- Good evening and welcome to the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum. My name is Isabel Lilles and I am one of the Ath Fellows this year. The other day, a couple of friends and I ate out to celebrate a friend's birthday. We got settled into our table and our waiter passed out the menus. They were the heaviest menus I've ever held and when I opened them up, I had before me six pages containing long lists of appetizers, pastas, sandwiches, and main entrees. Needless to say, I was incredibly overwhelmed. While my other friends were making conversation about how their days went, my face was buried in the menu, brows furrowed, analyzing which side would work with which dish. The waiter came back a few minutes later and everyone ordered their dishes with ease. "And what about you ma'am?", the waiter asks. I freeze up and after 30 seconds my friends leans and says to the waiter, just come back for her, she's still deciding. In the end, I forced my friend to select three dishes for me and from there I would pick one. I should have been excited about the opportunity and privilege to pick from so many great options, but instead of feeling empowered, I felt paralyzed. Was the salad really going to be better than the cod? Was that sandwich really the better option over the pasta? In this day and age, living in a society driven by consumerism has led us to believe that in every case, more is more. The more choices we have at our disposal, the more freedom we have. But with so many things to choose from, be it your career, a partner, or a dinner meal, how are we to know that our final choice was the best option? This is the question that our speaker tonight will be addressing and I for one, am desperate for an explanation. Barry Schwartz is an American psychologist who studies the link between choice and human behavior. His research and writings address morality, decision making, and the complex relationships between science and society. A prolific author and speaker, Professor Schwartz has published numerous books and over 200 articles in scientific and academic publications. A frequent guest on television and radio, Barry Schwartz has also spoken at TED multiple times with his talks garnering more than 12 million views. Barry Schwartz's 2004 book, The Paradox of Choice, Why More is Less, was named one of the top business books of that year, by both Business Week and Forbes Magazine. It has since been translated into 25 languages. Schwartz also wrote Practical Wisdom, The Right Way to Do the Right Thing, with colleague Ken Sharp, and most recently Barry Schwartz published Why We Work. He is a professor emeritus of psychology at Swarthmore College and is currently a visiting professor at Berkeley's Haas School of Business. As always, I must remind you that audio and visual recording are strictly prohibited. Please silence and put away your mobile devices at this time. As a note, our speaker today, Mr. Schwartz, has requested that if anybody have any questions during the talk to raise your hand and Wesley and I will try our best to hand the mic over to you as quickly as we can. So without further adieu, please join me in welcoming Barry Schwartz to the Ath. (audience applauds) - That's one of the best introductions I've ever had. My temptation is to say, does anybody have any questions, because I have nothing, like nothing left to say. Nonetheless, I'll say something. Thank you so much, it was incredibly kind of you. So I would encourage you to ask questions if you have them while I'm talking. If you have world view kinda questions, save them. If you have questions that you can imagine could be answered in a sentence or two and are getting in the way your understanding of the point I'm trying to make, don't save them. And if I think it's gonna lead me astray, I'll just find a polite way to tell you that that's a really stupid question for you to be asking, (audience laughs)
so you won't be embarrassed. Okay, that's the plan. So I'm gonna talk about the Paradox of Choice. I've met with several students today and the sense I have is that I have nothing to say that many of you don't already know, but you know, I think it doesn't hurt to hear something more than once, especially something that requires you to change the way you live. So let's go. I think most affluent societies, certainly American society is governed by what I have come to call an official syllogism and it runs roughly like this. The more freedom people have, the happier they are, the more welfare they have, the better off they are. We should take every opportunity to enhance freedom. You can't have too much freedom. Almost everybody living in modern American society believes this. It's hard to imagine what the counterargument would look like. So you might ask, sure this is true, but what does it mean to enhance freedom? And it would be quickly apparent to you that freedom is empty, unless there are real choices available for you to make with this freedom. And so the way to enhance freedom is to enhance choice. If more freedom means more well being, more happiness, and more choice means more freedom, then what follows from these two claims is that the more choice people have, the more well being they have. I think this is like fish not knowing they live in water. People living in societies like ours, simply assimilate this syllogism without even appreciating that they are. How could this not be true? And I'm gonna tell you how it could not be true. We have certainly acted on it. I went to a supermarket near Swarthmore College, where I used to teach, and it wasn't a super supermarket, it was just an ordinary sized supermarket and I counted instead of buying and this is what I counted. Now we will all agree, this is a lot of choice, yes? So what? People will say, we've always had choice when it comes to supermarket shopping. This is merely a quantitative change. It used to be five cereals, now it's 200 cereals. What the hell's the difference? Choice has always been part of our weekly shopping trip. This is nothing to get alarmed about. Is that a question? Yeah. - [Audience Member] How did you count this? (audience laughs) Sorry, no-- - I walked up and down the aisle and went one, two, three. - [Audience Member] Did you count the brands of cereal or like the boxes of cereal? - Brands and types, I did not count sizes. So if it's super size, medium size, and small size, Cheerios all counts as one, although those arguably those are three different options. - [Audience Member] I'm sorry, but 300 cereals in a store doesn't seem possible. - Walk to our supermarket and count. - There are 40 different kinds of dental floss. - I can't.
- Trust me. (audience laughs) - Or don't trust me, collect your own data. So the argument is, we've always had choice and now we just have a little bit more of it. We know how to choose in supermarkets, what's the big deal? And I think that's a fair argument. And in some areas of life, where we've always had choice, we just have more. But there are other areas of life where we didn't used to have any choice and where we now have significant choice. Some examples, phone service. There may be one or two people in the room old enough to remember when there was one phone company, when the phone actually had to be plugged into a wall, when the phone company owned it, and you just rented it and the only choice you had was whether or not to use it. Those days are gone. I'm sure you're all thrilled and delighted that there are 40 different cell phones you could choose among and 60 different cell phone plans and 12 different service providers. So that what used to be a non-decision, has become not only a decision, but a decision that seems to be for a lotta people to be very consequential. So people, these are the phones of the future. The middle one is my favorite. It's a phone, an MP3 player, a nose hair trimmer, and a Creme Brulee torch. (audience laughs) And here's what's funny about this cartoon, which is a dozen years old, the iPhone had not yet been invented. So this looked preposterous. Now you look at this and you go, is that all it does? (audience laughs) So the world has changed and as a consequence, people occasionally go into their cell phone store and they ask, "Do you have a phone that doesn't do too much?" And what's the answer to that question? Near as I can tell, the only kind of phone you can no longer buy is a phone that is just a phone. Actually there is one you can buy called the Jitter Bug. It's for old people.
(audience laughs) It's just a phone. The numbers are like this big, because the assumption is that they're nearly blind and all it is is a phone, but you can't find it in any store, you got to mail away for it, because who would buy it? So here's a domain, where we have a lotta choice, where we used to have none. Here's another one. Liberal Arts curricula at places likes this used to be highly structured. There were lots of requirements. Often the first two years of college was fulfilling requirements, lab science, math, English literature, history, lots and lots of requirements before you could roll up your sleeves and do what you were actually interested in. And then within the major there were lots of requirements. So you really felt like, you were basically being told what to do all the time. I don't know what CMC is like, but at the places I do know, that world is gone. Now, you can pretty much do any damn thing you want and we still want a liberal arts breadth, so instead of actually having requirements, we give students lists. Take three courses from this set of 70, two courses from this set of 63, and one course from this set of 59 and then you will have met your distribution requirements and now we will have created a common intellectual culture. Now everybody is studying some things in common. Yeah, like three out of 73 courses. So basically, what you now do in college is entirely a matter of choice and the choice is quite substantial. It may not be overwhelming in small places like this and Swarthmore. It is certainly overwhelming in universities. Health care. Once upon a time, you went to the doctor and the doctor said fill out this prescription and call me in the morning. Fill this prescription, start taking the pills, and call me in the morning. You're lucky the doctor's would tell you what you had. Not nescessarily. The doctor took care of you. You had no choices to make. Those days are gone. The ethic of American health care is the ethic of patient autonomy. And what does that mean? It means that doctors don't tell patients what to do anymore. Doctors propose, patients dispose. We can do chemotherapy or we could do surgery. The risks and benefits of chemotherapy are this. The risks and benefits of surgery are this. What do you wanna do? And you look at the doctor like, what do I wanna do? What should I do? And the doctor says, I told you all I can. These are the risks and benefits of surgery. These are the risks and benefits of chemotherapy. What do you wanna do? And you go, "Doc, if you were me, what would you do?" And the doctor says, "But I'm not you." And so the burden of literal life and death decisions has been transferred from people who know something, the doctors, to people who a, know nothing, and b, are operating in situation of high emotional distress. And by the way, this is a burden in my experiences, that is mostly borne by women, who seem to be the healthcare officers for themselves, for their negligent husbands, and for their, you know immature children. Don't you feel liberated by being able to make all these medical decisions for yourself and your loved ones, instead of simply being told by an expert what to do. Another, retirement plans. There used to be a thing called a company pension. What was that? You put in 40 years at the company and you retired and you got some amount of money as a pension. Those days are also largely gone. There's some public sector occupations where the pensions still exist, but for the most part what we have instead is a 401K or its equivalent. Well what does that do? It gives you the choice to decide what to do with your retirement money, how to invest it. This was not a decision people had to make. Now it's a decision that people do in fact have to make and how you make it, may determine whether you go through your golden years eating human food or dog food. So here's another case, very consequential like health care, where the burden of, sorry, the liberation of having choice has been handed to us, to us lucky modern citizens. And lastly, something I imagined some of you occasionally give some thought to, marital and family arrangements. There's a lot that's good about the way in which that has changed. It used to be that people did not ask themselves the question, "Should I get married?", because that had a default answer. They did not ask the question, "Should I have kids?", because that had a default answer. They didn't ask, "When should I have kids?", because that had a default answer. Yes, get married as soon as you possibly can and have kids as soon as you possibly can. I mean there were people who did not follow the script, but they, you know, they were the people that everyone else whispered about, because they were so unusual. For the most part, people did follow the script and the only decision they had to make was who. And from what I've observed, people screwed up that decision often. Now, everything's on the table. When, whether, if, children, no children, you get to make, invent whatever kind of intimate life seems right for you. We have liberated you from the social and moral constraints that your parents, and even more your grandparents were saddled with. So the world used to look a little bit like this. That's supposed to be the 10 Commandments. And now the world looks like this and the question is, is this good new or bad news? And the answer, as I'm sure you can tell, is yes. (audience laughs) I think what's good about this is obvious, so I'm not gonna bore you with it. Let's all acknowledge, I know, that is a lot about all this that's really good. People are living lives that they get enormous meaning and satisfaction out of that would not have been possible a couple generations ago. I know that. There's a lot that's good here. And psychology has lots of theories about why it's good, autonomy, control over your life. These are important psychological dimensions to well-being. The mistake psychologists have made and economists have made, is to assume that since choice is good, it is only good. And what my work has focused on, and a lot of it reports on work other people have done, is on the dark side of all this freedom of choice. And choice has three bad effects. Not always, not for all people, but often and for many. Bad effect number one, instead of liberating, instead of freeing people, choice can paralyze people, a lot like ordering from a six page restaurant menu. You end up not eating dinner, unless you have a concerned friend who looks out for your welfare. And the first study that showed this was done by Sheena Iyengar, where she set up a table with fancy jams in gourmet food store in Palo Alto. And this was a new product and the way this store operated is whenever they got a new product they would let people sample. And the experiment simply followed standard store practice, but in addition, if you came to the table and sampled, you'd get a coupon that would save you a dollar on any jam you bought. So they were able to assess how many people were attracted to the table and then how many of those people actually bought jam. And one day they had 24 different flavors of jam and one day they six. And what she found is that more people came to the table when there were 24 jams, then when there were six. It was more interesting, it was more inviting, it was more exciting. People like choice. One-tenth as many people actually bought jam. I'll say that again, one-tenth as many people actually bought jam. Why? Because they couldn't figure out which damn jam to buy. To raise the stakes a little bit from jam to life, speed dating, which most of you don't know what it is, because it's become obsolete. It's like a sexual square dance. (audience laughs) Men and women gathered together in a room, there are tables like this, only smaller, somebody blows a whistle, you spend 10 minutes talking to somebody. If you're interested in that person, you let the organizer know. If they're interested in you, they let the organizer know. Email addresses are exchanged. And then you pursue it or you don't pursue it and a few months later you're married. This was meant for busy professionals and the idea was to do a year's worth of dating in one night. Saves a lotta time, a lotta wear and tear, and lot of money. And so Tinder and things like that have replaced. Now you can do all of this from the comfort of your living room. They did a speed dating study, where on one occasion you met 12 potential partners. And on a second occasion, different people, you met six. And the questions is, how many matches got made? Now they studied only women. I think partly because they assumed that men would say yes to anyone. They studied only women and the question is, do you make more matches when you see 12 people or when you see six people? Logic demands that we know the answer to this, which is you make more matches when you see 12 than when you see six. Doesn't that have to be true? Of course it has to be true. But if it was true, I wouldn't be telling you about it. So what happens is that people make fewer matches when they see 12 people than when they see six. Why? Because it's so hard to decide which damn people to choose. We'll see there's another problem with seeing lots of people in speed dating that I'll get to in a minute. So whether you're buying jam or making a life commitment to a romantic partner, there can be too many options. One last example, 401Ks. And what's especially impressive about this is it was real people making real decisions. Sheena got access to roughly a million retirement accounts in a thousand different companies, all of them serviced by Vanguard. And they all offered slightly different arrays of funds. She wasn't interested in which funds, she was interested in how many funds. Some offered six, some offered 15, some offered 30, some offered over 100. Her question was, how does the number of options a company offers employees effect the likelihood that employees will choose any? And what she found, by now you can guess, the more options you offer, the less likely people are to chose any. And by not choosing, people are leaving money on the table. They are passing up matching money from the employer, several thousand dollars worth of matching money from the employer, because they can't figure out how to pull the trigger. Now all these funds were offered as a favor, because of that syllogism. More choice has to be better than less. Adding options doesn't make anybody worse off and it's bound to make somebody better off. We're doing our employees a favor. Except it turns out, you're doing your employees a disservice. You're paralyzing them into indecision, and if there's one set of people on earth you don't want to discourage from saving money, it's Americans. You know, if you did this in China, it might be, wouldn't be so bad, since the Chinese from what I can gather, save roughly a third of every dollar they make. But in the United States, savings is like minus five percent. So you don't wanna discourage Americans from saving. So these are three demonstrations, that although choice is good, there can be too much of a good thing, and when there is, it leads to paralysis. Second problem is it leads people to make bad decisions. And I'll just describe this in the case of speed dating. So the women are asked, "What's important to you "in a romantic partner?", before the evening. And they say, I want someone who's kind, who's a good listener, who's intelligent, who's got a good sense of humor, who's empathetic, and who's hot. Now the big evening comes and when they see six people, they are more likely to evaluate potential mates based on how funny and kind and intelligent and empathetic they are. When they see 12, they choose entirely on the basis of physical appearance. Why? Because it's too complicated to make these difficult judgements about so many people. So instead of choosing on the basis of what's important to evaluate, you choose on the basis of what's easy to evaluate and you kinda cross your fingers and hope that what's easy to evaluate is also important. But it's almost like the next morning after the speed date, they wake up, it's like, oh I must have had too much to drink. What was a I thinking when I chose those people? So bad decisions, when the decisions are at all complicated. I won't give you the second example. The third thing, the thing that I have focused my own work on the most, is in some ways the most surprising. And that is when you choose things from a large choice set, you end up less satisfied than if you chose exactly the same things from a smaller choice set. And there are several reasons for this. So just to give you a sense of what I'm talking about, you go to this restaurant and they have five items on the menu and you order salmon with rice and broccoli and you eat it. And it's good. The salmon's maybe a little overcooked, broccoli's a little too crunchy, but it's good, good. You go into a restaurant and you order salmon and broccoli and rice from a menu that has 25 things and it's good. Salmon's a little overcooked and the broccoli's a little too crunchy, but it's good. Here's what I'm saying, when you order that dish from a menu with 25 options, you will like it less than if you order the very same dish from a menu that has five options. Same food. Why? Several reasons. One, is the salmon perfect? Well I just described it to you, so that it's not perfect. It's good but it's not perfect. And even if the salmon wasn't overcooked, you'd still find something to complain about right? The china has a little gold pattern around the rim and you hate gold. It reminds you of Trump, you'd rather see like blue. So it's, you know, perfect doesn't happen. And so what happens is you say, was this perfect? No. Well could I have done better? If there are five options, you might well conclude, no, I couldn't have done better. If there are 25 options, you will almost certainly conclude, yes I could have done better. And if you conclude that, you will regret the choice you made and what ever regret you experience, will subtract from the satisfaction of a perfectly good piece of grilled salmon. And so regretting passed up rejected alternatives in the face of anything that's less than perfect, makes the the things you choose even less good, subjectively than they would otherwise be. And I think it's inevitable that with large choice sets it's easy to imagine alternatives being better than what you've chosen. Easier than with smaller choice sets. Anticipated regret, in someways, is more insidious. If you're worried that you will regret your decision, what can you do short of years of intensive psychotherapy, what can you do to avoid regretting your decision? This is not a rhetorical question? Anybody have any ideas? I've only been able to come up with one way to avoid regretting decisions. - You don't make one.
- Don't make 'em. Exactly, don't choose. You can't regret a decision you don't make. And so I think a lot of the paralysis that we see comes from people's intense desire to avoid regretting, second guessing, decisions. Now it's obvious to us, at some removed from all of this, that often not making decisions is the worst thing you could possibly do. Not choosing a mutual a fund is catastrophic. Not choosing a 401K is catastrophic. Just taking a dart and throwing it at the list is better than choosing none of the above. But still, you don't have this pain, this pang of regret, immediately associated with the sense that you coulda done better and you didn't. Related, but not quite the same, is missed opportunities. Suppose you order the salmon and you actually conclude that it's the best thing you could have done on that menu. But, the salmon came with rice and I prefer french fries. And if I'd ordered the chicken I woulda gotten french fries. It came with broccoli, but I like beans and if I'd gotten cod I coulda gotten beans. Why the hell didn't the restaurant make salmon with french fries and beans? And so I didn't make a mistake, but by ordering the salmon I missed the opportunity to have french fries and I missed the opportunity to have beans. And these missed opportunities add up and again subtract from the satisfaction that you get from what you don't think was a mistake. I made the right decision, but unfortunately the world didn't allow me to make the perfect decision. And you're much more likely to find this a salient consideration when there are 25 options on the table or on the menu then when there are only five. So here are some of the examples of this in action. You need to know something about New York, I think to appreciate this. I can't stop thinking of, I guess I don't need to explain it. Here they are in the Hamptons, beautiful summer day, beach to themselves. But this guy, all he's thinking is, it's August. Everyone in our neighborhood's away on vacation, I could be parking the car right in front of the God damn building. This is not the right way to spend time on the beach. And this one I think needs absolutely no explanation, though that won't stop me from explaining it. (audience laughs) Slowly it seeps through the room. There's a very, very profound lesson in this cartoon that nobody under the age of 30 is going to like to hear, and that is this, you can only do one thing at a time. And the more time you spend thinking about the other things you might be doing, the less satisfaction you will get out of the thing you are actually doing. I know people think they can text and drive and compose music and poetry and figure out how to propose to their romantic other all simultaneously while balancing a plate on the tip of their noses, but in fact it ain't doable. And that's what this cartoon captures. Okay, so there's a little study that shows this in the lab. It's not just true in he New Yorker. I want you to know I do take empirical work seriously, somewhat seriously. It's never as funny as New Yorker cartoons. So here's a study where people do a short survey in the lab and when they're done, you say thank you very much. 10 minutes of their time, we'd like to offer you a token of our appreciation. You can have two bucks or a high quality pen that sells in the college bookstore for about two and half dollars. 75% of participants choose the pen. This study is 40 years old, two dollars was money then, sort of. Another group does the same 10 minute task. Thank you very much, as a token of our appreciation we'd like to offer you a gift. You can have two dollars or you could have one pen that sells in the bookstore for about two and a half bucks, or you can have two less expensive pens, that together sell in the bookstore for about two and a half bucks. And the question is, what percentage of people choose either of the pen options in the second case? Logic demands that the answer to that be some percentage higher than 75. Is that obvious to you? Not obvious. If 75% of people think a good pen is better than two bucks, 75% of people think a good pen is better than two bucks. And some people might think, well a good pen's not better than two bucks, but two pens is better than two bucks. So I'm adding another pen option. I'm not losing any of the people who think a good pen is better than two bucks, and I'm gaining some people who think two pens is better than two bucks. 85%, 90%, some percentage higher than 75. Has to be that way. 45% choose either of the pens. Why? 'Cause you're looking at the good pen and you say, it would be nice to have a good writing instrument, but if I choose it, I'm passing up the opportunity to have two and that makes the good pen less good. And you're looking at the two pens. This will take care of my note taking needs for the whole semester. But if I choose it, I'm passing up the opportunity to have a good pen and I never write with a good pen. And this makes the two pens less good. And we can even quantify how much less good the third option makes the pens. It makes it just enough less good that it's no longer better than two bucks. Either option by itself is better than two bucks. The two options together make each of them worse than two bucks. And this is the way missed opportunities subtract from the satisfaction you get out of making what are not mistakes, making good choices. Now to raise the stakes a lot, I think, that this is exactly what is going on with college graduates and especially with college graduates who go to highly selective institutions like yours and the one I taught at. You people are not worried about finding a job and paying the rent, you take it for granted that you're gonna find a job and pay the rent. You're worried about finding the perfect job. You're worried about being able to work and also indulge all the other interests that you have. You're wondering, how can I make life like college, where I actually work, but I also play sports, and I also paint, and I read poetry, and I listen to classical music, and I play the flute. They let me do all of that stuff here. Every single door was opened to me. I didn't have to say no to anything. And people believe that with graduation comes a commitment or a requirement to make a commitment to walk through some door and hear lots and lots of other doors slamming closed. And they don't want to walk through the wrong door. And they don't know how to figure out what's the right door. And the result is a level of anxiety and discomfort at a moment, which in some sense ought to be the pinnacle of their lives that is painful to watch. I learned years ago not to ask seniors what they're going to do when they graduate. 'Cause if they know they've told you. And if they don't know, this is the last conversation they wanna have. And so they work at Starbucks hoping that one morning they will wake up knowing this is the door to go through. But it doesn't happen. So it's a month at Starbucks, six months at Starbucks. All of a sudden they're interested in benefits, making a career as a barista, which was certainly not what they intended. Their parents are scratching their heads going, I spent $250,000 so that instead of slinging burgers at McDonald's they could sling coffee at Starbucks? This seems like a bad investment that I made. It's really, you know, I'm making light of it, but I think it's tragic to see how much graduating seniors torture themselves, because they know a point has been reached when they have to say no to lots and lots of things they have been saying yes to for the whole of their career. Silvia Plath, a wonderful poet who killed herself, wrote this 40 years ago. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, she was describing herself, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, another was a famous poet, another was a brilliant professor, another was Europe and Africa and South America, another was an Olympic lady crew champion, and quite beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. And so it's not just something trivial like choosing jam or choosing cereal, it can be something extraordinarily consequential, like choosing a life path or choosing a life partner and the paralysis that you see when people are choosing jam, you also see when people are making much more monumental choices. And the sad truth is, that everything suffers from comparison. And that means the more options there are, the more comparisons you make, the more any of those options will suffer in comparison with the other options that are on the table. There's a wonderful book written by a person I'm sure you've heard of. It's a funny book, that actually has some very serious points in it. It's called Modern Romance. And I consulted with Aziz Ansari as he was writing this book, before I'd ever heard of him. And then I found out that I was the only person on the planet who had not heard of him, which embarrassed me enormously and lost me lots of points in the eyes of my grandchildren, let me tell you. So anyway, he is lamenting the problems of developing, finding and developing and sustaining significant romantic relationships in modern, urban society, like New York. And he thinks that Twitter, not Twitter, Tinder and Facebook are catastrophic. And he things they're catastrophic, first of all, because with unlimited options, why would you ever settle for anything less than perfection? Perfection maybe one swipe away. More significantly he thinks, because there are unlimited options, people don't expect to have to work to make their relationships great. Why work? There's always another person you could check out. And he believes that for the most part, and I think he's right, what makes relationships great is what people do in them after they have been formed, not what people bring to them, before they have been formed. So anything that stops you, from forming a relationship with someone who is, how shall I say, less than perfect, stops you from cultivating the kind of intimacy that would probably come, if you each committed yourselves to making this union something that neither of you could do on their own. It takes work to make great relationships and when there aren't that many fish in the pond, people are willing to do the work. When there seem to be an infinite number of fish in the pond people aren't willing to do the work and the result is maybe more matches that are collectively much less satisfying. This is his account, as no doubt, a very successful participant in the great dating game. The next thing that does people in, is escalation of expectation. Somebody asked me during the day about my effort to buy jeans and I begin the book talking about this. I, you know, I wear jeans all the time and I go into the Gap, I tell 'em my size, I walk out five seconds later, it's a simple transaction. I did this, hadn't done it in years, and the shopkeeper said, "you want slim fit, "easy fit, relaxed fit, button fly, zipper fly, "acid washed, stone washed." And I said, swear to God, "I want the kind "that used to be the only kind." And the clerk said two things. One, "they don't make that kind anymore." (audience laughs)
Of course. And two, the clerk was 12 years old and had no idea what that kind was. So I tried on all the kinds they had. Instead of five minutes, 40 minutes and I walked out with the best fitting jeans I had ever bought. In other words, I did better and I felt worse. And the reason I felt worse, is not that it took me 40 minutes instead of five. Instead, it's that I, without realizing it, I dramatically raised my expectations. How well do you expect jeans to fit you when they only come in two styles and you don't have a model's body? You know, they're gonna fit however they fit and if they're not good enough, don't buy 'em. Well if there are 200 styles, how good do you expect the fit to be? Well now you expect perfection. Surely one of those 200 styles is going to fit me like it was made for me. So my jeans fit me well, but they didn't fit me as well as I expected them to, given how many different flavors of jeans there now were. And so when we make a decision and we experience the decision, we ask not how good was it, but how good was it in relation to how good we expect it to be? And in world of unlimited choice, we have unlimited expectations. They can virtually never be met. What we experience will always fall short of what we expect, and the net result is that we'll decide, we made a bad decision and we made a mistake. This captures that idea, everything was better back when everything was worse. I don't wanna paint a romantic picture of poverty, but I think here's the important insight here, when conditions were worse, when there was less choice and less affluence, expectations were modest. When expectations were modest, it was possible occasionally to have experiences that exceeded expectations. I think expectations nowadays are so high, you can never have experiences that exceed them and mostly you will have experiences that fall short. And your interpretation of that is will be that you've made a mistake, you made a bad decision. Okay, one last idea, and that is a distinction my colleagues and I made having to do with the goals people have when they make choices. Some people want the best. Only the best will do. The best cereal, the best cell phone, the best job, the best college, the best romantic partner. We call them maximizers. How do you get the best in any of those categories? What's the best restaurant in Southern California? How do you know what the best restaurant in Southern California is? How many restaurants do you have to check out to find the best restaurant? Anybody know? All of them. How else are you going to know that you found the best? Now in a world of limited choices, it's no big deal. If you just have Corn Flakes and Rice Krispies, it's not hard to check out all of them. But in the modern world, checking out all of them is impossible. So at some point you stop and you pull the trigger and whatever you get you get and it's however good it is and you go out convinced that if you'd only looked a little longer or in a different place you'd have found something better. So maximizing is a recipe for misery in the modern world, not so much in world where there are fewer options. Satisfice, what does it mean to satisfice. You don't want the best restaurant in California, Southern California, you want a good enough restaurant. Some people, for some people good enough will mean they have very low standards, for some people we'll have modest standards, some people will have high standards. But whatever your standards are, you will look until you find something that meets them and then you will stop looking. And you will not worry that if you had kept looking you might have found something better. So that's the intuition. Only the best will do means exhaustive and exhausting search. Good enough means search until you find something that meets your criteria. We developed a, here's an example of maximizer. (audience laughs) It's funny, except that it's not funny. Imagine all of the students walking around at Brown with that sweatshirt in their heads. Are they gonna have a good time at Brown if they spend four years at Brown thinking they should be at Yale? No, it's gonna be self-fulfilling. I should be a Yale, Brown is gonna suck. Well if you go to Brown with that attitude, you know what, Brown is gonna suck. So this is actually tragic for people to have this, not on their sweatshirts, but in their heads. Anyway here's a maximizer, here's a satisficer. So we find that maximizing correlates with various things. It's negatively correlated with happiness, optimism, satisfaction with life, and self esteem. It's positively correlated with regret, perfectionism, and depression. Sounds good right? We tracked students as they search for jobs as college seniors, this may be relevant to some of you. It started in October and ended in June. They took this scale that we developed to see whether they were maximizer. We were interested in how hard the decision was, how many options they wanted, how well they did, and how well they felt about how well they did. Maximizers considered more jobs, wanted more options, got $7,000 more in starting salary. In other words, they did better. 20% higher starting salary. And they were more pessimistic, anxious, stressed, worried, tired, overwhelmed, depressed, regretful, and disappointed. But they were less content, optimistic, elated, excited, and happy. In other words, maximizers did better and felt worse. I think this is generally the case. If you are out to get the best, you will consistently do better, and you will consistently feel worse about how you do. Which means the question you have to ask is what's more important, how objectively good a decision was or how subjectively good a decision was? And I think if you scrutinize this question a little bit, you'll discover that almost all the time, how good you feel about a decision is more important that how good a decision actually is within the limits that you don't want people going around feeling good about catastrophically bad decisions. So I think it is a price not worth paying to make objectively better decisions that you feel worse about in small things or in big things. Okay, almost done. How can choice be good and bad? Since remember way back when I said that choice was good. There's an assumption that most social scientists make, psychologists certainly make that I call the monotonicity assumption which says that currents only go in one direction. Here's an example. This is a diminishing marginal utility curve, except what's on the axis is a little different from what you're used to. Number of choices on the X axis, subjective state on the Y axis. When people have no choice, all the way on the left side of the graph, life is infinitely hard. I mean that literally, not metaphorical. As you add options, life gets better and better and better and better. You cross from low neutral, to above neutral. But you'll notice it's a curve. It's not a straight line, which means that there are diminishing marginal returns to increased choice. Nonetheless, it's clear from this graph that choice is good. With me? This is not what I've been talking about. I've been talking about this. Regret, missed opportunities, paralysis, raised expectations. Here we're plotting what's bad about choice. When there isn't much choice, there isn't anything bad about choice. You're right near zero. As you add options, the negative characteristics that I've been talking about grow. More options mean more regret, more missed opportunities, more disappointed expectations. But the slope of the negative curve accelerates as you move from left to right, instead of reducing. This is just meant to capture how, in a sort of quantitative way, the negative aspects of too much choice unfold. So is choice good? Yes. Is choice bad? Yes. What's the net effect of having a given amount of choice? How do you determine that? You add these two curves together. And when you do, this is what you get. Going from no choice to some choice makes people's lives better, but a point is reached where the additional benefits have become very small and the negatives have become large and at that point the curve changes direction. The negatives start to outweigh the positives as you keep adding options. And as you can see, you move people closer and closer to zero and if you add enough options, you move people below zero. And you know, my take, on the state of mind of affluent Americans, like the people in this room is that they are well below zero. Clinical depression, anxiety disorder, I mean, you people are a collective basket case and I think it is partly, not entirely, partly that we've liberated you and you don't have any idea what to do. And I wouldn't either if I were in your position. So the trick is to find the sweet spot. How much choice allows us to derive benefits without paying the price? And nobody knows what the answer to this question is. Where is the sweet spot? It's probably not the same for every person, and it's probably not the same for every domain, but I am quite certain that more is not better than less. And the task, a much harder task, is to do the hard work of figuring out, where the sweet spot is when it comes to choice of courses in college. Where the sweet spot is when it comes to choices among jobs and among romantic partners. It's hard work, it's empirical work, and it will pay off because we can create choice environments where people derive the benefits of freedom without paying as much of a price. So that's your homework. I won't talk about this. All right, what does this have to do with happiness? The country grandpa came from was a stinking hell hole of unspeakable poverty, where everyone was always happy. For those of you who have read some of the literature on wealth and happiness, you know this is not true. In stinking hell holes of unspeakable poverty, people are not happy. They're not as unhappy in a lot of these places you might expect, but people are not happy. What is true is that as material affluence grows and measured by per capita GDP, happiness grows but it levels off. It levels off a lot lower in the income distribution than you might expect. There's a well known paper by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, two Nobel prize winners who argued that at after about 75K in the United States there's not a whole lot of extra juice associated with additional income. Most of the people I know think 75K is sort of what you make a week. And really the action is what... I know, I know, you think that's implausible. Just give yourself a few years. I'm sure that the people who think that now, didn't think they would think that when they were juniors and seniors in college. So it is not true that the country grandpa came from was stinking hell hole of unspeakable poverty where everyone was always happy. What is true, is that adding material affluence and the freedom of choice that it brings does not do much for the collective well-being of the people who experience that affluence. So somehow, we are directing our resources in the wrong places. What really makes people happy, I think, again from the research literature, is close relations. The single most important determinant of happiness is our network of friends, family, loved ones, community groups. The stronger out social ties, the happier we are. That's interesting. It's not implausible to me. Here's the thing to think about when it comes to close relations. Close relations don't liberate us, they limit us. They constrain us. If you are close to your family, you're gonna look for a job within a hundred miles of where your family lives. You're not gonna look for a job anywhere on the planet, right? So all of a sudden the set of possibilities has been dramatically reduced. The more connected you are to your town and to the people in the town and to your family members, the more you're gonna limit your own possibilities so that you can take account of the effects of your decisions on the welfare of the people you care about. Close relations limit us. Now what I used to think, is that so powerful are these close connections to other people that even though they limit us, it's a price worth paying, because of all the benefits that come with being closely connected to other people. That's what I used to think. What I now think is that this is not a price. What I now think is that it is actually part of the benefit. When you are constrained by your network of connections to other people, all of a sudden, you are not face with an infinite number of options, you're faced with a smaller number of options. The fact that you care about the welfare of these people, suddenly makes an unmanageable choice set into a manageable choice set. And in the modern world, not 50 years ago, not 75 years ago, but in the modern world, constraint is actually part of the benefit of ties to other people, not a cost. And this is captured by my last slide. When I first saw this cartoon I thought it was ironic. You can be anything you want to be, no limits, says the papa fish or the mama fish to the baby fish. And we're supposed to look at it as highly sophisticated, modern urbanites and say, "no limits." Look at this impoverished world, right? There's nothing you can do in this fish bowl. Huh, what does this myopic father know? That was my first reaction. And then I thought, you know, what would happen if you took a hammer to the fish bowl and made everything possible. Almost all of the things that you now made possible would be somewhere between bad and catastrophic. So in deed the truth is, that this father or mother is on to something. You can be anything you want to be inside this fishbowl. And outside this fishbowl nothing is possible. We all need a fishbowl. We all need constraints. We need a richer fishbowl than this fish does, but the notion that the, sort of, royal road to human happiness is to shatter fishbowls so that anything is possible is a profoundly mistaken notion and the task that we face as social scientists, philosophers, policy makers is to figure out what needs to be in the fishbowl that humans inhabit, so that they have enough freedom to create the kinda lives they want, without having so much freedom that they find it almost impossible to put one foot in front of the other. I'm too old to solve this problem. I trust that you will solve it and send me an email at my next address. Thank you very much. (audience applauds) Thank you. - [Male Host] So we will now be opening it up to question and answer. Please raise your hand if you have a question. As always, priority goes to students. - [Emily] Hi, my name is Emily Wang, thank you so much for coming to speak with us.
- Thank you. - [Emily] My question is, you were talking about the Gap jeans scenario that you face, and I was wondering in a world where we don't have a choice in how many choices are presented to us, how you go about your day to day life in making those decisions without leading to all the catastrophic consequences you were talking about? - Great, so you actually do have some choice. You can, here are things you can do. One, you can buy the same things you bought the last time and be satisfied with them, unless you're unlucky and they don't make those things anymore. Two, you can decide, I'm only going to go to two stores. Period. Don't matter how many stores are here, I'm only goin' to two. Or I'm only goin' to two websites. And by all means, never, ever click the button that says show all.
(audience laughs) Never, never do that. So I think you have some control. You don't have as much control as you used to. Shoe salesman will tell you, that the first thing they learned, this is when people actually went into stores to buy shoes. The first thing they learned was, never bring the customer more than three pairs of shoes. If none of them worked, go back into the back and bring out another couple. You bring out five, they'll never pick. Real estate agents learned, never show the customer more than three houses. If they don't like any of the houses, then you can try out some of the other listings and show them. Now in those days, the shoe salesman and the real estate agent had much more control. The information was very asymmetric. Now you can go on Red Fin and look at every house for a hundred square miles. So they can't control. So you have to not do that. You hire a real estate agent as your filter, as your curator. You go to a boutique and you pay 10% extra to hire the people who order for the boutique as your curators. It's not a perfect solution, but it's something of a solution. And, most important, you learn and discipline yourself, and say every morning when you brush your teeth and every night when you brush your teeth, good enough is good enough. Then you will be less tempted to look at every option that's available to you. So it's harder in the modern world, but it's not impossible. You have some control I would say. - [Female Audience Member] Hi, thank you so much for your talk. So I was wondering, you had said at one point about how we make choices and we don't consider really how much we feel about them. So do you think a lot of this stems from the fact that we focus so much on rationality versus our emotions? - I said we make choices, but we don't think about how we feel about them? Did I say that?
- Well, no, no no. - [Female Audience Member] At one point you said, something about like we don't incorporate the feeling of them, right? (audience member drowned out).
- What I was saying is, that we focus much more on the objective dimensions of a decision than on the subjective dimensions. So we are interested in, what's the best college and not how will I feel if I go to this college or that college. And that I think is a huge mistake. And I think it's a huge mistake, not because feelings are nescessarily so important in themselves, but feelings create a dynamic. If you feel really good about this institution, it's gonna be a good institution because you're gonna take advantage of every opportunity that the place makes available to you. If you feel crappy, you know, I should have been at Pomona, I should have been at Reed, I should have been at Williams, wherever, then you're gonna sit sulking in your room as one opportunity after another passes you by. And when you finish, you know, people will say, "how was it?" You say, "it was pretty mediocre." Well whose fault is it that it was pretty mediocre? It was your fault, why? Because you were so convinced going in that it wasn't the right place for you, that you made it true that it wasn't the right place. So I think there's a kinda dynamic when you focus on failing to meet objective criteria that ends up subverting your opportunity to make the best of what's actually quite a good situation. So I don't think, I didn't mean to suggest that we do ignore feelings or that we should. I think we are dominated by the notion that there is a right answer to every decision problem and our job is to keep on doing a spreadsheet analysis until we find it. And that's almost certainly a recipe for misery and mistakes. - [Cici] Hi, my name is Cici. Thank you for coming to speak to us. My question was, what's the hardest decision that you've ever had to make and how did you go about that process to make a decision? (audience laughs) - I'm not drinking water to stall for time. So as I was telling people during the day. I have lead a remarkably atypical life. I applied to only two graduate schools and had no intention of going to one of them. So effectively I gave myself no choice. I applied for one job in my entire life and I took it and had it for 45 years. I met my wife when we were in the eighth grade. So I would say that the world has chosen me, much more than I have chosen the world. And none of these decisions felt the least bit effortful or conflicted or anything. And I was a kid when I made all these decisions and I stuck with 'em. You know I was 23 when I started teaching at Swarthmore. I was 20 when I got married. So I didn't know anything about anything. I was lucky. So the hardest decision I actually made was the decision to retire. That was an extremely difficult decision, 'cause I loved what I did and I loved the people that I did it with and I knew that I was giving up something that I would not be able to replace. I decided that what I was getting by coming to the west coast, more than made up for what I was giving up. But it was what people who don't like utilitarianism describe as a comparison of incommensurable goods. There was no metric that you could use to compare what I was losing by leaving Swarthmore to what I was gaining by being closer to my kid and my grandkids. So finally, you know, after lots of hand wringing, we pulled the trigger. So far, as the guy who jumped out the 72nd story of the Empire State Building said, "so far, so good." We'll see what happens when I hit the ground. So seriously, that was a really hard decision. I never really felt like I made decisions, until recently. - Hi, thanks for your talk.
- Thank you. - [Male Audience Member] I was wondering, how might people go about finding the sweet spot that you talked about? - I think you have to bring some of it into the laboratory. You know, I mean, you can do it with, like with goods and services. There are a couple of studies on this. You offer people pens. And you know, one group gets six pens to choose from. One gets eight, one gets 10, one gets 12, one gets 16, one gets 20. And you ask, what's the number of pens that produce the most conversion, the most sales. And the answer is between eight and 12. So fewer than eight, there's not enough variety for people to find something they like. More than 12, there's too much variety and people can't decide how to pull the trigger, so that's the sweet spot. Is that the sweet spot in general? That seems to me to be preposterous to imagine. But I don't think there's any way to know, except by doing the research. And you can do the research on something like selling pens and selling shoes. It's not clear how you do the research when it's like choosing your college. So I think maybe if you do the research in domains where it's feasible, you can start making educated guesses, about where the sweet spot is in domains where empirical research is really not feasible. So that's, you know, that's what I would suggest. - I'm not calling on people. - [Audience Member] Hi, thank you so much. Definitely thought provoking, so naturally I've been trying to figure out, which one of my 20 questions to ask you. (audience laughs) Most of them do revolve around food though. And so I've been thinking about In and Out a lot. You know, I look at one of its competitors, McDonald's--
- In and Out burger, you mean? - [Audience Member] Yeah, so In and Out burger has maybe six to seven items on its menu. They never add more. Is that because they know this data? If that is, why are there--
- No. - [Audience Member] Okay, so why are their competitors adding more? Because that seems like--
- I wish I knew. - I don't know the answer. The supermarket. The places that people are happiest shopping are Trader Joes and what's that big box store that's a competitor of Walmart, I always forget the name? - Costco.
- Costco. - People love to shop in Costco and Trader Joes. Why? You know, prices, you get bargains at both of those places, not as much of a bargain as you'd get at Walmart. In both cases you have highly limited selection. At Costco, you have to buy like 500 rolls of toilet paper which kind of rules it out, if you live in a typical urban 46 square foot apartment. But very limited selection and these occasional surprises that you encounter, that you actually have the energy to look at, because you haven't tortured yourself choosing jams and cereals, peanut butter and toilet paper. So you encounter something that was not on your list, and you go, ooh, that would be interesting. And you have the energy to evaluate it. So why isn't every store like Costco and Trader Joes? I wish I knew. There are a handful of studies that actually manipulated the amount of choice people have. Never because of anything that I said in my book, for other reasons. So Staples had a gigantic print catalog, that was mostly business to business. Not to you in the home, but to somebody who ran an office. Huge catalog. Cost 'em a fortune to produce, cost 'em a fortune to mail. They decided they wanted to save money on production and postage so they were gonna reduce the number of options in many categories in the catalog. They assumed when they did this, that they would lose sales, 'cause you'd look for your favorite pen, it wouldn't be there anymore. They hoped that what they gained in savings would more than compensate for what they lost in sales. What they found, is that in every single product category where they reduced selection, sales went up. And all they could do was scratch their heads and go what happened? And then somebody read my book or heard my talk and they go, that's what it was. Same thing with a gigantic housing development company where you'd look at models and you'd pick a house and then you'd go to the design center and outfit it. And there were, if you do the combinatorics, you know, 11.6 million different houses that you could design with combinations of tile and carpet and paint color and you know, plumbing fixture and so on. The average home buyer spent 20 hours in the design center. They decided that this was too expensive, so they reduced options, in many but not all, of their design center categories. Time spent in the design center went from 20 hours to four. People bought more upgrades, which meant more profit for the company. And there was virtually no buyer's remorse and people where much more satisfied with the home they ended up with than they had been when they had a million options. None of this was motivated by anything I said. It was motivated by an effort to reduce production cost. So I think the evidence is out there and the question is, why are not more companies taking advantage of this evidence and redesigning the product set that they offer? The only plausible argument I've heard, which only applies in a limited setting, is that a lot of decisions that producers make are not decisions about sales, they're actually real estate wars. They want to control as many linear feet in the supermarket as they can. And you're not gonna get any supermarket to have an entire aisle of Coke. You might get them to have an entire aisle of Coke products if Coke makes enough different products. And every foot of Coke product, is a foot that is not a foot of Pepsi product. And so they're willing to lose money on some items, as they fight the real estate war with their primary competition. That could be part of an explanation for why you don't see more reduction in the amount of choice that companies offer people. - [Female] Hi, thank you so much for your talk. - Sure. - [Female] So I was thinking as you went through your slides about how choice will effect different people, disproportionately. Because it makes sense to me, that on the whole of goods and services, when you can make these choices, less choices are better. However when you started talking about, specifically the health questions and those of like marital and family decisions, it seems like people, who back when there were less choices for health, let's say, like was I thinking specifically about female health choices, that disproportionately effected women as opposed to men. So what are your thoughts in terms of places where your theory might not apply as cleanly? - Well no, no. I don't think these are places where my theory doesn't apply, I think that, I don't wanna be, sort of maniacal about this, I'm discussing one dimension of, if you like the question, how to create a flourishing and just society? And my discussion gives you no information about creating a just society. It only gives you some suggestions about how to increase the amount of satisfaction we get collectively out of the resources that are being devoted to providing us with satisfaction. That's never the only consideration. You know, justice is an incredibly important consideration and sometimes in the name of justice you might want to increase options in a way that in the short run, makes a lot of people's lives worse. Because in the long run, you're after something, justice, equality, and empowerment, that is worth the price of creating a kind of confusion. You know, Sylvia Plath wouldn't a had this problem if she were her mother. If she were her mother, she wouldn't have been a housewife and it didn't matter how good she was a poet or as a crew racer, she would have just raised a bunch a kids, and you know, become an alcoholic in middle age and you know, been frustrated at all the things she might have done that she didn't do. So we liberated her, Wellesley girl, and created a massive problem that she was unable to solve, although she was one of the most acclaimed poets of her age. So, you know, the point is that achieving justice, which I regard as the highest good, comes at a price and sometimes, at least in the short run, that price can be that people are less satisfied than they would be if they had more limited aspirations and more limited possibilities. You know, I think it's a price worth paying. I think we want to cultivate in people a sense that lots and lots of possible lives are possible for them, just as they're possible for other people. But that doesn't mean that there won't be casualties. You know, we told women a terrible lie, implicitly, not nescessarily explicitly and that is the, you can have it all lie. It wasn't true when we told it, it isn't true now. You can't have it all. Every move you make in the direction of getting one thing makes its harder to get other things you care about. Sacrifice is what life is and you have to decide what's more important than what. And that's a painful decision to make and you didn't used to have to make it. Because you weren't free to make it. You were stuck. So are you better off making painful decisions that you may regret, or not being able to make the decisions? It seems to me that you're better off making painful decisions that you might regret. But that doesn't mean that there won't be causalities along the way. Does that help? - [Isabel] That is all the time we have for questions tonight. Please join me once more in thanking Barry Schwartz. (audience applauds)
- Thank you. Thank you very much.
