The Paradox of Choice

Choice is good, but too much choice can be bad.

Choosing between 4 types of red wine is pleasant but choosing between 144 types of wine is stressful. The paradox of choice is becoming more relevant with time, as more options become available across many different domains. There are millions of books available to download; how do you make the best choice?

You have much more to choose from in the modern world than in the past. In the past, people only had a handful of holiday destinations, religions, food, and entertainment to choose form. Today, your choices are endless. Choice is seen as a sign of progress because it a sign of abundance. And abundance is better than scarcity, but psychologically, abundance can be crippling.

Barry Schwartz coined the phrase in his book, he outlines these psychological difficulties. First, abundant selection creates paralysis. An experiment that illustrates this issue was conducted in a supermarket. A stand containing 24 different kinds of jelly was set up inside the supermarket on one day. The next day, the stand only contained 6 different kinds of jelly. The result? Customers bought very little on the first day when selections were plentiful, but on the second day, with less choice, customers bought ten times more. The experiment was repeated with no change in results.

Second, more selection leads to worse decisions. You might want to select a partner based on carefully selected criteria, but what do you when you are faced with infinite options? Which qualities do you give priority and why? The result is that you often settle for a simple metric such as beauty and ignore everything else.

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Related posts:

1. Antifragile Summary (9/10)
2. System 1 Versus System 2
3. Chapter 4: The Associative Machine
4. How to Read Nassim Taleb?