The paradox of choice

The podcast about ‘The paradox of choice’ of Barry Schwartz lets some interesting ideas related to what he calls the ‘official dogma’ of thinking that having a lot of choice it’s better than not having that much choice. He talks several times about freedom, welfare, expectations, etc. and this is why (before going further in the topic) I would like to give the definition of freedom that gives Jorge Bucay, a famous argentine writer, which I think it’s appropriate:  freedom is the capacity of choose in between the possibilities we have, over what is possible.

It’s a fact that in today’s world we have a lot more options, related to products or services, than the ones we had years ago. And this is one of the reasons of today’s consumerism, the whole branch of things we can purchase and with some help of the communication media the consumerism has been spread worldwide. But in the other hand having too many choices it is true that affects to our satisfaction in the consuming experience. As Mr. Schwartz says in the podcast, having some choice it’s better than none, but its not true that having more must be better than some.

With this word the author is relating to how having so many choices to make affect our decision when we purchase, and definitively affects to our satisfaction once we have consumed the product/service itself. When we don’t have many options where to choose from we just take the decision and feel good with the consequences, like in the examples of the jeans that is given in the video. When we have a lot of choices to make, apart from making the decision harder, creates in us some kind of anxiety that makes us feel worse although the decision taken is correct, having too many choices makes the decision hard (paralysis).

In this way, a lot of times having many choices or decisions to take makes us not even taking the choice. If you start to think in your last purchases, it is true that a lot of times the ones you feel that were the best ones where those you made forced for many reasons. I like the paradox B. Schwartz makes about everyone needing a fishbowl, because for us to make a decision, we need some rules to follow or at least some barriers inside which to be free to make our choice.

As personal experience of being a victim of the paradox of choice, comes to the top of my head the one I experienced just a few weeks ago when I got to the room where I was going to live during the next 4 months as an exchange student in Austin. We (my roommate and I) realized that we didn’t have sheets on our beds so we decided to go to Target and buy our sheets. The problem came when we got to Target and there were 4 corridors full of different kinds of sheets. After deciding that of course the size mattered, we thought going to the cheap ones could be another good idea of deciding which ones to take but there were about 20 different types in the same range of money to spend. What happened at last, is that after half an hour thinking which ones to buy we finally went with the ones we had seen first and when we got to our room with our brand new sheets we realized that we had mistaken with sizes…

Finalizing this mix up of ideas, it can be true that having many choices between to choose from can increase paralysis, and it’s this paralysis the one that decreases the satisfaction we have. Anyway, I don’t share with the author that the secret of happiness is having low expectations because in a punctual experience can be true that it works, but it’s the freedom we have to make our own expectations and how we deal with them afterwards what makes us truly satisfied in the end.