The Burden of Choice
The High Emotional Cost We Pay For Nearly Unlimited Choice In Consumer Culture
Consumer Culture rests on the premise that choice is good and the more choices available to us, the better.
However, this contradicts considerable research that indicates having many choices is not the benefit we imagine and facing too many options can make our lives harder.
Psychologist Barry Schwartz’s book, The Paradox of Choice, remains a classic on the subject even two decades later. In it, he makes a compelling case that our seemingly endless freedom to choose often makes us miserable.
“When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable. As the number of available choices increases, as it has in our consumer culture, the autonomy, control, and liberation this variety brings are powerful and positive. But as the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear. As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize…clinging tenaciously to all the choices available to us contributes to bad decisions, to anxiety, stress and dissatisfaction, even to clinical depression.”
His point is as relevant to choosing a career as it is to purchasing an automobile, but I’m going to stick with brand choices for this discussion.
Let’s remember that Schwartz wrote this in a world where the online choices available were not nearly as many as today, so the problem has only become more acute. For example, current estimates put the number of products offered on Amazon alone at more than 600 million.
The real-world implication of this choice overload, as it is often described, is that the more products and information we have available, the more time we are likely to spend on evaluating each purchase. So we can find ourselves spending 30 minutes scrolling to decide on a trivial purchase that will have no real effect on our quality life.
To underscore his point that too many choices can be counterproductive, Schwartz discusses Sheena Iyengar’s well-known jam study in which supermarket shoppers were offered a discount coupon for a jar of jam after sampling several.
In one phase of the test, shoppers were offered just six samples for tasting, although all 24 flavors were available. In another phase, all 24 flavors were available for tasting.
While shoppers in both categories sampled about the same number of jams before purchase, it was found that those offered six samples to taste purchased more frequently than those who could sample all 24 jams. Nearly a third of those offered a taste from the six samples purchased a jar of jam, while just three percent did so who were offered samples of all 24 jams.
Much is made of choice overload today but it’s worth noting that this is mainly a Western cultural issue, and especially an American problem. A recent study among consumers from six countries showed that choice deprivation, not overload, is the main issue in many countries.
It seems to me that our identity as Americans plays a role here. Experts connect choice overload to cultures that emphasize individual freedom, making it a non-negotiable condition of a consumer culture that values freedom of choice.
Regret is a natural consequence of the endless choices scenario and can complicate our lives on several levels.
There is the regret of wasting time on numerous inconsequential in purchases, as I mentioned. There’s also the specific regret of making a purchase and discovering it is not what you expected (“buyer’s remorse”), as well as what Schwartz calls “anticipated regret,” which occurs before a decision is even made when we consider how we will feel if we later discover a better option.
And let’s not overlook the issue of hedonic adaptation. That refers to the emotional rush we experience after a positive experience, such as purchasing a long-anticipated product, that inevitably diminishes over time as we return to a relatively stable emotional baseline, so off we go on another search to find satisfaction through consumption.
We need to choose wisely and perhaps not so often if we want to avoid anxiety and stress. In a sense, making good brand choices and sticking with them over time can make choosing easier, especially in product categories where “good enough” is sufficient. And it may explain in part why we “marry” some brands, as I discussed previously.
I’ll leave the last word to Barry Schwartz:
“I believe that we make the most of our freedoms by learning to make good choices about the things that matter, while at the same time unburdening ourselves from too much concern about the things that don’t.”