Notes from The Paradox of Choice

_The Paradox of Choice_ has been on my radar for a long time ([over a year](http://ryskamp.org/brain/design/paradox-of-web-choice)), but I just recently read it. What took so long? Well, I had so many books on my shelf waiting to be read…and because there were so many I couldn’t pick just one to read. What if I was missing out by choosing the wrong one?

This is exactly the problem that Barry Schwartz takes on in the book. In a time and place of unbounded opportunity, what explains the fact that people are more dissatisfied with their choices than ever? It should be clear from the failure of Communism that choice is a good thing, so America’s “land of opportunity” should be the happiest place on earth. If some choice is good, more choice is better, right? (See the definition of “hedonic lag” below…)

Schwartz argues that the glut of choices available to us in fact makes us less happy. Not only are we burdened with more decisions than ever, we are constantly reminded by friends, family, and the media about what we’re missing out on by selecting the options we do.

Sure, there are many wonderful things out there–but does considering them all as options, even when we pick “the best one”, actually make us happier? Schwartz argues that it usually doesn’t, and offers up remarkably pragmatic solutions to reduce the stress that choice places on our lives.

In the end, extremists like myself have the most to change. There isn’t a hard and fast rule to always or never allow choice. Some choice is better than no choice; infinite choice is usually worse than a little choice. And sometimes you _do_ have to maximize your choices, out of responsibility to yourself or others. But the ultimate lesson is to choose your battles because you can’t fight them all, and be grateful for the things you do win, rather than regretting the things you don’t.

### Lessons for me

* Limit the choices you provide in designs and products. Providing too many choices can paralyze people who would otherwise buy or choose something.

* Yet totally limiting choice can make people feel hedged in. There’s a lesson here somewhere that the balance between absolute focus on the “best” product design is at heads with the fact that people want some choice. (Apple?)

* Realize that possessing something warps your perceptions of it. To decide impartially on something, make sure you don’t own it.

* Design for the “peak” experience and also the “end” experience. That’s what people will remember.

* Take more positive risks–we’re programmed to be hesitant toward possible gain and risky about losses. Be riskier when taking on new things.

* Work with constraints — they force you to limit your choices and focus you on what’s important.

### Notes

Isaiah Berlin was apparently the source of the distinction between “negative liberty” and “positive liberty”.

> “Negative liberty is ‘freedom from’–freedom from constraint, freedom from being told what to do by others. Positive liberty is ‘freedom to’–the availability of opportunities to be the author of your life and to make it meaningful and significant.” – 3

Big idea:

> “I believe that many modern Americans are feeling less and less satisfied even as their freedom of choice expands.” – 4

Schwartz’s 5 hypotheses about choice:

> 1. We would be better off if we embraced certain voluntary constraints on our freedom of choice, instead of rebelling against them.

> 2. We would be better off seeking what was “good enough” instead of seeking the best.

> 3. We would be better off if we lowered our expectations about the results of decisions.

> 4. We would be better off if the decisions we make were nonreversible.

> 5. We would be better off if we paid less attention to what others around us were doing. – 5

Kind of like Kurt’s reasoning for reading Harry Potter–media creates shared experiences. Are the gains from personalization worth the loss of community?

> So the TV experience is now the very essence of choice without boundaries…like the college freshmen struggling in vain to find a shared intellectual experience, American TV viewers will be struggling to find a shared TV experience. – 18

The benefits of being an “automaton”:

> So deeply ingrained, so habitual, so automatic, are these morning activities that you don’t really contemplate the alternatives…you’re an automaton. This is a very good thing. The burden of having every activity be a matter of deliberate and conscious choice would be too much for any of us to bear. *The transformation of choice in modern life is that choice in many facets of life has gone from implicit and often psychologically unreal to explicit and psychologically very real.* So we now face a demand to make choices that is unparalleled in human history. – 43

Why it’s hard to know what you want:

> But knowing what we want means, in essence, being able to anticipate accurately how one choice or another will make us feel, and that is no simple task. – 48

Since our experience _is_ our memories, it’s important to optimize our experiences _for_ our memories:

> Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues have shown that what we remember about the pleasurable quality of our past experiences is almost entirely determined by two things: how the experiences felt when they were at their peak (best or worst), and how they felt when they ended. This “peak-end” rule of Kahneman’s is what we use to summarize the experience, and then we rely on that summary later to remind ourselves of how the experience felt. – 49

Another argument for only buying your favorite things:

> People who do their grocery shopping once a week succumb to the same erroneous prediction. Instead of buying several packages of their favorite X or Y, they buy a variety of Xs and Ys, failing to predict accurately that when the time comes to eat X or Y, they would almost certainly prefer their favorite. – 52

We just can’t predict or remember what makes us truly happy.

> So it seems that neither our predictions about how we will feel after an experience nor our memories of how we _did_ feel during the experience are very accurate reflections of how we actually _do_ feel while the experience is occurring. And yet it is memories of the past and expectations for the future that govern our choices. – 52

Our experiences are usually biased toward the sensational due to the media…but since we each consume different media the extremes can cancel each other out. The strength of Google News…

> What they found was that the frequency of newspaper coverage and the respondents’ estimates of the frequency of death were almost perfectly correlated…We are all susceptible to making errors, but we’re not each susceptible to making the )same) errors, because our experiences are different. As long as we include social interactions in our information gathering, and as long as our sources of information are diverse, we can probably steer clear of the worst pitfalls. – 60

Choosing with risks involved gets interesting–we will conserve our gains but risk against sure losses.

> Most of us, for example, will choose a sure $100 over a coin flip that determines whether we win $200 or nothing…[but] we will choose a coin flip that determines whether we lose $200 or nothing over a sure loss of $100. – 65

Defn: _Prospect theory_: We prefer a gain that is certain more than a gain that is less than certain, even when the expected value of each is the same. The opposite is even more true for losses: we much prefer a loss that is less certain to a loss that is certain, again even when the expected value of each is the same. (http://changingminds.org/explanations/theories/prospect_theory.htm)

Defn: _Prospect theory_: Evaluations are relative to a baseline. A given experience will feel positive if it’s an improvement on what came before and negative if it’s worse than what came before. – 184

Defn: _Risk aversion_: Our tendency to avoid risks to our gains – 69

Defn: _Loss aversion_: Our tendency to take risks to avoid losses – 70

Defn: _Endowment effect_: The fact that once we possess something, we value it more than before we possessed it (because a loss of something we already _have_ is bigger than the gain of the same thing when we don’t have it) – 71

Defn: _Maximizer_: Someone who seeks and accepts only the best – 77

Defn: _Satisficer_: Someone who settles for something that is good enough and doesn’t worry about the possibility that there might be something better. – 78

The real problem with maximizing:

> Maximizers savor positive events less than satisficers and do not cope as well (by their own admission) with negative events. – 84

To let our decisions give us the best experiences, we need to first decide what is important to us in the decision.

> We have to ask ourselves what counts when we assess the quality of a decision. Is it _objective results_ or _subjective experiences_? What matters to us most of the time, I think, is how we feel about the decisions we make. – 88

My main objection to maximizing:

> Time spent dealing with choice is time taken away from being a good friend, a good spouse, a good parent, and a good congregant. – 111

Opportunity costs of buying a house; of course if you don’t do anything else with the money then you _are_ better off buying a house.

> What buyers leave out of this line of reasoning is the opportunity cost of putting that $50,000 [down payment] into the house. What else could you do with it? You could put that $50,000 into stocks or Treasury Bills, or you could use it to finish law school and increase your earnings, or you could travel around the world and write that novel that you hope will utterly change your life…” – 120

But opportunity costs can be twisted in our minds to promise more than they could deliver.

> The existence of multiple alternatives makes it easy for use to imagine alternatives that don’t exist–alternatives that combine the attractive features of the ones that do exist…So, once again, a greater variety of choices actually makes us feel worse. – 122

Interesting effect of comparisons on value of individual items:

> When [items] are evaluated as part of a group, each of them will both gain _and_ lose from the comparisons. And because the losses will loom larger than the gains, the net result of the comparison will be negative. Bottom line–the options we consider usually suffer from comparison with other options. – 131

How our grasp of language and making verbal commitments affects our decision-making (like why people “didn’t like” the Aeron chair, and Cialdini’s commitment principle):

> 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…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, the explicit, verbalized reasons weight heavily in the decision. – 139

Why young people (mid-20s =) don’t like having so many options:

> “What happens when you have too many options is that you are responsible for what happens to you.” – 142

But for most of human history, this was not a problem.

> Instead of “Should I take A or B or C or…?” the question people asked themselves was more like “Should I take it or leave it?” – 142

Defn:_Counterfactual thinking_: Thinking about the world as it isn’t, but might be or might have been. – 152

Regret is a powerful adversary, but it can be harnessed by choosing instead to reflect on what _did_ go right.

> The lesson is that we should try to do more _downward_ counterfactual thinking. While upward counterfactual thinking may inspire us to do better the next time, downward counterfactual thinking may induce us to be grateful for how well we did this time. – 154

Of course, all this belly-button gazing–how happy am I, how can I optimize my happiness in my decisions–isn’t everything, and what’s good for the individual may not be the same thing that’s good for the world.

> Happiness isn’t everything. Subjective experience is not the only reason we have for existing. Careful, well-researched, and labor-intensive decision may product better objective results than impulsive decisions. A worlds with multiple options may make possible better objective choices than a world with few options. But at the same time, happiness doesn’t count for nothing… – 177

But it may help put you in a better position to contribute to the world.

> Individuals who regularly experience and express gratitude are physically healthier, more optimistic about the future, and feel better about their lives than those who do not. Individuals who experience gratitude are more alert, enthusiastic, and energetic than those who do not, and they are more likely to achieve personal goals. – 179

Why it’s important to control your expectations.

> We probably can do more to affect the quality of our lives by controlling our expectations than we can by doing virtually anything else…One way of achieving this goal is by keeping wonderful experiences rare. No matter what you can afford, save great wine for special occasions…This may seem like an exercise in self-denial, but i don’t think it is. On the contrary, it’s a way to make sure that you can continue to experience pleasure. – 187

Comparing yourself to “the Joneses” doesn’t ever help you.

> Certainly, it is safe to say that, based on available research, social comparison does nothing to improve one’s satisfaction with the choices one makes.

Defn: _Hedonic lag_: The tendency of every culture to persist in valuing the qualities that made it distinctively great long after they have lost their hedonic yield. (Rober Lane) e.g. if a little choice is good, infinite choice would be better! – 215

How to be a happy chooser (222-236):

> 1. Choose when to choose: Make rules for yourself for common decisions so you don’t have to think about those choices.

> 2. Be a chooser, not a picker: Be willing to choose none of the options, or create a new option, rather than passively picking from what is presented to you. You can only do this a little bit, so follow rule 1 to give yourself time to do so.

> 3. Satisfice more and Maximize less: Think about choices where you are happy to satisfice; compare them to the areas you tend to maximize and see if you can do the same satisficing there.

> 4. Think about the opportunity costs of opportunity costs: Stick with things you are satisfied with, and don’t worry about their alternatives. “Let new and improved find you” (226)

> 5. Make your decisions non-reversible: Either by physically eliminating the other possibilities or by mentally deciding not to change your decision.

> 6. Practice an “attitude of gratitude”: Make a habit of thankfulness, writing down what you are thankful for (like Oprah’s thankfulness journal!)

> 7. Regret less: let go of past decisions and move on.

> 8. Anticipate adaptation: realize that you will grow to accept almost any situation; that big exciting new things quickly fade into the background.

> 9. Control expectations: Reduce the number of options you consider, plan less and open yourself up to pleasant surprises.

> 10. Curtain social comparison: focus on what makes _you_ happy, and what gives meaning to _your_ life.

> 11. Learn to love constraints: for a fish in a fishbowl, there are great constraints. But without the bowl, “the fish would have to spend all its time just struggling to stay alive. Choice within constraints, freedom within limits, is what enables the little fish to imagine a host of marvelous possibilities.” – 236