful for what's good in your decisions instead of focusing on what's disappointing, that suggestion comes from research that other people have done. And it's not going to make the choosing easier, but it's going to make the level of satisfaction with choices higher, because you'll asking "what was good in this choice?" not "what was bad in this choice?" and that makes a big difference. Now, it's insulting to suggest this to people because everyone agrees, "I know I have so much to be grateful for." The problem is that that sentence lives up here in the clouds, and minute by minute and day by day what you're thinking about is what you're disappointed with. And the idea that you actually need to cultivate the habit of being grateful is anathema to people, but it seems to work. You practice it, it gets easier and easier, and everything about your life gets better. So I think it's doable because people have actually done studies that show it can be done.

Also, it's not so hard if you think about it, to ask other people to choose on your behalf. Choose when to choose. And in some cases, just call up a friend and say, "I'm in the market for a camera, what should I buy?" and then just buy it. Relieve yourself of the burden. This has to go hand-in-hand with being satisfied with good enough because chances are that your friend's criteria and standards won't match yours, so you'll almost certainly do better if you do the searching on your own. I bought a digital camera this way. The advice I got was from a serious photographer, so I knew the camera I was buying was a better camera than I needed. But it was just a no-brainer. "Yes, I'm spending $50 more than I need to and getting a better camera than I need, and I'm spending no time deciding . I don't have to look at 500 different digital cameras and figure out which is the right one." I'm in a position where I can afford to waste $50; if I weren't it would be a different story. But I'm willing to pay money for time and peace of mind, in a heartbeat. So I think those are implementable.

What's disappointing about all that is all the recommendations in The Paradox of Choice are focused on what you as an individual can do, and there's no discussion on systemic changes. This is quite deliberate; my other books, which nobody bought, were all about systemic changes. That's not the way Americans think about the world. They are interested in how I, tomorrow, can make a better life.

E An example of our individualism.

B Absolutely. They're very suspicious of analyses at the institutional level, or mass historical trends, and they just go to sleep at proposals to transform this or that institution. So I obviously think that if you get over the ideology that choice is good, you will not throw choices at people in areas of life where they don't currently have them, on the assumption that just by giving them choice you've made them better off. Social Security privatization, the Medicare prescription drug plan, these are wonderful examples of wrong-headed thinking applied in places where it doesn't belong. I think the same thing is true of school choice. That's a tough one, because you want people to have choice if their neighborhood school is a disaster, which it often is, and it might even be in this case that if you give people choice competition will force the worst offenders to get better. Which is one argument for it. So it's not necessarily a bad idea. But it's certainly not automatically a good idea because "choice is good." So I think at the institutional level we can be much more careful before we solve social problems simply by offering options rather than fixing the existing thing that everybody has to experience. And my preference would be to do it that way, not the options way. It's really just abdicating responsibility.

E Some states have a very active and long tradition of public referenda. The legislature can refer issues to the voters, or the voters can on their own initiative put issues on the ballot. Sometimes it did seem to me to be abdication of responsibility on the part of the legislature, or people would pass all of these measures without having to decide how their impact would fit into the overall budget.

B It's a tough thing, because there's a real tension, I think, that we won't face collectively, between democratic and effective. "The people know what they want" is the assumption. Well first, we don't even know as individuals what we want. We certainly don't know what the collective wants. And, we're not in a position to anticipate the consequences of some sort of social transformation. We can't look twenty years down the road. We don't see how this issue intersects with all these other issues. It takes experts to do that, and that's what the legislators are supposed to be. The old model was not direct democracy. You elect people, and then they do what's in your interest, and you trust them. And if you lose trust in them, you throw them out. But you don't expect to be telling them what to do. You're electing judgment; you're not electing a specific thing. And I think partly as a sign of how little confidence we have in elected officials, people want to take it into their own hands more and more. But if you say this is craziness, or inefficient, or leads to terrible policies, it's like you're criticizing democracy. So it's a hard sell. California had the best education system in the United States, and then they had this enormous cutback in real estate taxes, and they went from having the best public education system to the worst in a decade.

E Where are you going from here?

B With a colleague in political science I'm now working on a book on wisdom. We've taught a course on this, called "Practical Wisdom," and it's an attempt to argue that there is no set of rules for regulating the behavior of individuals, or the behavior of professionals, that is good enough to substitute for good judgment and good character. This was Aristotle's view, and we think he was right. So the question then becomes how do you nurture good judgment and good character? What are the impediments to these in modern social institutions? And the argument we make is that every day it gets harder to be wise, and harder to display this. For example, doctors now get to spend seven minutes with a patient instead of a half hour, so they don't know the patient enough to use their judgment, because judgment is an individual thing. What do you need? Do I tell you the straight truth, or do I sugarcoat it? I need to know you to know how to approach you, so instead I just follow the rule that says, "Tell all your patients the truth." And it's a poor substitute for judgment. Even good rules are sort of like road maps that get you to the city but don't get you to the street. And so we face lots of decisions, lots of choices, paradoxically, in the way we relate to one another, and there's no substitute for making those choices. But we're so busy making choices about toothpaste and salad dressing that we don't have the time to devote to getting to know other people well enough so that we can make the choices in an area of life where there is no substitute for choosing.