The Paradox of Choice: Why having many choices isn’t always a good thing

People love to have choices. Walk into a supermarket and you will see dozen of toothpaste brands to choose. Many people, even economists, believe that more choices means more welfare for the consumers. People should feel liberated because they are not trapped in a prison with few choices to make. People should feel satisfied and happy. Well, it turns out that having many choices can actually do more harm than good. That’s called the paradox of choice. American psychologist Barry Schwartz explains the two negative effective of too many choices.

The first negative effect is that too many choices actually make it so difficult for a person that she won’t choose at all. Counterintuitive huh? It’s proved by conducting two experiments. One experiment is to let shoppers sample 24 flavors of jam. The second experiment is to sample just 6 flavors of jam. The result was that more shoppers bought the jam when they were presented with 6 flavors to sample. Schwartz believes that it’s because the shoppers with too many options don’t want to make the wrong decision and they want to postpone their decision making.

The second negative effect is that even if the choice is made, sometimes people are less satisfied with the results of their choices, as they feel the result of the other alternatives might produce a much better outcome. We have learned from our previous post that there is an opportunity cost of the choice that we made. For instance, if I have enough money to buy one of the ten available houses, I would blame myself so bad if the house that I buy does not live up to my expectation or the price of the other house has risen in value dramatically. But if my money is only enough to buy one particular house, well I wouldn’t feel so bad if other people’s house has increased significantly in value, since I don’t have many choice with the amount of money that I have. Well, having too many choices does give you a higher expectation that the choice that you make will be a good one. But you would feel miserable if it doesn’t live up to your expectation.

Moral of the story: The secret to happiness is low expectation.