Barry Schwartz is the Dorwin Cartwright Emeritus Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College and since 2016 has been visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His work focuses on the intersection of psychology and economics. Schwartz’s research addresses morality, decision-making, and the inter-relationships between behavioural science and society. His books criticise certain philosophical roots of western societies and expose underlying myths common in both lay and academic psychological theories. In particular, he is a critic of the “rational economic man” model in both psychology and economics. Schwartz is the author of several books, including The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, Psychology of Learning and Behaviour, with Edward Wasserman and Steven Robbins, and Why We Work.
Zan Boag: It’s hard for me not to start with an obvious question, which is: with all the options available to you as a psychologist – of course you’ve delved into a range of other topics: human nature, learning, behaviour, work – but why did you originally choose choice?
Barry Schwartz: This turns out to be a more complicated question than you might imagine. Much of my work was focused on criticising the conception of human nature that you get from economics, that economists hold, and criticising some of the effects of the free market on the character of American society, and also human welfare and well-being. It certainly has its upsides, but it’s a cruel tool for promoting material well-being.
Anyway, I wrote two books about the evils of using the lens of the market to focus all aspects of your life. And the one thing that always stopped me in my criticism is that the voice in my head or someone else would say, “But what about freedom of choice? The market caters to freedom in a way that nothing else you can think of will do. No one’s forcing you to buy anything. No one’s forcing you to sell anything. It’s just the perfect institutional structure to enhance freedom.” And I would shrug my shoulders and say, “Well, you’re right.”
And then this article came out, this paper that showed this – the famous ‘jam study’. The study showed that choice is good, but if you give people too many options, instead of liberating them, it paralyses them. And the assumption is that rational people, if they don’t want all those options, they’ll just ignore them. That turns out, as an empirical matter, not to be true. And that was what I was looking for, although I didn’t know it.
And so, it got me thinking really quite hard about this presumption that if freedom is good, more freedom is better. And that led ultimately to the book. It turned out it was not just a curiosity, but really a profound contribution to the view of the world that I had, that was not fully developed.
This focus on freedom, which has been a cornerstone of western thinking, is it the case that we are aiming for ‘more’ freedom because more freedom is necessarily a good thing?
You don’t even have to make an argument. It’s just self-evident.
That’s right. And choice is one of those things that is essential for freedom. Without choice, freedom is impossible, but too much of it, as you are saying here, as you discovered, it can lead to a range of psychological challenges for humans. We have decision paralysis, we are not sure what to do; we have regret. How is it that too much choice can negatively affect our well-being – what psychological mechanisms underlie this paradox of choice?
There are a few. First of all, it’s really a cognitive challenge when you’re confronted with say, 2,000 options when it comes to buying a pair of jeans, trying to figure out which pair of jeans to buy. The truth of the matter is that most of the differences among them are trivial, but you don’t know that. In order to discover that most of the differences among them are trivial, you’ve got to spend a lot of time and energy looking at them. And then you finally say, “Oh, there really isn’t much difference between these.”
But then you also eventually buy one, and, as you choose, you’re thinking about the nice features of some of the others that you’re going to be passing up, like the stitching on the back pockets. You probably didn’t give a lot of thought to what the stitching on the back pockets of the jeans should look like.
But once you’ve looked at all of them, the jeans that don’t fit you very well have great stitching. The style, the brand has wonderful trademark stitching, and you go, “Oh, if only they fitted me better, I’d buy those.” And then you buy the ones you buy and you say, “Oh, if only they had the stitching I like so much, I’d have bought those.” And so, it ends up that all the attractive features that you’re saying no to subtract from the satisfaction you get from the one that you said yes to.
There are two problems. One is it gets really hard to decide, and this is a trivial thing like jeans. Imagine you’re choosing a job or a place to live or a romantic partner and all the complexities associated with jeans – where it really doesn’t matter very much if you make a mistake – get enormously magnified. It matters a lot if you choose the wrong romantic partner.
It produces paralysis because it is really hard to make the decision, and you end up much less satisfied because you’re thinking about all the attractive alternatives that you said no to. Is it inevitable? Probably not. But it takes a kind of discipline to suppress that. And it takes you by surprise. When I wrote the book a long time ago, it was a different world – the problem was bad when I wrote the book; it’s much worse now.
I recall in one of your talks, you mentioned how you decided to set 20 per cent less when it came to assignments and work for your students because they were having to make decisions about a whole range of different matters – as a result students today simply didn’t have as much time as students in the past.
That was my interpretation. What I realised, or what I thought, I never gathered data on this in any official way, but when I went to school, so many of the really important decisions we face in life were essentially made for us. People were not plagued by questions of sexual identity. They weren’t plagued by questions about what their romantic life should look like. Should I have a girlfriend? The default was yes. Should I get married? The default was yes. When should I get married? Soon as I graduated from college. That was the default, and so on. And so, there were still issues like, how do I find the right person?
But it wasn’t the case that everything about your daily life was an issue. I could focus on doing my studies without having these other really important things intrude on my thinking and distract me. Well, this was much less true for my children and it is ever so much less true for my grandchildren.
In a cartoon that you had in your TED talk, there was a couple taking their wedding vows and instead of saying “I do” the man says, “She’ll do”. Another major problem faced by current generations, as you’re saying, is finding a partner. We’ve been talking about all these products and services they are prompted to buy, but finding a partner is something that will determine their future to a large extent. Given dating apps have seemingly unlimited choices, how can people be satisfied with the partner that they have? Things inevitably get tough in relationships, and it’s never been easier to find a new partner. You talk about the difference between maximizers and satisficers. With the maximizers, do you think they’re the ones who are going to suffer the most in this world of unlimited choices?
I do indeed. I do. The thing about the distinction is that a maximizer is looking for the best. A satisficer is looking for good enough. And as a satisficer, you can have low standards for what breakfast cereal you eat. And you can have high standards, for example, for who you marry, but you’re not looking for the best. And the critical difference is that when you’re looking for good enough, once you find good enough, you stop looking, even though there are countless alternatives that you haven’t looked at. If you’re looking for the best, you can never stop looking.
And so, it’s pretty trivial when it comes to breakfast cereal, but when it comes to a job or a romantic partner, it’s not. And the thing that I believe happens is that you think your task in searching for a life partner is the search. And that once you succeed in finding the person, it’s smooth sailing from then on.
And that I think is a profound mistake. The task is not as much the search as it is what you do after you conclude the search. As you just said, there are rough spots in any relationship. Often the rough spots are concerned with fairly trivial things like one of you is neat and one of you is messy. Little things that don’t mean anything over a day or a week, but start to wear on you as the weeks become months and the months become years.
And so, there’s an enormous amount of work required in developing and maintaining the relationship. The challenge is not finding the right partnership, it’s making the right partnership. If you think that once you find the treasure, your work is done – you’re in for a failure. And as soon as you go through a bad patch, you’re looking over your partner’s shoulder for somebody better, and your partner’s looking over your shoulder for somebody better.
You know it is not an accident that people pair up later, and that relationships don’t last as long, because our standards about what relationships should be like and continue to be like as they proceed is just an unmeetable standard. The world has set us up for virtually guaranteed failure.
It makes it particularly difficult with these big life decisions, whether it’s jobs, where we live, or partners, because we’re faced with so much choice. People can always wonder about the life they could have led had they made a different decision – say to pursue writing instead of banking; move to San Francisco instead of Sydney; ballroom dancing over Taekwondo. They’re making choices that then will affect the way they lead their lives. Let’s call this a phantom life, the ‘other’ life. How can people find satisfaction with their choices when there are so many available, and the choices that they make will often seem like the incorrect ones? How can they find some sort of satisfaction?
I think in the book that I wrote, which by the way, as I told you in an email, I’m about to start writing a new edition of, I make some suggestions, but I think the truth of the matter is that it’s very hard to shut off these enemies of satisfaction in the modern world. What we’re talking about, and what I wrote about, is a rich society’s problem.
Most people in the world don’t have the problem that there are too many options. They have the opposite problem. But if you happen to live in a part of the world like you and I do, that is the problem. And we don’t have the tools for shutting it down. I make some suggestions, like limit the number of options you consider. Fine. I’m only going to look at six pairs of jeans. It’s one thing to say it and it’s another thing to do it, and it’s still a third thing to do it and not be nagged by the knowledge that there are all these options out there that you didn’t look at.
It’s sort of like just quitting smoking. “Yeah, I’ll just quit smoking.” Nice, easy to say, but really, really hard to do when you suffer at least initially when you quit smoking. And so, I think that you have to be prepared for a fair amount of discomfort and a lot of work to change your approach to making decisions, big ones or small ones.
It’s not a surprise to me that young people are in such bad shape because one of the things that we found is that the younger you are, the more likely you are to be a maximizer in decisions. I think one of the things that you learn as you age is that good enough is almost always good enough. But you don’t see too many 20-year-olds who think that. Experience teaches you that good enough is good enough.
After suffering for a generation or so, you settle into a life where you’re satisfied with good enough results of your decisions. But meanwhile, that’s 20 or 30 years of suffering. And what I think... I don’t know if you’re familiar with this somewhat controversial argument about what social media is doing to the welfare of young people.
Here in Australia, they’re implementing a law that prevents children under 16 from accessing social media.
I think that the evidence that has been amassed and reported is somewhat controversial because there are always multiple factors that explain things like a rise in anxiety and depression. It’s not one thing. So, people say, “Well, what about this and what about this?” And yes, of course, but I don’t think there’s much doubt that social media addiction is a huge problem for psychological health. And one of the things that that exposure does is it shows you all the different ways you could be living and how well people other than you seem to be doing.
Because, of course, they don’t present a random or even a remotely accurate picture of their own lives. They present this incredibly stylized picture of their own lives, which makes their lives look perfect. And you’re going, “Why can’t I have a life like that person’s life?” And so, you’re unsure what path you should be taking. And it seems as though the people you’re interacting with are completely sure about the path they’re taking. And so, you’re just plagued by doubt about every decision you make, trivial or important.
When it comes to a comparison with others, that’s something that is not just a contemporary problem. It has been exacerbated by the fact that we have so many choices and such an ability to compare our lives with others, but people have long regretted what they do or have compared themselves unfavourably to others. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote about this almost 200 years ago in Either/Or. He wrote that the essence of all life wisdom is that people will regret decisions no matter which one they take. I’ve got a quote here from him, “Marry and you’ll regret it. Don’t marry, you will also regret it. Marry or don’t marry, you’ll regret it either way.” And he goes on with a whole range of different things that people will inevitably regret, no matter the decision they make. However, today we are faced with many more choices than Kierkegaard was. So, rather than either/or, we have either/or/or/or ad infinitum. Regret is one problem, but how do we combat the decision paralysis that we face with this unlimited choice?
One is to teach yourself that good enough is good enough, because that reduces the number of options that you will seek out and evaluate. And as I say, teach yourself because it’s going to take work to get into the habit of satisficing. Another is to do what I call choosing when to choose.
We have other decision-making modes that we could rely on. One is habit. This is what I did yesterday. This is what I’ll do tomorrow. I always have cornflakes for breakfast. That’s good enough for me. Another, which is a mega version of habit, is cultural and social tradition. This is what everyone does, this is what I’ll do.
And what we’ve done in western democratic societies is that we have really just rejected people who just do the habitual thing or do what everyone else is doing. It seems ‘inauthentic’. It seems like we’re throwing away the incredible freedom that these societies we live in have given us, so we’re contemptuous of other people who do that and we become critical of ourselves when we find ourselves doing it.
Instead of taking advantage of tools that would reduce the number of options we have, and reduce the number of domains where we have any options at all, we just keep breaking every constraint we find. And as I say, we’re critical and disdainful of people who seem to embrace these constraints. And this turns out not to be to our psychological benefit.
I imagine that this contributes to anxiety and stress, which, as you write, leads to lower satisfaction and happiness. Is there some data that supports this view; is there any data or are there any studies that support that it contributes to anxiety and stress and leads to lower satisfaction and happiness?
We’ve done studies that show that people who are oriented toward maximizing are borderline clinically depressed, using paper and pencil measures of depression. That’s one. And I think, pardon me, we don’t have clear evidence for this, but I think that there’s good reason to believe that the uncertainty people feel contributes to anxiety.
I just read an article just this morning that makes the following point: the more uncertain you are that you are in control of things that matter in life, the more attracted you are to people who are just like you, the more rejecting you are of difference – gender difference, racial difference, ethnic difference. When the world seems certain to you, when you feel like you’re in control, then you’re more open to all these differences. But when the world seems uncertain, you want to, as it were, build a little world where everything is predictable and everything is familiar.
Here we are living in, depending on what society you live in, highly diverse societies in a very uncertain world. And this diversity is just another threat. And so, we try to simplify and make the world we live in more predictable because we don’t feel like we are in control of our lives.
The paradox is, in some sense, you have more freedom of choice so you have more control, but it feels like you have less control. And the result is that you do all kinds of things to make your world more certain. And some of those things are really problematic, not just for you, but for society. I don’t want to be grandiose here, but it’s not inconceivable to me that part of what explains the result of the recent election here in the US may be this feeling that people have that they are not in control of their lives.
And the reason they feel this way is that they can’t make a decision without being uncertain about whether the decision they made is the right decision. People are willing to submit to a certain amount of authoritarianism, not to make the trains run on time, but to make the world more predictable and make them feel more in control.
And it may not be an accident that the rise of right-wing governments in democratic societies seems to be spreading all over the world. It’s potentially an extremely consequential problem because it affects not just the satisfaction you get out of what ought to be a satisfying life, but it also affects what you want your social structure to look like.
Do you feel that when people are feeling uncertain about the way things are going in the world, they then reach for certainty in some way?
Correct. And certainty takes the form of familiarity. Certainty takes the form of reducing difference. Do you look forward to going to a party where there are people of multiple races, nationalities, religious affiliations and so on? In a world where life is predictable, this may be an interesting and stimulating possibility – people are exposed to different views of the world, and that enriches your life.
But in a world where you don’t know what tomorrow’s going to look like, for you, this is the last thing you want. There were these wonderful studies of young children. They’re called the ‘Strange Situation’ studies. Very young children. You put them in a room that has a bunch of toys in it, and the caretaker brings them in. And in one condition, the caretaker sits in the room while the child explores what’s in it. And in another condition, the caretaker leaves the room.
It turns out that when the caretaker stays in the room, the more stuff is in the room, the happier the kid is. The kid ventures away from the caretaker and explores, but then goes back to the caretaker or just looks back at the caretaker to reconnect with certainty and security and explores and explores and explores. When the caretaker is absent, the child is terrified by all the stimulation. It’s like, “Get me out of here.”
And so, in an uncertain world, you want certainty. Your mother, your father provides that certainty. And seeing that certainty there makes you willing to explore. In a certain world, you’ll go to that party that has all these people who are so different from you. But in an uncertain world, you want to surround yourself with people who are just like you to introduce a little bit of certainty and predictability to the world.
And I think that buying jeans is trivial, buying cereal is trivial. These are all trivial, but the trivial add up. The example that I currently use when I give talks about this, because I think it connects with people more, is deciding what video to stream on Netflix. I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience, but very often after a hard day, my wife and I will sit down and decide to kick back and watch a movie. So, we go to Netflix and try to decide what movie to watch. And after 40 minutes of searching, we turn off the TV and read a book.
It’s interesting that you’re talking about these trivial matters relating to products and services. Jean-Paul Sartre, he believed that humans are condemned to be free; that they must make choices. With the number of choices that we have now, condemned is probably an appropriate term. He was referring, it seems, to big life decisions rather than whether we have a decaf soy latte or caramel mocha with stevia. But it leads me to my question: how can we make choices, these important life choices when so much of our time is taken up with decisions about what to watch on Netflix, or trivial matters relating to various products and services? How do we focus on the big life decisions when every hour of every day we’re making choices about trivial matters?
That’s a huge problem, a huge problem. And it’s not like if you decide that you’re not going to be plagued by it, the choices are going to disappear. They’re there. You can live your life as a Luddite or try to live your life as a Luddite, but still they’re all out there. They steal your time and attention away from other things.
I read an article recently in the newspaper that university professors of literature who routinely would assign, say, to read this book for the next two weeks and then we’ll turn to this book, and read that book in the next two weeks, and then we’ll turn to this book. Students were coming up and saying, “I can’t do this.”
And discussion would reveal that throughout their educational career, they had never read a serious book from cover to cover. Instead of assigning Hamlet, you would assign Act 4 of Hamlet because you couldn’t expect students to read the whole play. And why can’t they? Because they don’t have time. And why do they not have time? Because they’re so busy making other decisions in their lives. And so, what do you do as a teacher? You either say, “Well, listen, dammit, you’re going to read a book every two weeks or you’re going to fail the course,” or you find ways to adapt what you teach to what your students are prepared to learn. And so, I think you’re right.
I used to have this habit when I had a bunch of big things, big tasks on my plate, I would invent small tasks, I’d write a to-do list with a dozen things on it, and I would keep adding trivial things to it so I could do them and tick them off and push the hard things down to the bottom of the stack; so I never got to them. Whether we like it or not, these small decisions intrude on our lives – take time, take energy, take cognitive resources, and we don’t devote the time that we should to the big things. We end up either uncertain about the big decisions we make, or unsatisfied with them after we make them.
We are presented with so many choices and these choices are bleeding into every aspect of our life, whether it’s which jeans to get, partners, jobs, what entertainment to watch. This is our reality now, as you said, even being a Luddite, there’s little chance of avoiding this. How can we mitigate the negative effects of unlimited choice? You’ve touched on it before, but is there a way that we can prepare ourselves and set ourselves up in life so that we can minimise the negative effects of unlimited choice and maximise making good decisions about the important choices in our lives?
Yes, I think we can. But again, I emphasise that all of the suggestions I have take some work and are going to be uncomfortable until we get used to them. One of them, as I said, is looking for good enough rather than the best. Another is relying on habit or social custom. Another is delegating choices to other people. You need a new cell phone. Instead of choosing a new cell phone, talk to your friend who recently got one. And if your friend is satisfied with the phone that he or she got, you just get the same phone.
You can informally delegate to others the decision making that society simply insists that you do. Now, none of that is going to feel good at the beginning. It seems irresponsible not to make your own decisions. It seemed like you don’t have high enough standards if you are just looking for good enough and you’re going to feel always like you’ve left something on the table.
But what happens, I think, over time is you suddenly discover that two more hours have been added to your day. And you go, “Where did they come from?” “Oh, I get it. I’m not spending two hours deciding what to watch on Netflix. I’m actually watching something instead.”
And so, over time, you see the benefits of doing this in A, that you have more freedom to devote your attention to things that you think are more important. And B, you’re less uncertain about the decisions that you make. You’re worrying less about the decisions other people are making because part of why we look so much at what other people are doing is to help us figure out what we should be doing.
If you simply default in certain areas of your life to doing what other people are doing or what have you, buying what your friend bought, then you feel less need to check your decisions against the decisions that other people are making. I think there are a bunch of tools.
The problem is that the societies we live in are fighting against us using these tools. The thing is that in a market, societies want us always to be dissatisfied with what we have because they want us to be looking for new things or new activities. Everywhere you turn, you’re being pushed by social forces in a direction that I think is actually quite injurious to well-being.
It’s not simply like flipping a switch and you become the kind of person who can cope in the modern world. It takes discipline and energy to put the blinders on when they need to be put on. I think that people benefit enormously by doing it, but I don’t want people to think that it’s like taking a pill. It’s work.
I think the fact that these forces are at play makes it all the more important that we make an effort to do something about this.
I do too. And the thing that is so troubling to me is that there’s an enormous social cost to this. It takes enormous resources to make the range of options that are available to us available. It’s more costly to produce 2,000 kinds of jeans than to produce two. And you’d think maybe it’s worth the cost if the result is that people get more satisfaction out of the decisions they make. But if it turns out they get less satisfaction, then it’s just an enormous waste of resources that could be devoted to meet the needs of people who can barely meet their daily needs as they currently are.
We’re devoting enormous resources to things that don’t make people better off. And that really is heartbreaking – I think we’re paying a very large price. Partly I think we’re paying a price in global warming. We are certainly paying a price in terms of the distribution of material goods within societies, and we’re not deriving the benefit collectively.
It’s not just how to be happier as an individual, it’s about how to be happier as a society.
