In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz contends that the vast array of choices presented to us leaves us stressed and indecisive. To lift this burden, Schwartz, a professor of social theory and social action, recommends we learn how to better navigate our choices, from groceries to health insurance.
Schwartz’s work combines psychology and economics. He wrote The Paradox of Choice based on his research and personal experiences with the negative consequences of expanded choice.
(Shortform note: Schwartz’s ideas have become popularized, and the concept of the “paradox of choice” has been written about frequently since the book’s publication. However, it has also attracted criticism: Writers for outlets such as The Atlantic and the Financial Times questioned the premise of Schwartz’s book, arguing that the idea that expanded choice has negative effects is not grounded in sufficient evidence.)
In this guide, we’ll examine the types of choices we face, the challenges of making choices, how excessive choices make these challenges more difficult, and how to live with expanded choice. We’ll also add scientific and cultural context to Schwartz’s ideas, plus updates on how choice has grown since the book’s publication.
The many different decisions just about everyone has to make fall into three broad categories—consumer choices, complex choices, and personal life choices.
Schwartz explains how choices in each of these categories have expanded and become more complex, and how this expansion impacts our lives.
Consumer choices are choices about purchases of consumer or tangible goods, from potato chips to computers.
According to Schwartz, consumer choices have expanded to the point that seemingly simple decisions require a lot of unnecessary thought and energy—if there are 30 brands of cookies to choose from at a supermarket, for instance, you must give more attention to deciding which cookie to buy.
One way to mitigate this stress in consumer choices is to identify the decisions that are worth your time and energy. To do this, Schwartz distinguishes between “durable” and “nondurable” consumer goods:Durable goods are those that last a long time, like electronics or appliances, and nondurable goods are used quickly, like groceries.
People typically spend more money, time, and energy on choosing durable goods than nondurable ones. Because you’ll use these goods for a long time, the lengthier decision-making process is worth the effort. In contrast, by spending too much time making choices among nondurable goods, you'd use up energy you should spend on choosing durable goods.
(Shortform note: All durable and nondurable goods are tangible, meaning they’re physical objects you can use. In contrast, services, such as restaurant service or exercise classes, are intangible. Broader life choices, like marriage or religion, can’t accurately be described as either goods or services.)
Complex choices involve more complicated decisions about intangibles that have a greater impact on our lives than products.
Common areas of complex choice include utilities, insurance, education, retirement, medical care, and jobs. Schwartz writes that choices have expanded in all of these areas. For example, there are numerous electricity plans to choose from without many distinct differences, hundreds of college majors, and many private and government-subsidized insurance plans. These choices are all consequential and take time to consider, and Schwartz argues that the proliferation of options in each of them makes it harder to reach a satisfactory and well-informed decision.
(Shortform note: While utilities and insurance are important choices that take time and energy to consider, other complex choices like education and retirement are generally of greater importance. People with the financial means have the opportunity to change their utilities and insurance plans if they are unsatisfied, but education and retirement choices have longer-lasting consequences that may significantly affect the life of the chooser.)
In contrast to consumer and complex choices, personal life choices are broad, long-term choices that don’t explicitly involve purchases, but instead incorporate how we want to experience our lives and present ourselves to the world. These typically involve choices surrounding our personal relationships and our identities (religious, social, and so on).
Schwartz explains that aspects of our personal lives where choices have expanded include relationships, religion, and identity. People now have greater choice over their romantic relationships: Strict social norms previously led many people to marry, buy property, and have children on an expected timeline—but now, most people have the freedom to create romantic relationships that work best for them. Freedom to choose which religion to practice, or not to practice religion at all, has grown more common and socially accepted. Many people are now more free to express their identities as they want to (for example, someone can engage with their queer identity with an L.G.B.T.Q. social group, and also engage with their Jewish identity when attending services at their synagogue).
Since this book’s publication, our choices in these arenas have only grown. In romance, dating apps and websites have expanded our relationship options, although some of these services are more useful than others. An article in Nautilus argues that websites that curate your matches to a greater extent, such as eHarmony, are more effective because they force you to look closely at a few people, rather than presenting dozens.
When it comes to religion, although the options haven’t expanded a lot, 42% of people surveyed in 2015 said they’d changed their religious affiliation at least once. Disengaging from religion entirely, too, is becoming more common: Between 2007 and 2014, people reporting a lack of religious affiliation increased from 16% to 23%.
Schwartz believes that these are all positive developments, allowing people greater control over how to live their lives. However, he notes that it can be more challenging to make choices in areas as consequential as relationships and religion when you have many options available to you.
The countless choices in these three categories overwhelm and deplete us, according to Schwartz. These are all deliberate decisions, or choices that we actively think about, rather than unconscious choices that we make automatically, like basic hygiene. Expanded choice overloads us with deliberate decisions in inconsequential areas. As a result, we prioritize our choices poorly, spending time and energy on inconsequential decisions without giving ourselves space to consider more important choices.
Can Expanded Choice Have Positive Effects?
Some researchers have come to opposite conclusions about the consequences of expanded consumer choice, arguing that instead of overwhelming us, it helps us to clarify what we really want.
A group of psychologists and economists conducted 10 experiments where subjects were made to choose between either limited or expanded options. The researchers found no correlation between expanded choice and difficulty of decision-making. Instead, they found that offering many choices doesn’t make much of an impact on decision-making either way.
Another researcher conducted a study on what happens when people are faced with only one option and found that they were much more likely to make a decision when they had multiple options.
These studies seem to contradict Schwartz’s main findings about the stress expanded choice can cause: If having too many choices has either no effect or a positive effect, then it’s not a problem that needs to be fixed. However, Schwartz has responded to these claims by arguing that, while some studies have indicated that expanded choice can have a positive effect, numerous other studies published since The Paradox of Choice have indicated negative effects.
The process of making decisions is difficult with or without expanded choice. Decisions are challenging in part because each decision has many layers. A single large decision can consist of many different small decisions to weigh against each other. In addition, Schwartz notes that psychological biases can get in the way of effective decision-making.
Schwartz establishes several steps toward making a good decision:
After you make your decision and put it into action, Schwartz recommends a sixth step of reflecting on the results and using what you learn to adjust future goals and how you approach them.
More Decision-Making Tips
While Schwartz gives an overall framework for making decisions, here are a few more specific strategies:
Make a list of pros and cons, considering the future possibilities of each decision.
Do some relaxing activities to decrease decision-making stress.
Talk through your options with people you trust.
If you’re concerned about others’ reactions to your decision, think about how you’ll tell them the decision you made.
If the decision you’ve been leaning toward starts to feel wrong, take another look at your original options to see if any of them seem more appealing now.
Numerous psychological biases, exacerbated by expanded choice, stand in the way of making good decisions. Schwartz identifies six biases that can lead to bad choices:
How Reliable Is Our Memory?
While it’s true that our memories can be biased and skewed, scientists have had difficulty determining the extent of our memory’s reliability or unreliability. For example, Scientific American described a recent study showing that people’s memories were much more accurate than anticipated: When recalling events that happened two days ago, a study group described them with 90% accuracy, much higher than the 40% that the researchers predicted.
Other studies have shown that, while memories tend to be strong soon after events occur, they diminish over time. Researchers are still studying how memory works, and how well, but understanding the likelihood that our memory can be strong in the immediate aftermath of an event and weaken over time can be helpful in decision-making.
For example, if you take a trip and are trying to decide whether to return next year, you might decide to write down your thoughts immediately after the trip. Even if remembered utility biases you to consider your feelings at the end of the trip, you’ll still probably have a sharp memory of what happened at the beginning and middle.
Because of the difficulties of expanded choice and cognitive biases, Schwartz notes that many people fall into a particular bad habit to save energy and effort: making most choices indiscriminately, without considering options or consequences. These people are “guessers.” In contrast, those who think through their decisions are “deliberators.”
Schwartz notes two kinds of deliberators:
(Shortform note: The terms “maximizing” and “satisficing” were coined in 1956 by economist and psychologist Herbert A. Simon, in the article “Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment.” Simon argued that people are generally incapable of selecting the single best option from a wide range, but are in fact able to choose an acceptable option that will satisfy their needs.)
Maximizing and satisficing both come from a desire to make good decisions, but Schwartz argues that maximizing causes stress and eats up time much more than satisficing. If you maximize, you need assurance that every decision you make is the best you could have made. Because of this, maximizers aspire to consider every option they can, even for small decisions.
Satisficers, on the other hand, consider their options and have high standards, but once they find an option that meets those standards, they accept it rather than continuing to explore options.
Schwartz believes that, while maximizers think they’re prioritizing their best interests, they’re actually making themselves unhappy. Satisficers are the people who actually make the most of their decisions.
Are Maximizers Actually Unhappy?
Some research on maximizing counters Schwartz’s belief that maximizing and unhappiness are correlated, instead suggesting that there’s no meaningful connection between them.
Schwartz and other researchers use a metric called the Maximization Scale to determine whether people are maximizers or satisficers. However, a 2008 study contends that this scale is flawed, as it asks respondents questions that may not be directly correlated to maximizing (for example, whether they like to rank movies). The researchers created a narrower scale to measure maximizing tendencies, and they found that, though maximizers are still more likely to feel regret, they’re just as happy as satisficers.
Schwartz argues that the best way to find satisfaction in decision-making is to balance our freedom of choice with self-imposed restrictions. The most important of these is restricting our relationships to a few close ones. When we invest in close relationships, we limit our options, assume responsibility for others, and compromise. This puts some restrictions on our freedom of choice, yet evidence shows that people with strong relationships are happiest.
In addition to narrowing our freedom of choice by engaging in close relationships, Schwartz recommends deciding which choices to spend time on, and which to make without much deliberation.
Schwartz cites the work of Cass Sunstein and Edna Ullmann-Margalit, who described decisions we shouldn’t have to think much about, and can therefore automate, as second-order decisions. They identify four categories of second-order decisions:
Second-Order Decisions and the Legal System
Schwartz focuses on individualized second-order decisions, like picking a morning routine or setting standards to make everyday decisions easier. However, second-order (automated) decisions may also encompass higher-stakes decisions, such as those involving the legal system.
In a 1999 paper, Sunstein and Ullmann-Margalit wrote that institutions and the legal system use second-order decisions as often as average people do. As examples, the researchers cited legal authorities enforcing speed limit laws (which fall under rules), or government agencies setting limits on energy use for corporations, which can be appealed if necessary (an example of presumptions).
Schwartz’s view on second-order decisions is more casual and low-stakes, since he’s only discussing them in terms of individuals. However, it is important to note that all decisions have consequences, and you should be able to revisit and reconsider second-order decisions if you think they could have a negative impact.
In addition to exacerbating the difficulty of making choices, Schwartz asserts that expanded choice comes with four distinct pitfalls: missed opportunities, regret, disappointment, and unfavorable comparison.
Opportunity costs always come into play when we make a choice: When we settle on one option, we forgo the potential benefits of the other options. While it is important to consider the pros and cons of your options when making a deliberate choice, obsessing over opportunity costs can make you dissatisfied with the choice you do make.
People who stress over opportunity costs might be dissatisfied in the end because they worry that they haven’t made the objectively correct decision, or that there could have been a perfect option they haven’t considered. Schwartz argues, however, that opportunity costs are entirely subjective. There is no objectively correct decision, just the right decision for the chooser.
(Shortform note: Many decisions do have objectively positive or negative outcomes—for instance, if you choose to save money by eliminating doctor visits, you’ll end up with poor health. While Schwartz’s argument is salient in that we make many decisions based on feelings, which we can overemphasize, it’s important to be more aware of objective outcomes when making choices in areas like health and finances.)
Expanded choice can lead us to regret our choices. Schwartz notes three factors that cause regret:
Maximizing and Regret
Studies have shown that regret is one of the key negative impacts of maximizing. One study even suggested that quality of life for maximizers is affected only when the maximizer feels regret.
Because maximizers don’t have consistent standards, and instead constantly consider what better options there are, they have the potential to regret any decision that they make. Thus maximizers can feel regret constantly. This can have many negative effects on quality of life, because significant regret can harm mental health, making you feel anxious, depressed, and dissatisfied.
Therefore, learning to be a satisficer, can lessen regret and improve life satisfaction. If you’re a maximizer and struggle with decision regret, try taking steps to satisfice, like setting standards, making firm decisions, and accepting options that are “good enough” instead of perfect.
To make matters worse, we’re able to imagine hypothetical scenarios, called counterfactuals, that prompt regret. For example, we imagine how past events might have gone differently, or what our lives would be like had we made different choices.
Schwartz identifies two kinds of counterfactuals: upward and downward. The kind that brings us regret are upward counterfactuals: We imagine how something in our life could be better, and regret that that’s not the case. Using downward counterfactuals, however, we imagine how things could be worse. Schwartz writes that downward counterfactuals have the potential to reduce regret, and that those who struggle with excessive regret could benefit by practicing them.
(Shortform note: A 2017 study showed a correlation between upward counterfactuals and depression. It’s unclear whether depression causes people to think of upward counterfactuals (how they could have been better off) or vice versa, but this data backs up Schwartz’s idea that frequent counterfactual thinking leads to unhappiness and regret.)
Expanded choice, and the maximizing tendency it encourages, amplifies regret over decisions. Aiming to choose only “the best” will create regret whenever a chosen option isn’t perfect, which is almost all of the time.
Schwartz explains that even when we make good choices, we often end up disappointed in the long run because of hedonic adaptation: When we get used to things that give us pleasure, they lose their novelty and we begin to take them for granted. To counteract this, many of us get caught on a “hedonic treadmill,” meaning that we constantly chase after pleasurable experiences.
The Link Between Shopping and Unhappiness
An example of the hedonic treadmill that most of us have experienced is the desire to buy more and more things. Buying a coveted item, or even a random product that piques your interest at the right moment, makes you feel good in the moment, yet hedonic adaptation usually kicks in pretty quickly. It can be easy to get trapped in a pattern of purchasing random products to get a regular little jolt of pleasure.
In an article in The Atlantic about how unfettered shopping can damage supply chains, Amanda Mull illustrates the futility of buying things to create happiness. The author comments that feeling bad makes people buy things to feel better. Yet studies have shown that accumulating material possessions makes you less happy. Shopping is just one example of how hopping on a hedonic treadmill can make you less satisfied.
Expanded choice makes our relationship to hedonic adaptation more difficult, because we have more opportunities to be disappointed by our choices. Our decisions are also more difficult and time-consuming when we have more options to choose from, meaning that our disappointment can be heightened when we don’t feel as good about a choice as we’d expect. If we spend a lot of time on a choice, we hope it will be satisfying, therefore it can feel depleting when we’re less happy than expected.
This problem is heightened for maximizers, since they put more weight on each of their decisions. Because maximizers strive to make perfect decisions, being dissatisfied with a decision will make them feel worse than a satisficer who is occasionally dissatisfied.
Schwartz notes that one reason we may feel regret or disappointment in our choices is that we compare them with others’ choices to gauge whether we’re choosing well.
Social comparison—comparing ourselves to others—affects decision-making the most in market democracies, according to Schwartz. He notes that a motivating factor behind social comparison is the desire for status. Achieving status, however, is difficult in a society of expanded choice: Everyone has more ways to accrue status, so it’s harder to get ahead.
A complicating factor is that society encourages us to compete for scarce resources. Status motivates us to compare ourselves and our choices to others’, yet scarcity means we sometimes fall short, which makes this pursuit profoundly unsatisfying. While social comparison and the drive to accrue status cause challenges for everyone, Schwartz notes that, once again, maximizers suffer the most acutely because of their drive for the best.
(Shortform note: Social media is one area where social comparison is especially notable. Because people tend to post idealized images of themselves on social media, users make frequent upward comparisons. When subjected to a constant stream of images that cause upward social comparison, people may experience depression, lower self-esteem, and negative body image. These results are particularly strong for those who are pessimistic.)
The Paradox of Choice, by psychology and economics researcher Barry Schwartz, argues that unrestrained choice in market democracies creates problems. Since the book's publication in 2004, it’s generated ongoing debate.
Schwartz acknowledges that the freedom to choose is essential to our autonomy. However, he contends that the vast array of choices we have in contemporary Western societies leaves us stressed and indecisive. To lift this burden, Schwartz recommends we learn how to better navigate the choices we’re presented with, from groceries to health insurance.
Schwartz is a professor of social theory and social action at Swarthmore College. His work combines psychology and economics and focuses on the problem of choice.
In addition to The Paradox of Choice, he has published seven other books and numerous articles for journals, magazines, and newspapers. Popular books by Schwartz include Why We Work, based on his TED Talk of the same name, which analyzes our motivations for working; and Practical Wisdom (co-written with Kenneth Sharpe), which describes the benefits of using what we’ve learned from personal experience, and applying it with intelligence and compassion.
Connect with Barry Schwartz:
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Since the publication of The Paradox of Choice in 2004, Schwartz has continued to publish articles related to the proliferation of choice in market democracies, particularly the U.S., and how that can cause us unnecessary stress. HarperCollins e-books published a revised Kindle edition in 2009.
The expansion of choice in market democracies is an effect of the rise of consumerist capitalism, particularly in the United States. During the 20th century, the industrialized economy grew in fits and starts, hampered by significant national and global events (particularly World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II). However, following World War II, the organizations driving the economy placed their bets on the idea of consumerism.
At this point, the United States’ economy had grown large but needed to inspire consumer demand for the products it was generating at an accelerating rate. Companies used advertising and marketing to spark new needs and wants, thereby increasing consumer demand to match supply. Commodities came to be seen as status symbols: The middle class could now purchase “luxury” products, and these new goods communicated that their social station was on the rise. The United States’ economy, and those of comparable market democracies, continues to rely on consumerism. However, one result of a consumerist culture is that choices consistently expand. Since the economy relies on people constantly finding new things they want to buy, companies are incentivized to regularly create new options. As Schwartz argues, the expansion of choice now overwhelms our decision-making abilities and creates stress.
Much of The Paradox of Choice incorporates concepts from psychologists, economists, and social scientists. The ideas of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky are particularly prominent throughout the book.
Kahneman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and psychologist, whose work on decision-making and judgment significantly influenced Schwartz. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman argues that our brains operate with two thinking systems: System 1, which runs on instinct, and System 2, which uses rational, deliberate thought.
Tversky worked with Kahneman to develop prospect theory, an economic framework for considering how we weigh alternatives involving risk and uncertainty. Kahneman’s work also incorporates cognitive biases, or psychological tendencies and logical fallacies that shape how we process events and make decisions.
The concepts of cognitive biases and prospect theory are central to Schwartz’s analysis of how we choose, and he connects these ideas to the problems of expanded choice.
Schwartz’s ideas have been widely cited and debated since the book’s publication and reviews in major journalism outlets.
Schwartz gave a popular TED Talk where he summarized the book’s main ideas, and The New York Times, The New Yorker, and PBS NewsHour are just a few journalistic outlets that have published articles or aired segments on Schwartz’s ideas.
The Paradox of Choice has also attracted criticism since its publication. For instance, writers in The Atlantic and the Financial Times questioned the premise of Schwartz’s book several years after its publication, when the problem of too much choice had become a mainstream idea.
According to these critics, Schwartz’s thesis was unscientific and not grounded in sufficient evidence; they argued that some of the key studies Schwartz used to shape his ideas were not consistently replicated. One primary argument against the paradox of choice is that, rather than being overwhelmed by numerous options, we’re unwilling to choose when we only have one option.
Schwartz responded to critics in detail. He acknowledged that his argument was not universal, and that there are instances when more choice can be beneficial. However, he maintained that excessive choice still frequently poses a problem, citing numerous other studies where this theory was borne out.
Schwartz’s overarching argument was that, while further research complicated his initial theory, the refinement and shifting of ideas is a key part of the scientific process, and he is open to changing his perceptions as new evidence emerges.
The Paradox of Choice was reviewed positively by Publishers Weekly, which noted the book’s persuasive argument for its thesis and its accessibility to the average reader. Similarly, Booklist praised Schwartz’s book as insightful.
Online reader reviews have been mainly positive, nearly all agreeing with the central premise and many claiming the book opened their eyes to the difficulties of choice. Common criticisms are that the book is repetitive, that the examples are poorly chosen, and that Schwartz’s ideas are sometimes inadequately supported.
Schwartz gives a straightforward, easily comprehensible take on the topic. He states his main argument quickly and clearly and builds on the idea that the amount of choice in our society overwhelms us.
The Paradox of Choice is organized in four main sections: 1) “When We Choose,” 2) “How We Choose,” 3) “Why We Suffer,” 4) “What We Can Do.”
The first section delves into the choices people in contemporary market democracies make on a regular basis. The second section explores how we psychologically go about the decision-making process. The third section analyzes the pitfalls of making decisions, paying particular attention to how an excess of choices lessens our ability to effectively choose. The fourth section, which is the briefest, provides guidance for more effectively dealing with choice.
In this guide, we’ve eliminated repetition and emphasized key concepts important to understanding the paradox of choice, particularly focusing on how people can effectively deal with choice in their day-to-day lives.
As of 2021, it has been 17 years since The Paradox of Choice was published, so we’ve added perspective on how choice has continued to expand in the years since. Our society has grown more interconnected, and choices have grown rapidly, largely due to technological advances. Social media, smartphones, and streaming services are three examples of how we’ve gained choices in how to form and maintain relationships, communicate with others, access information, and entertain ourselves. Accordingly, this proliferation of widely accessible technology has come with problems, many related to decision-making, which we discuss at length.
Our guide also provides exercises for reflecting on how you’ve encountered Schwartz’s ideas about choice, and ideas for making better decisions with less stress.
Freedom of choice is integral to living a fulfilling life. Schwartz explains that individual autonomy and satisfaction increase as choice increases, and he acknowledges that living a life with no choice at all causes unhappiness.
But while Schwartz stresses the overall importance of freedom of choice, he believes that too many choices can actually hinder autonomy. In market democracies, we’re presented with boundless choices on a daily basis, from groceries to health insurance plans. Schwartz argues that the number of choices we face often leaves us stressed and indecisive. At a certain point, Schwartz posits, expanded choices do not bring us further happiness and independence, but instead overload us with inconsequential decisions to make.
To lift this burden, Schwartz recommends we learn how to prioritize decisions, so we can deal with expanded choice more efficiently.
Schwartz’s interest in this topic stems from both his career and his personal life. He’s a psychologist and professor at Swarthmore College, specializing in the interactions between psychology and economics. The Paradox of Choice, published in 2004, was inspired partly by Schwartz’s experiences as a consumer facing dramatically expanded choice.
In The Paradox of Choice, Schwartz explains:
The Internet Drives More Choice
Schwartz’s argument about expanded choice has only grown more salient in the years since its 2004 publication, as technological, market, social, and labor shifts have added choices in many areas of our lives.
In a 2015 article in The Guardian, Schwartz explains how his views on choice have developed since his book’s publication. He cites the internet as a main driver of proliferating choice. While entertainment services and online retailers have developed recommendation systems that aim to lessen the massive influx of choice, Schwartz is skeptical, commenting that the internet is trying to fix a problem of its own making. He argues that dating websites, in particular, have created a heavy burden of choice in people’s romantic lives by showing users hundreds of potential options.
We’ll discuss topics like the internet and dating websites in detail later in this guide.
Schwartz writes that the choices we face in our lives have increased over time, and they continue to increase. They’ve also become more complex, and we often have little guidance or knowledge of how to make smart choices.
Schwartz attributes the expansion of choice to: 1) the incentives of market-based economies to provide as many options as possible for consumers, and 2) in the United States specifically, the nation’s core values of independence and freedom.
Schwartz explores and defines the major categories of choices—consumer choices, complex choices, and personal life choices—and the consequences of expanded choice in each of them:
Schwartz explains how choices in each of these categories have expanded and become more complex, and how this expansion complicates our lives.
(Shortform note: Schwartz uses two categories instead of three: “shopping” choices that Americans have always made (for example, groceries), and “new” choices that largely stem from the transition from “bundled” economic resources offered by monopolies to a broad array of services that consumers freely choose from (for example, utilities). Schwartz’s categories are rather broad and not totally accurate, categorizing some long-standing choices as “new” and putting services and personal life choices in the same category. The three categories Shortform uses instead are more specific and applicable for readers looking to incorporate Schwartz’s principles into their lives.)
The first category is consumer choices. These are small, routine choices about consumer products. Most people make multiple consumer choices on an average day.
Schwartz contends that these choices have expanded to the point that seemingly simple decisions require a lot of unnecessary thought and energy—for instance, if there are 30 brands of cookies to choose from at a supermarket, you must give more attention to deciding which cookie to buy.
One way to mitigate this stress in consumer choices is to identify the decisions that are worth your time and energy. To do this, Schwartz distinguishes between “durable” and “nondurable” consumer goods: Durable goods are those that last a long time, like electronics or appliances, and nondurable goods are used quickly, like groceries.
People typically spend more money, time, and energy to choose among durable goods than nondurable ones, because you’ll use these goods for a long time, the lengthier decision-making process is worth the effort. In contrast, by spending too much time making choices among nondurable goods, we use up energy we should spend on choosing durable goods.
(Shortform note: All durable and nondurable goods are tangible, meaning they’re physical objects you can use. In contrast, services, such as restaurant service or exercise classes, are intangible. Broader life choices, like marriage or religion, can’t accurately be described as either goods or services.)
With durable and nondurable goods in mind, Schwartz lists the different kinds of consumer choices people frequently make.
Schwartz paints a picture of the vast array of choices a shopper faces at a grocery store. He writes that he counted the number of brands he noticed in a store for various products. The results? Dozens of brands and varieties of just about everything: crackers, juices, chips, suntan lotion, lipstick.
Different brands and varieties, of course, aren’t all that different. One kind of potato chip might be extra salty, one might be low-sodium, and another might have ridges, but they’re all similar products.
This overwhelming variety often leads shoppers to buy only what they’re familiar with. Since it would take a long time to compare many products to each other, buying something you’ve purchased before and found satisfactory is the easiest way to go. To support his point, Schwartz cites a statistic indicating that the average shopper doesn’t notice 75% of the products in their supermarket, instead sticking with the products they already buy.
(Shortform note: Schwartz’s assertion that grocery stores carry an overwhelming amount of products is reflected in current data: According to the food industry association FMI, the number of items an average supermarket carries is 31,119. While Schwartz focuses on large supermarkets, bear in mind that there’s a wide array of grocery stores, including small, local markets; farmers markets; dollar stores; wholesale clubs; high-end grocers, and so on. So before deciding what items to buy, you must first choose among a variety of grocery store types.)
It might be overwhelming, but since the items in a grocery store are nondurable goods that don’t last, Schwartz says your decisions don’t matter much in the long term. If you don’t like one brand of cereal, you can get another without much of a problem.
The process of shopping for electronics in a store is similar to grocery shopping, yet since electronics are durable goods, the stakes are higher. Electronics are meant to last a long time and accordingly cost more, so Schwartz says that it’s more important to think about your purchase.
Schwartz found almost as much variety in an electronics store as in the grocery store. Since electronics are durable goods, making a decision will likely be more challenging than choosing groceries. Additionally, most people don’t buy printers or televisions often, so it’s harder to default to a familiar brand.
Since the publication of The Paradox of Choice in 2004, the durability of many electronic devices has declined. Widely used appliances like cell phones and laptops are no longer built to last; instead, they typically lose their functionality after a couple of years, so consumers are incentivized to purchase new ones. That said, electronics remain more durable than products like groceries and clothing.
Additionally, the variety of electronic products has grown, with multitudes of laptops, smartphones, tablets, and other gadgets available. As of 2015, for example, over 24,000 styles of Android smartphones were available, a number that has presumably grown since then.
Just about anything you could possibly want to watch or listen to is now available with the click of a button. For this reason, Schwartz says that even choosing entertainment for relaxation can cause indecision and stress.
Entertainment is generally a durable good. Whether you buy a collection of albums, subscribe to a new streaming service, or purchase a new cable plan, your entertainment choices typically last for a sustained period of time.
(Shortform note: When Schwartz discusses entertainment, he mainly refers to it as a durable good. However, there are many instances where an entertainment-based purchase would be considered nondurable—buying a ticket for a concert or a movie, for example. One could also argue that cable and streaming packages would more accurately be categorized as services than goods, even though the devices needed to access them are typically durable goods. In any case, the proliferation of entertainment options carries with it the difficulties of expanded choice, no matter how we categorize them.)
The number of entertainment options we can enjoy from home increases every day. When Schwartz wrote The Paradox of Choice in 2004, cable television provided viewers with hundreds of channels, and TiVo allowed viewers to record numerous programs to watch whenever they wanted.
(Shortform note: Our options have grown exponentially since then. Cable and TiVo are still available, but subscription streaming services have become increasingly popular. As of 2021, there are over 200 streaming services available for a subscription, from the uber-popular Netflix to niche services like Shudder, a service for devoted horror fans. These streaming services often have hundreds of shows and films to choose from. Combine streaming services with cable, network television, on-demand offerings, and physical media like Blu-rays, and one can easily see how the vast array of entertainment options can be overwhelming.)
Schwartz theorizes that, someday soon, there will be little-to-no water cooler conversation about the latest hit TV show, because no two people will be watching the same shows.
(Shortform note: With the plethora of streaming options now available, Schwartz’s prediction has largely come true. While some television shows, such as Game of Thrones, have generated widespread public discussion, the general entertainment landscape is still more fragmented and individualized than in the past.)
Online Shopping and Consumer Choices
In the years since The Paradox of Choice was published, online shopping has further increased the number of consumer options and has made it easier to access them, particularly with the rise of Amazon Prime and two-day shipping. Amazon has become by far the most dominant online retailer, and their prioritization of speedy shipping has created new consumer expectations for convenience. As of 2020, there were approximately 200 million Amazon Prime members worldwide, with more than half concentrated in the United States.
Amazon allows customers to set some purchases to recur automatically, potentially lessening the choices we make. However, despite the new ability to automate some choices, online shopping also has the potential to add to our mental loads. For example, its convenience makes it easier to spend much more time shopping than before the rise of e-commerce. Plus, there are many more choices available online than in brick-and-mortar stores. Ultimately, we can easily get carried away with searching for the best products, comparing items to one another, and reading dozens of reviews.
The second category of choices is complex choices. These are choices, relating mainly to intangible services, which have a major impact on one’s health, finances, education, and career. These are more consequential than everyday consumer choices, and since these choices are complex and often require research, it can be difficult and depleting to make informed decisions.
Schwartz notes that a host of options exists for utilities, such as telephone and electric service. In the past, utilities like these were owned by monopolies, leaving consumers with little to no choice. For example, people could only purchase their telephone plans from one company, the Bell System.
(Shortform note: Bell was broken up in 1982, since it discouraged free-market competition. For many consumers, Bell had been the only option, and they had to lease phones and buy service from Bell. As a result, new companies and greater choice of utilities followed.)
Regulation has provided consumers with multiple options and incentivized companies to improve services and lower prices to stay competitive. On the other hand, there are many choices for phone and electric services, and it can be difficult to distinguish among companies and make informed choices. For this reason, Schwartz writes that most people stick with the plans they already have, without investigating other options (even if they could be more cost-effective or provide more reliable service).
(Shortform note: With many options and sometimes minimal information, choosing a utilities plan can be challenging, and it may lead to unintended consequences like inadvertently paying more than you did before. For example, deregulation of electric services in some states has led to a proliferation of deceptively expensive plans from power suppliers.)
Schwartz notes that, while employees had few health insurance options in the past, companies now tend to provide employees with an array of options. If people must buy their own insurance, they have even more choices to make.
Health insurance is complicated and difficult to understand, and choosing the wrong plan could have significant consequences. There’s frequent public debate about whether the government should step in and provide health insurance to a greater extent, or continue allowing the free market to dominate the industry.
The Challenges of Choosing a Health Insurance Plan
Many countries have national health care systems, or use a combination of public and private systems.
However, choosing a health insurance plan in the United States can be complicated due to the number of options available, each coming with significant trade-offs. Government-subsidized plans, for example, are categorized as Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum, each with a different range of coverage. If you select a Bronze plan, your insurance will cover less of your care but your deductible will be low; on the other hand, if you select Platinum, your insurance will cover nearly all of your care, but your deductible will be very high. It could be easy for someone to get overwhelmed and miscalculate—for example, choosing a Bronze plan for the low deductible without considering that they need frequent medical care and will have to pay high rates for their appointments. Because of the complexity of choosing a government-subsidized plan, the government provides Navigators to assist people in the process.
More choices abound: Choosing a network type affects which health care providers you’ll be able to see and in which areas. You can also choose whether or not to purchase dental insurance. Since these choices have a direct and significant impact on health and finances, the stakes are high, and the chooser is likely to experience stress. Re-enrolling and switching plans is an option every year, taking a bit of the pressure off, but since the decisions involved are complicated, most would not want to go through the process very often.
(Shortform note: While utilities and insurance are important choices that take time and energy to consider, the areas of choice that follow, such as education and retirement, are generally of greater importance. People with the financial means have the opportunity to change their utilities and insurance plans if they are unsatisfied, but the complex choices described below have more long-lasting consequences that may significantly affect the life of the chooser.)
One of these vitally important choices is education. Schwartz particularly focuses on choices in higher education.
Colleges and universities in the United States previously had a more or less fixed curriculum for their students. Students generally took the same introductory courses, which gave every student a shared experience of college education.
In recent years, education has moved to accommodate students’ individual interests and pursuits. At most colleges and universities, students are able to choose their courses from a catalog of hundreds, with dozens—sometimes hundreds—of majors (and minors) to choose from.
Schwartz compares this educational model to a “shopping mall.” Most schools still have some kind of core curriculum, but even within these boundaries, there tend to be many course options. While the increase in choices in higher education allows students to follow their own goals and learn about topics they’re interested in, it also means students must make choices that will affect the rest of their lives while still teenagers.
The choices college students must make are consequential, and many find that they regret them later on. In a 2017 survey, 36% of college graduates reported regretting their field of study. Given the importance of this decision and the young age at which most students attend college, many may be ill-equipped to make an informed decision from a large selection of majors and minors.
Many college students also take out substantial loans to finance their education. Again, many graduates regret this decision: One study found that 84% of graduates born between 1982 and 2000 had some level of regret about their student loans. Loans, then, are another decision that those entering college aren’t yet prepared to make.
While education is a consequential decision many people make in preparation for their careers, planning for your life post-career also involves a variety of choices.
Schwartz notes that retirement planning has grown more complicated, requiring employees to make many choices about their pension plans. As with health insurance, employers typically offer employees numerous pension plan options. Plans have largely shifted from “defined benefit,” meaning that a retiree’s pension is directly correlated with their years of service, to “defined contribution,” meaning the pension results from a series of investments made by employee and employer.
Defined contribution plans provide employers and employees with potentially dozens of choices, in both high-risk and low-risk investments. Employees may not have enough prior knowledge to make an informed selection, and since there are so many investment choices available, it’s difficult for employers to provide oversight and guidance.
(Shortform note: While defined benefit plans are now uncommon in comparison to defined contribution plans, some employees may find themselves facing a choice between the two types of plans. This creates yet another high-stakes choice to make for retirement plans, and those who have to choose between defined benefit and defined contribution plans have numerous factors to consider—including which would provide a greater financial benefit and whether they want to choose their investments or stick with a stable plan.)
Medical care is another area where choices have proliferated and grown increasingly complex.
In the past, Schwartz writes that doctors generally dictated medical care to the patient. Even if the patient disagreed with the doctor’s advice, the doctor would typically disregard their concerns and proceed with the treatment they thought was best.
Now, rather than being told what is appropriate by medical professionals with little room for disagreement, patients are typically given more autonomy to decide what care they want to receive. This often benefits patients, as they now have more control over the care of their own bodies. However, according to Schwartz, too much choice in their medical care can overburden patients. Many people imagine they want total autonomy in their medical decisions, yet there are situations in which having to make one’s own medical decisions can cause stress and hardship.
Schwartz illustrates this point by citing a study on whether cancer patients want to choose what care they receive, conducted by physician Atul Gawande. When Gawande asked one group who did not have cancer to imagine what their preference would be, 65% of this group said they would want to choose their treatment. However, in the group of participants who actually had cancer, only 12% said they would want to choose their own treatment.
(Shortform note: Factors other than simple preference also may complicate patients’ choices about medical care. In the United States, the high cost of care increases the difficulty of making medical decisions. Recent studies found that 22% of Americans had recently skipped medical care because of the cost, and 29% had not taken prescription medicines properly for the same reason (for instance, some rationed pills to save money). Your insurance plan has a significant impact on how much you pay for medical care, which shows how closely insurance decisions and medical decisions are connected.)
Numerous advances in technology and work culture allow many people flexibility to choose when, where, and how to work. However, Schwartz posits that these advances can also require people to make important decisions about work on an ongoing basis, rather than settling into a satisfactory job long term.
Schwartz explains that people now have greater choice over which careers to pursue. In the past, many were unable to further their education, and so were left with a limited pool of careers, often taking jobs that their parents or other family members did.
Since then, social mobility has expanded, and many more middle-class Americans can now attend college. As a result, it is more common to be able to freely choose one’s career or job.
Additionally, remote work provides professionals with the option to work from any location. Also, remote work, plus digital technologies like email, allows us to choose when to work, even if not during regular working hours.
As a result of these changes, Schwartz notes that many people choose to switch jobs many times and to constantly seek new work even while employed.
(Shortform note: While it’s a common perception that people switch jobs more than they used to, evidence doesn’t support it, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. In fact, since the 1980s, the number of workers who stay with employers for only a brief time has declined, while the number staying for a long period has increased. This misperception may be due to the fact that men have seen a decrease in extended employment, while women have seen an increase.)
The third category of choices we regularly make is personal life choices. These include close relationships, spiritual practices, identity, and self-expression.
Schwartz writes that standards for romantic relationships are less defined than they were in the past. While strict social norms previously led many people to marry, buy property, and have children on an expected timeline, most people now have the freedom to create romantic relationships that work best for them.
(Shortform note: Same-sex marriage and interracial marriage are two types of relationships that have grown significantly in social acceptance following their respective legalizations. Same-sex marriage was legalized federally in 2015, at which point 60% of the public supported it; that support climbed to 70% in 2021. When interracial marriage was legalized federally in 1967, 20% of the public supported it; as of 2021, 94% of the public supports interracial marriage.)
Many people are now able to live happy lives in relationships that would have been more difficult or impossible in the past. However, the number of choices within the relationship (like whether to move in together, whether to marry, and whether to have children) can stress relationships.
Expanded Choice in Romantic Relationships
Since this book was written, dating apps and websites have expanded the pool of potential partners, although some of these services are more useful than others. In some of the most popular apps, the number of options can be overwhelming—for example, Tinder users swipe through an endless array of photographs, accumulating “matches” along the way.
A Nautilus article argues that websites such as eHarmony that curate your matches are more effective because they force you to look closely at a few people rather than attempting to decide among dozens. The article quotes Schwartz as pointing out that “with a million options, you’re less likely to persevere” in a relationship.
Most people still inherit their parents’ religious practices, but it is now largely accepted to either change religious affiliations or to practice only the parts of a religion that are meaningful to you.
Schwartz asserts that it benefits many people to be able to choose their religious affiliation or non-affiliation and which aspects of their religion to practice. However, choosing a religion and deciding the extent of one’s observation are challenging decisions that can preoccupy you for years.
(Shortform note: In the United States, switching religions is common: In a 2015 survey, 42% of people said they’d changed their religious affiliation at least once. Disengaging from religion entirely, too, is becoming more common: Between 2007 and 2014, people reporting a lack of religious affiliation increased from 16% to 23%.)
All of us possess multiple identities: race, socioeconomic status, gender, sexuality, and so on.
Schwartz writes that, in the past, your identity was typically associated with your family history—for instance your ethnic, national, or class background. People now have more choice to express which aspects of their identity are important to them. It’s also common to choose which identities to highlight in which contexts (for instance, someone can engage with their queer identity in an L.G.B.T.Q. social group, then engage with their Jewish identity when attending services at their synagogue).
(Shortform note: Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in a 1989 paper describing how Black women experience an overlap of gender and racial discrimination; the term is now widely used to describe how your numerous identities—like gender, race, and class—combine to create distinct experiences, advantages, and disadvantages in your life.)
When faced with numerous choices in each of the three categories, Schwartz argues that we become overwhelmed and depleted. Besides making us unhappy, this leads us to prioritize our choices poorly, potentially spending time and energy on inconsequential decisions without giving ourselves space to consider more important choices.
Schwartz identifies two ways we make decisions: deliberately and unconsciously. Deliberate choices are those we actively think about, and unconscious choices are those we make automatically.
Think about the routines you go through every day—for example, the steps involved in getting ready for work or getting your children ready for school. Even though every step is technically a decision, you do them on autopilot. If you thought deliberately about every decision you made in your morning routine, you’d wear yourself out by the time you got to work.
Our ability to make some choices unconsciously allows us the energy and time to consider the decisions we must make deliberately. However, the expansion of choice in market democracies presents us with more deliberate choices than we might be able to handle.
Making so many small decisions lessens our mental capacity to make more important ones. Schwartz cites economist Fred Hirsch, who calls this phenomenon the “tyranny of small decisions”: The cumulative effect of these inconsequential decisions is a heavy mental load that controls us, contradicting the idea that we’re in control when we make constant choices in every aspect of our lives.
Schwartz describes a study called “When Choice is Demotivating” that showed how tiring expanded choice can be. Researchers set up a display of jams, with free samples available. Customers who decided to buy a jar were given a $1-off coupon. One scenario offered six varieties for tasting and another scenario, 24. In the six-samples scenario, 30% bought a jar, but in the 24-sample scenario, only 3% bought one. Since choosing among 24 jams takes much more effort than choosing among six, many people elected to save their energy and not choose at all among the 24 varieties.
When we waste energy on choices (like jam) that should be easy to make, it’s harder to make more important decisions about things like education or marriage. Schwartz contends that we often don’t recognize this as a problem because of how highly our market democracy values freedom of choice.
Understanding that we face too many decisions to process, and that many of these decisions don’t have much impact on our lives can help us to prioritize the choices that matter and brush aside the ones that don’t.
Can Expanded Choice Have Positive Effects?
Some researchers have come to opposite conclusions about the consequences of expanded consumer choice, arguing that instead of overwhelming us, it helps us to clarify what we really want.
A group of psychologists and economists repeated the jam study numerous times and weren’t able to replicate the results. After conducting 10 similar experiments where subjects were made to choose among either limited or expanded options, the researchers found no correlation between expanded choice and difficulty of decision-making. Instead, they found that offering many choices doesn’t have much of an impact on decision-making either way.
Another researcher found that when people had only one option, they were less likely to make a decision than when they had multiple options. He concluded that stores shouldn’t limit people’s options. (The research didn’t address the idea that there may be a “sweet spot” at which people feel they have enough options to choose from without being overwhelmed by too many choices.)
These studies seem to contradict Schwartz’s main findings about the stress expanded choice can cause: If having many choices has either no effect or a positive effect, then it’s not a problem that needs to be fixed. However, Schwartz has responded to these claims by arguing that, while some studies have indicated that expanded choice can have a positive effect, numerous other studies published since The Paradox of Choice have indicated negative effects. He also notes that some stores that have reduced options have seen increased business. So while expanded options might not have a negative impact in some situations, evidence suggests that they can cause negative consequences in others.
Schwartz argues that the overwhelming number of minor choices we make every day causes unnecessary stress. Reflect on how you’ve handled a situation where you had many options to choose from.
Describe a recent instance where you had to make a consumer choice and had numerous options available to you. What were some of these options?
How did you feel about these options? What were some of the differences between them that you struggled with? How much time did you spend deciding?
How did you make the decision, and how did you feel afterward?
In Part 1, Schwartz describes the proliferation of choice in market democracies and the categories of choices we face. Part 2 will examine how we make decisions, common mistakes we make, and how expanded choice hinders our decision-making and personal satisfaction.
Schwartz explains that making choices is always challenging—having a huge number of options just exacerbates the difficulty. Decisions are challenging, in part, because each decision has many layers. For example, think about choosing a city to live in. How much does it cost to live there? What are work opportunities like? Do you have friends or loved ones who live there, or would you have to spend a lot of time meeting new people? These are just a few questions you’d need to consider. A single large decision, then, can consist of many different small decisions to weigh against each other.
In addition to confronting many layers, we also contend with psychological biases that often lead us to poor decisions. To provide a context for understanding how we go wrong, Schwartz first describes what the ideal decision-making process looks like.
Schwartz lays out several steps that go into making a careful decision:
After you make your decision and put it into action, Schwartz recommends a sixth step of reflecting on the results of your decision and using what you learn to adjust future goals and the way you go about meeting them.
More Decision-Making Tips
While Schwartz gives an overall framework for making decisions, here are a few more specific strategies:
Make a list of pros and cons, considering the future possibilities of each decision.
Do some relaxing activities to decrease decision-making stress.
Talk through your options with people you trust.
If you’re concerned about others’ reactions to your decision, think about how you’ll tell them the decision you made.
If the decision you’ve been leaning toward starts to feel wrong, take another look at your original options to see if any of them seem more appealing now.
While the steps Schwartz describes may seem simple, we have thought processes that can get in the way of making effective decisions.
Schwartz describes five cognitive biases that hinder our ability to make decisions. He references concepts developed and researched by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky; many of those concepts are described in Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
We use our memories of past experiences to decide what we want in the future. Our memories aren’t always reliable, so the goals we choose for the future are based on potentially inaccurate assumptions.
Schwartz defines three concepts that explain how we use our faulty memories to make decisions: experienced utility, remembered utility, and expected utility.
How Reliable Is Our Memory?
While it’s true that our memories can be biased and skewed, scientists have had difficulty determining the extent of our memory’s reliability or unreliability.
For example, Scientific American described a recent study showing that people’s memories were much more accurate than anticipated: When recalling events that happened two days ago, a study group described them with 90% accuracy, much higher than the 40% the researchers predicted.
Other studies have shown that, while memories tend to be strong soon after events occur, they diminish over time. Researchers are still studying how memory works, and how well, but understanding the likelihood that our memory can be strong in the immediate aftermath of an event and weaken over time can be helpful in decision-making.
For example, if you take a trip and are trying to decide whether to return next year, you might write down your thoughts immediately after the trip. Even if remembered utility biases you to consider your feelings at the end of the trip, you’ll still probably have a sharp memory of what happened at the beginning and middle.
Another factor affecting how we recall information is which memories are most readily available to us.
Kahneman and Tversky coined the term availability heuristic for our tendency to give greater weight to information we can easily recall. If we can remember something easily, we generally assume it happens frequently or it’s important.
The availability heuristic can sometimes be accurate, since the frequency of an experience or event can make it stick in our memory. However, the vividness of an experience can also make it stick in our memory regardless of how common or uncommon it is.
For example, imagine a parent who is watching the local news a week before Halloween. He sees a report describing people slipping illegal substances into Halloween candy. He decides that, this year, he will check every piece of his child’s Halloween candy. Even though it’s extremely uncommon, the parent thinks it is likely that his child’s candy will be tampered with, because the news report he saw sticks so vividly in his mind.
The availability heuristic damages our ability to make decisions, because it can cause us to give importance to experiences or pieces of information that don’t really matter. Imagine you’re planning a trip, and you’re deciding between renting a house in two beach towns. You’ve researched online reviews from vacationers in both towns, and Town #1 has overwhelmingly positive reviews, while Town #2 has overwhelmingly negative reviews. You think you’ve made up your mind, but a friend tells you she took a trip to Town #2 and had a great experience. You then book a trip to Town #2 because her advice was more vivid to you than the negative online reviews. Unfortunately, the reviews were right, and you have a bad experience in Town #2.
To counteract the availability heuristic, Schwartz recommends collecting information from a variety of sources and people. Getting multiple opinions, many of which might be memorable, can help you make informed decisions even with this cognitive bias.
The Availability Heuristic and Media
The media can significantly affect people’s perception of the frequency or prominence of certain phenomena—local media, for instance, frequently report on the risk of tainted Halloween candy, even though it almost never happens.
Another example of the availability heuristic being affected by media coverage is popular perceptions of crime rates. For years, most Americans have believed that the rate of violent crime is rising. However, data does not bear that out—in fact, violent crime has been decreasing since the 1990s. An article for FiveThirtyEight makes the case that the media has an important role in this misperception, as local news outlets tend to disproportionately cover violent crimes. People see memorable reports of murders in their community; because these reports are deliberately attention-grabbing, they skew people’s perception of violent crime.
By seeking out various news sources, as Schwartz recommends, we can become less susceptible to reports that are eye-catching but misleading.
Even when we gather information from different sources, we can be led astray by making faulty comparisons. Schwartz defines two methods of comparison: anchoring and framing. Anchoring is using other items as reference points for comparison, while framing is using language to manipulate how people choose among options.
Both buyers and sellers of consumer goods use anchoring. Consumers use it to help them narrow their options, and sellers use it to incentivize customers to buy their products. For example, James needs a new sweater for fall. He typically shops from sale racks at department stores, and last year he found a sweater for $20. Now, he’s looking for a new sweater using the price of his old sweater as a point of comparison (or anchor). If he finds a sweater that’s under $20, it’s a steal, but if he can only find sweaters above $20, he’ll find them expensive in comparison.
While James is using a cheap sweater as an anchor, someone who shops at high-end stores where most sweaters are over $100 would have a different anchor—to them, a $90 sweater would be a bargain.
Most stores also use anchoring to incentivize shoppers to buy products: If a store lists many items as on sale, shoppers will think they’re getting a bargain, no matter the actual price. Companies also sometimes make high-priced versions of their products that incentivize customers to buy the regular versions, which are inexpensive in comparison.
Besides anchoring, companies also use framing to incentivize consumers to buy particular products. For example, a bookseller may offer two batches of books, one of expensive hardcover editions, the other of less expensive paperback editions. If the seller wanted people to buy the hardcovers, he might frame or describe them as “special-edition hardcovers,” and the paperbacks simply as “paperbacks.” On the other hand, if he wanted people to buy the paperbacks, he could frame or present the paperbacks as a “special discount.” The products are the same in both scenarios, but the language the bookseller uses is meant to influence which product the shoppers buy.
Because of the psychological biases they prompt, anchoring and framing can have significant effects on the decisions we make, even though they have no bearing on the actual products or experiences they describe.
“Nudging” People to Make Choices
In their book Nudge, Richard H. Thaler and Cass Sunstein identified a method of influencing people’s decisions that can help to counteract the negative effects of anchoring and framing. (Nudge also discusses other cognitive biases that Schwartz describes, including the availability heuristic.)
Thaler and Sunstein argue that everyone is susceptible to numerous cognitive biases when making choices, so those responsible for presenting choices should design them in a way that leads people to make beneficial decisions. The authors call this method of leading people to good choices “nudging.” For example, if the bookseller thinks the paperbacks are flimsy and poorly printed, he could frame the hardcovers as durable or top quality to give customers an incentive to purchase them. The bookseller would therefore lead customers to a superior product.
Building on their research on anchoring and framing, Kahneman and Tversky developed the concept of prospect theory. Like anchoring and framing, prospect theory describes how people choose among uncertain or risky options, and the role that bias plays in those choices.
The researchers noted that gains and losses have psychological effects influencing our decisions. As you make gains, you feel good, but as you continue making gains, the satisfaction you feel diminishes. Likewise, when you incur a loss, you feel bad, but as your losses increase, your dissatisfaction might not increase as much.
For instance, if you won $1 million at the lottery, you’d likely feel elated. If your winning were unexpectedly doubled, you might expect to feel twice as happy. However, you’d probably feel a little happier, but not much more than when you won your first million. Overall, the more you accumulate, the less additional happiness you’ll feel.
The reverse is also true: if you lost $1 million, you’d be unhappy. You’d be somewhat more unhappy if you lost $2 million, but the initial loss would feel worse than any additional loss would. Additionally, people generally feel loss more acutely than gains, according to prospect theory—so the person who lost $1 million would feel disappointment more acutely than the person who won $1 million would feel joy.
There is also a “neutral point” that determines what will feel like a loss or a gain: Anything better than the “neutral point” will feel like a gain, while anything worse than the “neutral point” is a loss. This “neutral point” is arbitrary, and can be manipulated by anchoring and framing. To extend the sweater shopping example, if a store normally sells a sweater for $40, but announces that it will be going on sale for $20, then your “neutral point” will be $40, and getting the sweater for $20 will feel like a gain.
Because our perception of gains and losses is not objectively accurate, our decision-making is affected by the risk aversion and manipulation of neutral points that prospect theory describes.
Two Modes of Thinking Affect Decisions
Kahneman and Tversky influenced Schwartz’s ideas in The Paradox of Choice—their prospect theory helps explain the biases that come into play when we’re overwhelmed with choices.
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman argues that people have two modes of thinking: System 1, which encompasses automatic reactions and processes, and System 2, which encompasses deliberate and conscious thinking. System 2 can get overwhelmed, which can lead to System 1 taking over our decision-making processes and making us more vulnerable to cognitive biases. Kahneman contends we should aim to balance System 1 and System 2 thinking in our decision-making.
Prospect theory describes the biases inherent in System 1 thinking: The psychological impacts of gains and losses, and the impulse to make decisions based on an arbitrary reference point, are automatic perceptions that we don’t consciously engage with. Schwartz would likely argue that when we’re faced with too many choices, our capacity for System 2 thinking is diminished, as it will eventually take too much energy to make choices.
The endowment effect explains how and when we feel losses.
Because of the endowment effect, once you have something, you feel that it’s yours, or you “own” it. This applies even if you’ve only possessed it for a short time. Once you’ve “endowed” an item or experience with your ownership, giving it up even after five minutes will feel like a loss. The endowment effect influences when we feel something is a “loss,” in accordance with prospect theory.
The endowment effect amplifies our aversion to sunk costs, which can become losses. Sunk costs are resources you’ve already spent or invested and can’t recover. For instance, you might buy tickets to see a favorite actor in a Broadway play, then learn that an understudy will be performing the role that day. Since you “owned” the tickets per the endowment effect, you might feel compelled to see the show anyway in order to avoid a sunk cost.
Sunk costs are a particular concern for those who prioritize avoiding losses. While there’s no logical reason to do something that won’t benefit you or that you don’t want to do just to avoid feeling that you’ve “wasted” your money, an aversion to sunk costs (or a sunk cost bias) is psychologically powerful.
How Much Do You Care About Sunk Costs?
The sunk cost aversion affects most people to some extent, but some people are more susceptible to it than others. If you’re not sure how much you consider sunk costs when making decisions, this short questionnaire evaluates how susceptible you are to this bias. The questionnaire consists of several sample scenarios. For example, one scenario asks you to imagine that you’ve spent a long time on a project that doesn’t have much hope of succeeding, and while you can’t take back the time you spent on it, you have the opportunity to begin a promising new project. If you answer that you’d prefer to stay on with the unsuccessful project, it’s likely you’re susceptible to the sunk cost bias. The more decisions like this you make in the other sample scenarios, the more likely it is that you struggle with sunk costs.
The questionnaire was created by economists David Ronayne, Daniel Sgroi, and Anthony Tuckwell, who also detailed their methodology in a Harvard Business Review article. They found that those who have substantial experience making decisions are less likely to be susceptible to sunk costs than those who don’t. So while most people struggle with sunk costs once in a while, you’ll likely become less influenced by them with time and experience.
We’ve discussed how numerous psychological biases make choices challenging. Schwartz describes three major ways that expanded choice adds to the challenge:
1. More options means more effortful choices. When there are more choices to make, and more options to choose from in each given choice, the time and energy it takes to make an informed decision dramatically increases.
(Shortform note: Effortful choices lead to decision fatigue. Signs that you’re dealing with decision fatigue include procrastination, impulsive decisions, indecision, and avoidance. If you’re experiencing decision fatigue, try taking some time to rest before making decisions, making a list of decisions in order of priority, and asking people you trust for their input.)
2. With too many choices in front of us, it’s easy to make bad decisions. When too many choices demand our attention, we can’t carefully consider each choice, so we’re more likely to make bad choices.
This might not matter when choosing what to make for dinner or what TV show to watch. But there can be long-lasting consequences if you don’t take the time to make decisions in more important areas. For instance, if you buy a used car without adequate thought, you could end up driving an unsafe vehicle.
(Shortform note: Research shows that it’s particularly easy to make a bad decision when you’re in an anxiety-inducing situation, or the decision has the potential to be rewarding. For example, you may be more likely to make a bad choice at work if you’re overwhelmed by your job, and you might be more likely to make a bad choice about a romantic partner if you find that person exciting and attractive. If you’re struggling with a decision, try asking yourself these questions to prevent a negative outcome: 1) What’s the worst thing that could happen?, and 2) How would I feel if the worst did happen?)
3. Since having more choices is more stressful, the psychological consequences of a bad choice can be more severe. We all make choices that don’t turn out the way we expect. But when you spend a lot of time making a choice and it turns out badly, you’ll probably feel worse than if you’d chosen quickly.
Schwartz contends that because of the difficulties and pitfalls of facing too many choices, many people fall into a particular bad habit: making most of their choices indiscriminately, without considering options or consequences. People who make decisions in this haphazard way can be called “guessers,” while those who generally think through their decisions are “deliberators.” Everyone has to “guess” and “deliberate” sometimes, but habitual guessing leads to habitual bad decisions.
Choice and System 2 Thinking
Schwartz’s description of guessers and deliberators echoes the two types of thinking Kahneman describes. System 1 thinking is automatic, while System 2 involves conscious thought—so when we guess we use System 1 thinking, and when we deliberate we use System 2 thinking.
These systems help explain how the psychological difficulties caused by expanded choice get in the way of effective decision-making. System 2 thinking weakens when we feel overwhelmed, stressed, or tired, and we then use System 1 judgments to a greater extent—and since cognitive biases are an effect of System 1 thinking, this can cause us problems.
Expanded choice, then, can cause us to make poor decisions because it exhausts our System 2 thinking.
Decisions can be overwhelming and stressful, so it can be tempting to be a guesser—that is, to choose indiscriminately.
Describe a time when you chose an option by guessing, instead of thinking about your alternatives. Why did you take this approach?
Do you think this approach was effective? Why or why not?
On the other hand, describe a time when you deliberated before choosing. Why did you spend time making the decision?
What was the effect of taking time to make your choice?
In the previous chapter, Schwartz described two kinds of choosers: deliberators, who think about their decisions, and guessers, who do not.
In this chapter, Schwartz distinguishes between two kinds of deliberators. Both types of deliberators carefully consider their decisions, but in different ways:
Schwartz explores the differences between maximizing and satisficing, the pitfalls of being a maximizer, and why people maximize in the first place.
The Theory Behind Satisficing
The terms “maximizing” and “satisficing” were coined in 1956 by economist and psychologist Herbert A. Simon in the article “Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment.”
While the predominant economic theory at the time was that humans are rational actors who will gravitate toward the best possible choice, Simon argued that people are generally incapable of selecting the single best option from a wide range, but are able to choose an acceptable option that will satisfy their needs.
Thus, Simon didn’t consider maximizing to be possible, a view that Schwartz echoes in arguing that trying to maximize is ultimately fruitless. Simon’s thoughts on making decisions in a society with expanded choice likely would be similar to Schwartz’s: Since people are naturally able to satisfice, but not to maximize, choosing options that are “good enough” instead of “perfect” is the better decision-making strategy.
Maximizing and satisficing both come from a desire to make good decisions, but Schwartz argues that maximizing causes stress and eats up much more time than satisficing. If you maximize, you need assurance that every decision you make is the best one you could have made. Maximizers spend a lot of time examining alternative options, even if they have one or more satisfying options, or if the decision is inconsequential. Even though it’s not possible to examine every option, maximizers aspire to consider every option they can.
For example, if a maximizer is choosing a restaurant for dinner, they might spend hours on the decision. They’ll look up every restaurant in the area, read every menu, read all the online reviews, and ask friends for their favorites. Ultimately, they’ll end up wasting time they could’ve spent eating at one of the restaurants they considered.
A satisficer, on the other hand, would consider their options and have high standards, but once they find an option that meets those standards, they’ll likely accept it rather than continuing to explore options.
Schwartz explains that while maximizers might think satisficers are settling for second-best, what satisficers really aspire to is making good decisions without stressing over whether they’re missing out on better options. In the restaurant example, the satisficer will have an enjoyable dinner and will have saved themselves the time it took the maximizer to closely examine every possible option.
Schwartz believes that, while maximizers think they’re prioritizing their best interests, they’re actually causing themselves unhappiness. Satisficers, on the other hand, make their decisions more effectively.
Are Maximizers Actually Unhappy?
Some research on maximizing counters Schwartz’s belief that maximizing and unhappiness are correlated, instead suggesting that there’s no meaningful connection between them.
Schwartz and other researchers use a metric called the Maximization Scale to determine whether people are maximizers or satisficers. However, a 2008 study contends that this scale is flawed, as it asks respondents questions that may not be directly correlated to maximizing (for example, whether they like to rank movies). The researchers created a narrower scale of measuring maximizing tendencies, and they found that, though maximizers are still more likely to feel regret, they’re just as happy as satisficers.
While maximizers may think they’re making the best decisions for themselves, their preoccupation with having “the best” makes them feel dissatisfied with their choices.
Schwartz writes that maximizers are susceptible to “buyer’s remorse,” meaning that they’re likely to regret their purchases, especially if they find out later that something “better” was available. Maximizers are also likely to feel anticipatory regret: Even before they make a decision, they feel there may be a better option that they’re not considering.
The regret maximizers tend to feel before or after making decisions can lead to general dissatisfaction with their choices. Even if a maximizer always makes the best decision objectively speaking, they’re likely to feel worse subjectively, because the decision ultimately didn’t bring them satisfaction.
While you might think that making the objectively best decision is important for major life choices, such as education, careers, or relationships, Schwartz believes your subjective experience still matters most.
For example, a maximizer could choose a job in the perfect location for them with an excellent salary, while a satisficer could accept a job that’s mostly the right fit, but that’s in an inconvenient neighborhood and pays a little less. The maximizer would still be less satisfied because they’re thinking of how the job could be even better, while the satisficer would likely be happy where they are because the job meets their standards.
Ultimately, while maximizers aim to make the best possible decisions, they undermine their decision-making skills by denying themselves the ability to be happy with their choices.
The Results of Maximizers’ Decisions
Schwartz focuses on how maximizing leads people to be dissatisfied with their decisions, no matter the outcome. However, it’s important to note that the decisions made by maximizers can actually lead to objectively better outcomes.
One study, where Schwartz was a researcher, found that maximizers took jobs with starting salaries that were 20% higher than satisficers. This has a material impact on your life: A 20% difference in salary can affect where you live, whether you can travel, whether you can pay off debt, and a host of other financial considerations.
The maximizers, though, were less satisfied with their jobs than satisficers, despite the higher pay. So while maximizing might be a logical path for consequential life decisions, it still can have negative psychological effects.
Maximizing isn't necessarily something people do all the time. Rather, there may be certain areas where you’re more inclined to maximize than others, and even people who are generally satisficers may maximize for certain decisions.
For example, you may always maximize when selecting a movie to watch, but satisfice when buying shoes. Maximizers, then, are people who maximize more often than not, and satisficers satisfice more often than not. Neither is absolute.
Because few people maximize or satisfice all the time, this implies that maximizers have the potential to incorporate satisficing into their life to a greater extent—after all, it’s likely they’re already doing that in certain areas.
Holiday Maximizing
The same year that The Paradox of Choice was published, PBS NewsHour interviewed Schwartz about expanded choice. To illustrate the point about expanded choice, the journalists conducted most of these interviews at the King of Prussia mall outside Philadelphia—one of the largest malls in the United States—at the peak of the holiday shopping season.
In the broadcast, a self-identified maximizer told interviewers she found the amount of choice overwhelming, but still always insisted on getting the best deal she could find, keeping a highly organized wallet full of coupons. This is an example of someone who has one particular area she maximizes in: finding deals. She didn’t mention the quality of her purchases, or which stores she bought them from—presumably, she’d be content with a wide array of options, focusing more on which products she’d get a good discount on.
Schwartz would likely argue that this shopper could tamp down her maximizing by considering which areas of her life she satisficed in and applying her satisficing process to her hunt for deals.
Given the many drawbacks, why do people maximize? Schwartz identifies several reasons:
1. Maximizers are often unaware of their maximizing. They’re not fully conscious of their constant comparing of options in the search for the best. Some maximizers might just think they’re indecisive.
2. Maximizing reflects the universal desire for status. The desire for social status, which can be demonstrated by possessions, has always been a part of human society, and this has only increased in recent years. In a competitive capitalist society, refusing to settle for anything but the best can be a compelling way to climb the social ladder.
Schwartz cites economist Fred Hirsch, who argued that the concern for status is a result of competitiveness over scarce resources. Hirsch believed that in a society where many people’s basic needs are already met, competition for scarcer resources grows. Aiming for only the best is a means to set yourself apart by attaining scarce products or experiences.
3. A society of expanded choice may create maximizers. Schwartz argues that people who are naturally satisficers may become maximizers, because the availability of a wide variety of options encourages them to pay more attention to their choices. Schwartz acknowledges that this idea is speculative and not backed by research, but he believes it’s worth taking seriously.
(Shortform note: Schwartz has argued that maximizing too much can undermine decision-making, but one might wonder if it’s possible to go too far in the direction of satisficing. Schwartz doesn’t raise this possibility, but it is conceivable that satisficing could work against you if you picked the first option that met your standards in high-stakes areas like housing or education. While satisficing is an effective and efficient decision-making strategy, it’s important to go beyond baseline acceptability in examining your options for big decisions.)
We all maximize and satisfice at different times, but most of us tend to do one more than the other.
Which decision-making strategy do you use more often? Why do you think this strategy is effective?
Think of a time when you used the opposite strategy to make a decision. What made you change strategies?
Did you end up making a better decision than if you’d stuck to your usual approach? Why or why not?
Schwartz previously discussed the contradictions of choice and happiness: Although freedom of choice is essential to autonomy and satisfaction with your life, too much choice can create stress and dissatisfaction.
In this chapter, Schwartz first acknowledges the benefits of freedom of choice. Then he explores how voluntarily limiting our freedom to choose in some cases can make us happier.
Schwartz argues that freedom of choice is valuable because it provides basic autonomy, the material ability to live your life as you see fit, and the ability to present yourself to the world however you want.
Schwartz cites 18th century economist Adam Smith, who posited that freedom of choice allows the market to respond to people’s desires by providing things they want or need, and people then have the freedom to choose the goods that best fit their lifestyle. Schwartz also emphasizes that freedom of choice allows people to express who they are. The goods and experiences we choose shape how we show ourselves to the world. This is a form of autonomy that helps us feel satisfied in our lives.
(Shortform note: There is scientific evidence for autonomy’s importance to well-being. A report in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that autonomy is the most important indicator of happiness: Those who feel control over their lives tend to be the happiest. Part of autonomy is the freedom to choose—if we don’t have choice in our lives, then we don’t have control. Some level of freedom of choice, then, is essential to our happiness.)
While autonomy and choice are essential to our well-being, Schwartz notes that lacking autonomy has negative psychological consequences. People who generally lack autonomy or control may succumb to learned helplessness, or passive acceptance of their circumstances even when they might be able to choose change. Learned helplessness can cause physical and mental health issues, such as a suppressed immune system or severe depression.
On the other hand, a constant barrage of choices can leave us feeling out of control, rather than in control. Schwartz argues for a balance between no choice and excessive choice. He explains how to achieve this through our social relationships and prioritization of choices.
Learned Optimism
Psychologist Martin Seligman, one of the researchers who developed the concept of learned helplessness, continued his work by exploring its opposite: learned optimism, the idea that people can learn to become optimistic over time just as they learn to feel helpless.
Seligman came to view optimism as a strategy for improving your outlook on life through techniques such as viewing problems as external, temporary, and common. Viewing your problems this way can lead to a greater feeling of control over your life, in contrast to learned helplessness, in which you feel permanently out of control.
While Schwartz acknowledges the importance of choice, he advocates voluntarily limiting our choices in order to avoid being overwhelmed. Above all, he recommends limiting choice by prioritizing relationships. When we choose to invest in close relationships, we limit our options and assume responsibility for others, yet Schwartz argues that limiting our choices in this way makes us happier.
Schwartz explains that, generally speaking, those who have strong social, familial, romantic, and communal relationships are happiest. It’s not clear whether people are happier because of their relationships, or whether people who are already happy are more likely to have stronger relationships. However, he argues that both are probably true: Close relationships make people happy, and happy people also tend to have an easier time forming close relationships.
Close relationships require compromising our choices for the sake of others. For instance, if you decide to have a monogamous relationship with a partner you’re in love with, you’re no longer free to seek romantic relationships with others. While this is a constraint, it’s one that will make you happy. The connection between relationships and happiness argues against the belief that absolute freedom of choice is the way to be happy.
Schwartz cites research by psychologists David Myers and Robert Lane that underscores this point. They argue that the United States has been experiencing a decline in well-being since the middle of the 20th century. While wealth has increased in this time, strong social relationships have decreased. With society’s focus on individualism, many people have a hard time forging the type of close relationships that bring happiness.
The Long-Lasting Effects of Strong Relationships
Besides contributing to happiness, close romantic and social relationships predict health and longevity. Research from the Harvard Study of Adult Development indicates the importance of close relationships to health. The study began in 1938 to examine the factors affecting how adults age, and it continues to this day. Over the many years that researchers have been following the original group of adult men in the study (later incorporating their wives and children), they found that one of the key predictors of long-lasting health is happiness and stability in close relationships.
Close, happy relationships, both romantic and social, were found to be excellent predictors of longevity, besting even good genes. Additionally, satisfying relationships in middle age were strong predictors of good health in advanced age. Clearly, prioritizing close relationships can reap benefits for one’s health, emotionally, mentally, and physically.
Schwartz has described how the freedom of choice encouraged by market democracies can be at odds with strong relationships. One way this conflict manifests is through struggles for time.
It takes time to form a trusting relationship and to maintain it. Additionally, relationships entail unexpected time commitments. Everyone with a strong social network sometimes has to drop what they’re doing to, for example, support a friend during an emotional crisis or take care of a sick family member.
With an overabundance of choices requiring us to spend more and more time making decisions, it’s easy to neglect time commitments in our relationships, causing our bonds to fray.
Lack of Time Causes Relationship Issues
Lack of a time commitment can lead to problems in relationships, including being unaware of your partner’s emotional state, not missing them when you’re apart, and feeling physically or emotionally distant. Besides affecting romantic relationships, these issues can also undermine close friendships and family relationships.
If you’re spending much of your time making significant and insignificant decisions, these issues can pop up quickly or develop slowly over time. For example, if you’re stressed about finding a job, you may spend much of your day examining job postings and your free time making smaller choices, such as what to make for dinner. If you end up too preoccupied to spend time with your partner for days or weeks, the distance between you could easily grow.
Another point of conflict between a society of expanded choice and intimate relationships is the length of commitment that relationships require.
Schwartz points out that when making consumer choices, people are incentivized to walk away if they’re unsatisfied. For example, you might switch to a new coffee shop if your usual spot stops serving your favorite latte, or you could buy a new brand of shoes if the quality of your current brand decreases.
In contrast, relationships require long-term commitments. Walking away from a relationship is generally a last resort, once conversations and compromises have failed.
Since we have conflicting approaches toward commitment in the free market and in our relationships, we have to balance our overall approach to loyalty and commitment in our lives.
Fear of Commitment in Relationships
A common obstacle in romantic relationships is the fear of commitment. Signs of a relationship with commitment issues include communication problems, different priorities between partners, and problems with financial compatibility.
Schwartz might add the fear of making a firm choice to this list. If you commit to a partner, that means you’re eliminating the possibility of forming relationships with other people. Even if someone fearful of commitment is able to enter a long-term relationship, arguments or problems in the relationship might tempt them to walk away and look for romance elsewhere.
In addition to narrowing our freedom of choice by engaging in close relationships, Schwartz recommends deciding which choices to spend time on, and which to make without much deliberation.
Schwartz cites the work of Cass Sunstein and Edna Ullmann-Margalit, who described decisions we shouldn’t have to think carefully about, and can therefore automate, as second-order decisions. They identify four categories of second-order decisions: rules, presumptions, standards, and routines. Incorporating each into your life can reduce stress by limiting the number of decisions you need to make.
Second-Order Decisions and the Legal System
Schwartz focuses on individualized second-order decisions, like sticking to a morning routine. However, second-order (automated) decisions may also encompass higher-stakes decisions, such as those involving the legal system.
In a 1999 paper, Sunstein and Ullmann-Margalit wrote that institutions and the legal system use second-order decisions as often as average people do.
As examples, Sunstein and Ullmann-Margalit cited legal authorities enforcing speed limit laws (which fall under rules), or government agencies setting limits on energy use for corporations, which can be appealed if necessary (an example of presumptions).
Schwartz’s view on second-order decisions is more casual and low-stakes, since he’s only discussing them in terms of individuals. However, it is important to note that all decisions have consequences, and you should be able to revisit and reconsider second-order decisions if you think they could have a negative impact.
Sunstein and Ullmann-Margalit’s first category of second-order decisions is rules. By making rules for ourselves about certain choices, we can alleviate the burden of many choices in our lives.
For example, we all technically have the choice of whether or not to stop at a stop sign. Most people, though, make a rule for themselves to always stop. This makes the decision automatic so they don’t need to think about it.
The law makes this an easy rule to follow, but there are many non-legal scenarios for creating your own rules, as well. For example, you could make a rule to always call your mother on Mother’s Day, or to never break a promise made to a friend. Rules like these can significantly help in social relationships, as well as limiting the time you spend making choices.
Strategies for Setting Rules
Some rules can be decided without much thought at all, like making a rule to follow the law. However, it can be difficult to determine what other choices you should make rules for. Psychology Today lists several types of decisions that are helpful to set rules for.
If there’s a product you use frequently, or often run out of, set a rule to always buy it when you see it in a store.
Set a rule to never skimp when you need something—for example, always fill your tank with gas if you need it.
When you have a routine, set a rule to always do it the same way. For example, if you already replace your toothbrush several times a year, you could set a rule to buy a new toothbrush every three months.
The second category of second-order decisions is presumptions. Sunstein and Ullmann-Margalit assert that, like rules, presumptions are predetermined choices you make for yourself. However, you can easily change presumptions if necessary.
For example, if you start work five days a week at 9 a.m., you might set your alarm for 7 a.m. throughout the workweek. Your presumption is to wake up at 7 each day, so you have one less decision to make. However, if you have an 8 a.m. doctor’s appointment one day, you might set your alarm for earlier. The change of circumstance prompted you to change your presumption.
Presumptions and Writing
We all use presumptions in our daily lives, but they’re especially applicable to certain areas. When you write, for example, you use a multitude of presumptions, with many reasons to occasionally break them. This is true whether you’re writing an email to your boss, a letter to a friend, or a 400-page novel.
Many grammar rules are presumptions: Starting a sentence with “and,” for example, is technically incorrect, but there are situations where it’s reasonable and effective. Presumptions are general guidelines to follow, but we allow room for flexibility when those guidelines don’t fit.
The third category of second-order decisions is standards. Sunstein and Ullmann-Margalit write that standards are more flexible than rules or presumptions, but they still confine your choices. To set standards means to sort your options into two categories: acceptable and unacceptable.
An example is choosing from a menu at a restaurant you’ve never been to before. You don’t have a usual order here yet, but you know the foods you like and the foods you don’t. Your choices, then, might look something like this: You like salads and sandwiches, so you consider those as options, but you don’t like soups or fried foods, so you bypass those options. You still need to make a decision, but you save yourself time and effort by knowing how to automatically narrow your choices.
Standards also help us build relationships. If you decide to start dating, for instance, you’ll probably have in mind certain qualities you want in a partner and certain qualities you don’t. You still might have to meet many new people, but standards make it easier to decide whom you want to spend time with.
Standards dovetail with the concept of satisficing: When you make choices based on what meets your standards rather than searching for the best possible option, you make decisions easier for yourself while still finding satisfying options.
How Expanded Choice Can Affect Our Standards
Setting standards is an effective technique to limit your choices, but be aware that expanded choice can inadvertently affect how you set standards. Studies on how people use dating apps found that, when presented with a large number of options, people tend to set their standards for potential matches higher and reject many people. This is in line with the tendency to maximize in a society of expanded choice.
Consciously setting standards can help you avoid this, because you automatically eliminate any option below your standards.
Sunstein and Ullmann-Margalit’s final category of second-order decisions is routines. We build routines when we find something that meets our standards.
To use the previous restaurant example, if you order a chicken Caesar salad and like it, you might order it every time you go to that restaurant. Because you’ve made a satisfactory and repeatable decision, you don’t have to spend time thinking about what to order again (you have a routine). Likewise, if you’ve been dating and find a person you like, you might start seeing them every Saturday night. There will likely be more choices ahead about the relationship, but for now, you’ve found a healthy routine and eliminated the need to decide what to do and with whom each Saturday night.
We have routines for spending time with friends and family, too—we don’t choose whether or not to continue the relationship every time we see them. Relationships would be close to impossible without routines.
Forming Routines
In Atomic Habits, James Clear provides advice for forming new routines, which he defines as a repeated series of habits—for example, flossing, brushing your teeth, and using mouthwash every night. Clear focuses on the habits and routines that we repeat over the course of our lives, and how to develop positive new habits and routines and phase out unhelpful ones.
Clear recommends listing the different habits you repeat over the course of a day and classifying which are positive, negative, or neutral. To form new habits, he recommends planning them in advance at first to ensure you carry them out and associating new behaviors with pre-existing habits to integrate the new ones into your life.
Since our routines are made up of habits, taking these steps can form new routines. For example, if you decide to make tea instead of coffee every morning, drinking tea will become part of a daily routine.
Second-order decisions, those you can automate, can help you reduce the number of choices you need to make. You likely use some second-order decisions already.
Consider the four categories of second-order decisions: rules, presumptions, standards, and routines. Pick one that you already use. How do you incorporate it into your life?
Think of a decision you made in the last few days that you could automate. What’s the best way to do so and why: creating a rule, presumption, standard, or routine?
Are there any types of second-order decisions you’d like to incorporate into your life more? If so, how can you do so?
In Part 2, Schwartz explained our decision-making processes and how expanded choice exacerbates the difficulties of making choices. Next, he discusses four pitfalls of expanded choice and how we can move past them: missed opportunities, regret, disappointment, and over-reliance on comparison.
When discussing the opportunities we miss, or think we miss, when making a decision, Schwartz uses the term opportunity costs. Opportunity costs are the opportunities we give up when we come to a firm decision. Schwartz defines opportunity costs, analyzes their effects on decisions, and discusses how to effectively incorporate opportunity costs into our decision-making process.
Schwartz writes that, when making decisions, we consider our options in relation to one another. No option exists in isolation. This is where opportunity costs come into play: When making an important choice, you need to consider the benefits of your alternatives to obtain a full, accurate picture of your decision. Many people don’t consider opportunity costs, instead focusing on the individual choice they plan to make. By not fully considering their decision, they leave open the possibility of making a mistake.
While the benefits of considering opportunity costs are clear, Schwartz notes that overthinking opportunity costs can make us dissatisfied with our ultimate decision. For example, imagine a student, Alan, who is choosing which college to attend to study art. College #1 is a small, private college with an excellent academic reputation and a quiet social life, College #2 is a large public university with good academics and vibrant parties, and College #3 is a prestigious conservatory that would give him excellent artistic training, but would require significant dedication and would not allow him to pursue other interests.
Alan picks College #1, because he likes the close-knit community of the school and the academic opportunities it offers. Even though he’s made a good decision, he doesn’t feel fully satisfied with his choice because he feels he’s missing out on the social life of College #2 and the opportunity to hone his craft offered by College #3.
People who stress over opportunity costs might feel dissatisfied in the end because they worry that they haven’t made the objectively correct decision, or that there could have been a perfect option they haven’t considered. Schwartz argues, however, that opportunity costs are entirely subjective. There is no objectively correct decision, just the right decision for the chooser.
(Shortform note: Many decisions do have objectively positive or negative outcomes—for instance, if you choose to save money by eliminating doctor’s visits, you’ll end up with poor health. While Schwartz’s argument is valid in that we make many decisions based on feelings, it’s important to be more aware of objective outcomes when making choices in areas like health and finances.)
In a society with expanded choice, opportunity costs can be particularly stressful given the excess options available.
Weighing Everyday Opportunity Costs
Schwartz largely focuses on substantial, long-term opportunity costs that give us stress. However, we all deal with small opportunity costs every day—to buy a coffee, or to save $3.50? To stay up and watch a movie, or to go to bed early? These decisions don’t have particularly high stakes, so Schwartz would recommend you don’t spend much time thinking about them. But they shouldn’t be ignored, either.
Short-term opportunity costs can have long-term effects, particularly when they relate to your finances. Let’s say you buy a $3.50 coffee every day for five years—you’d have the benefit of enjoying a coffee every day, but you could have saved $6,387.50 over those five years. An article for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis recommends that when you make a small financial decision, ask how important it is to you, what it costs you now, and what it will cost you in the future. This can help you make smart financial choices, while still allowing yourself the things you enjoy.
Schwartz probably wouldn’t want you to ask these three questions every time you make a small decision, as this would increase your decision-making burden. But if you wonder whether a choice like buying a coffee every day is worth it, this can help you effectively weigh the opportunity costs.
Schwartz points out that, when we make decisions with opportunity costs in mind, we make trade-offs. Even if the choice you ultimately make is the best option for you, you have to accept that you won’t get the benefits of the options you passed up.
Dealing with trade-offs causes stress, adding to the challenges of making complex decisions. People don’t like making trade-offs, whether the stakes are high or low. It’s unpleasant and demoralizing to think about all of the other options you’ll be giving up when you make a choice. Think about the example of Alan choosing a college—even though he made a good decision, the trade-offs made him feel unsatisfied.
The aversion to making trade-offs leads to psychological blocks that prevent us from making good complex decisions. Schwartz describes three psychological blocks: indecision, emotional stress, and excessive justification.
Re-Evaluating Trade-Offs
You might think of trade-offs as a one-time consideration: You think about trade-offs only until you’ve made your final decision. However, decisions with long-term consequences might require you to re-evaluate the trade-offs.
For instance, imagine you took a job with a low salary because you liked the location. Three years later, you want to move to a larger apartment, and you’ve gotten tired of the city you’re living in. You made the trade-off three years ago and it worked for you then, but now it would benefit you to reconsider this trade-off and make a new choice.
Schwartz notes that one psychological block is indecision. Distinguishing among several options is more difficult than distinguishing between two. Schwartz argues that we’re biologically inclined to make simple decisions on whether something will benefit or harm us, not to make complex decisions on what’s best among a large group of acceptable options.
Multiple attractive options make many people want to avoid making decisions altogether. Schwartz cites studies implying that, when faced with one clearly superior option and one clearly inferior option, people can easily pick the superior option. However, when another high-quality option is thrown into the mix, a greater proportion of people decide not to make a decision at all.
Dealing with a trade-off is stressful enough to cause people to postpone or cancel a decision. This is true in both low-stakes decisions, like deciding among products to buy, and in high-stakes decisions, like those involving health care.
Schwartz adds that the ability to reverse decisions we make can also cause indecision. When walking away is an option, we may become less confident in our decisions, since there’s no motivation to stick with them.
Working Through Indecision
Many people struggle with indecision. In an advice column published by The Guardian, a reader wrote about struggling between options much longer than was feasible. She sometimes spent so much time considering the trade-offs between two options that she lost both opportunities.
The columnist, ethicist Eleanor Gordon-Smith, gave similar advice as Schwartz’s: Since it’s impossible to know the “correct” choice in advance, it’s best not to stew over trade-offs for too long, and if multiple options are appealing, it’s perfectly fine just to pick one.
Emotional stress can also block us from making well-thought-out complex decisions. People tend to make worse decisions when they feel worse emotionally.
Schwartz explains that when we feel negative emotions, we tend to focus on individual facets of the decision instead of the full picture, or we train our energy on our bad emotions instead of on the decision. Conversely, we tend to make good decisions when we’re feeling good.
This creates a catch-22: Complex decisions make us feel bad because of the number of trade-offs at hand. It then becomes difficult to decide—and if the decision itself makes you feel bad, you’ll be ill-equipped to choose effectively.
Stress and Binary Thinking
Another negative impact of stress on decision-making is that it makes us think in binaries. Our brains simplify problems for us when we’re stressed, so complex decisions can start to seem more black-and-white. For example, if a student’s stressed out about an upcoming exam, they might study for it all night, or they might not study at all. The better choice would probably be to study for a few hours and get a good night’s sleep, but stress can override decisions that aren’t firmly on one side of a binary.
If you’re feeling stressed and facing a decision, it might help to take a step back and consider whether there are more nuanced solutions than you’re considering.
Schwartz writes that when a decision is high-stakes, we feel the need to justify it. However, we can’t always accurately judge why we make the decisions we do. In reality, thinking about our reasons for making choices can alter the choices themselves.
When we try to justify our decisions, we can have a hard time verbalizing our reasoning, which tempts us to just change our decision to something that’s easier to explain. As the complexity increases, the impulse to justify our decisions increases. We may end up with an unanticipated, unsatisfying decision once we try to justify it, even if our original decision would have been fine.
The Problem of Limited Knowledge
One of the main circumstances where we have trouble justifying our decisions is when we know little about the area we’re making a decision in. For example, if someone knows little about theater, they’d probably have a hard time explaining their preference for one play over another.
Studies have suggested that this effect doesn’t happen as much when you have expertise. A professional director would probably have a much easier time analyzing their own preferences and explaining why they liked or disliked a play, since they’re confident thinking and talking about plays.
So while you might not need to worry about justifying a decision in an area you’re knowledgeable in, it could benefit you to restrain yourself from over-justifying a choice in an area you’re not an expert in.
To effectively incorporate opportunity costs into your decision-making, avoid the tendency to maximize.
Schwartz argues that opportunity costs can be especially difficult to weigh for maximizers. Since maximizers will accept only the best, they’ll be tempted to consider every possible advantage and trade-off of their options, leaving them exhausted and indecisive, as opposed to leading them to the actual “best” decision.
Satisficers, on the other hand, are well-equipped to deal with the difficulties of weighing opportunity costs. Accepting “good-enough” options makes opportunity costs less daunting. Satisficing allows for considering the pros and cons of your options, while still making a choice without excessive deliberation. Setting standards can also help when making complex choices, since it eliminates many options.
Overall, while opportunity costs can pose challenges, using the techniques of a satisficer can help you effectively weigh them.
Opportunity Costs and Difficult Decisions
When making a complex decision, such as where to live, satisficing is effective, as it helps to realize that there are no perfect solutions, and what matters most is to make a choice that will live up to your standards.
However, it can still be tough to make a decision even if you apply satisficing techniques, especially if numerous options are up to your standards. An article in Harvard Business Review suggests you make a “consequences table” comparing options against your objectives.
To make a table, list your options across the top, and your objectives or preferences down the left side. Then, write in how well each option meets your objectives. Your answers are the consequences of choosing that option.
Bear in mind that using a table like this for too many decisions might veer into maximizing— you probably won’t want to do this for deciding what to eat for breakfast or what to wear to a party. When you’re dealing with a particularly challenging decision, though, this can help you to clearly see the opportunity costs you’re dealing with.
Opportunity costs are important to consider when making complex decisions, but sometimes considering them can over-complicate your decision-making.
Describe a recent decision that was difficult because of the opportunity costs or trade-offs. What were they?
How did you weigh the opportunity costs, and what was your decision?
How could you have applied a satisficing approach (accepting an option that meets your basic standards) in making this decision?
What’s an upcoming decision where you could take a satisficing approach to considering the opportunity costs?
In the last chapter, Schwartz discussed how the fear of missed opportunities makes decisions challenging. In this chapter, he examines another pitfall of too much choice: regret. He explains what causes regret, the tendency to imagine scenarios that make us regretful, the negative effects of regret, how expanded choice makes regret worse, and how we can use regret in a healthy way.
Schwartz describes three factors that influence how we experience regret:
1. Omission bias: When reflecting on the recent past, we regret choices we made instead of those we failed to make. The opposite is also true—when reflecting on the distant past, we tend to regret choices we failed to make instead of those we made.
(Shortform note: While Schwartz focuses on the individual effects of cognitive biases like omission bias, your decisions can have broader effects, as well. For instance, countries where you have to opt out of being an organ donor have high rates of organ donation: Since you have to actively decide against being an organ donor, opting out feels like doing harm, which you want to avoid. The United States, on the other hand, requires you to opt in to being an organ donor, and it has lower rates of organ donation—since you’re not acting by neglecting to opt in, you likely don’t feel as regretful about it.)
2. Nearness effect: If a choice nearly works out, we feel bad that it didn’t. For example, if you order a Christmas present that arrives on December 26, you might feel worse than if it had arrived after New Year’s. You’d feel that if you’d ordered it a day earlier, it might have arrived on time. However, if the present arrived even later you’d feel less in control of the outcome.
(Shortform note: In addition to creating regret, there’s evidence that the nearness effect also gives us a jolt of motivation. Research has suggested that when we almost win a game, part of us feels like we won, making us want to try again. The nearness effect, therefore, also poses a risk for people who engage in risky activities like gambling: If you rack up near-misses on the slot machines, for example, you’ll want to keep going, and likely end up regretful after the fact.)
3. Responsibility: We only regret choices we feel personally responsible for. If something goes wrong but we’re not at fault, we might feel bad, but we don’t personally regret it. But if something goes wrong because of a choice we made, we regret it because we feel that we’re responsible for the outcome.
(Shortform note: Some researchers have found that although we experience regret for decisions we’re responsible for, we experience greater disappointment for decisions we’re not responsible for. This is a different kind of negative feeling—instead of wishing we acted differently, we feel upset that we’ve been placed in an unsatisfying situation through no fault of our own. This is a benefit of regret: When we feel regret, we at least have the motivation and the ability to change our actions in the future.)
When these three factors combine, regret can grow even stronger.
Schwartz writes that, to make matters worse, we have the ability to imagine scenarios—called counterfactuals—that prompt regret.
Counterfactuals are hypothetical situations we imagine. For example, we envision how past events might have gone differently, or what our lives would be like had we made different choices. These hypothetical scenarios can make us regret the choices that led to our current circumstances.
Schwartz writes that we typically imagine counterfactual scenarios when something makes us unhappy. For instance, you could be generally satisfied with your life, but every day you get stuck in traffic on your commute to work. One morning, in particularly bad bumper-to-bumper traffic, you imagine life without this inconvenience. Then you start to regret your life as a whole—if you’d chosen a different career in a different city, you wouldn’t have such a frustrating commute. Imagining how things could be better is an upward counterfactual.
(Shortform note: A 2017 study showed a correlation between upward counterfactuals and depression. It’s unclear whether depression causes people to think of upward counterfactuals or vice versa, but this data backs up Schwart’s idea that frequent counterfactual thinking leads to unhappiness and regret.)
In contrast, Schwartz explains that imagining how we could be worse off—a downward counterfactual—can be positive because these counterfactuals can make us feel grateful for our lives and the choices we’ve made. After all, we could have chosen much worse. We don’t naturally imagine downward counterfactuals (or look on the bright side), so Schwartz advises people struggling with regret to make a point of doing so.
For example, imagine a college student who studied hard for a calculus exam and got a C+. Although she’d hoped to do better, she could choose to imagine a downward counterfactual: She might not have studied at all and failed. Imagining a worse outcome makes her feel better about her C+.
Downward Counterfactuals and Procrastination
While Schwartz writes that most people don’t naturally imagine downward counterfactuals, some are inclined to do so—namely, procrastinators. The tendency to imagine downward counterfactuals is associated with the tendency to procrastinate.
A study indicated that, when presented with scenarios that can cause anxiety, like seeking medical care, participants with a tendency to procrastinate generated numerous downward counterfactuals and relatively few upward counterfactuals. For instance, they imagined the ways in which their health could be worse, reducing their sense of urgency about seeking medical care. This seems to be linked to procrastination because imagining downward counterfactuals takes the pressure off making tough decisions—since things aren’t so bad now, you don’t need to make a decision right away.
Procrastination is related to difficulties in decision-making, since challenging choices can trigger stress, leading some to put off making the choice indefinitely. People who regularly imagine downward counterfactuals, then, may be people who already have some difficulty making choices.
Schwartz notes that, while regret has several distinct causes, what we notice most in our lives are its negative effects. Regret can carry consequences detrimental to our decision-making and emotional health.
Schwartz asserts that one of the major consequences of regret is regret aversion: making choices with the primary goal of avoiding regret.
Regret aversion is related to the concept of risk aversion, an aspect of prospect theory. People tend to avoid risk when making choices, even if the upside of the risk is highly positive. Regret aversion is a type of risk aversion. If faced with a choice between two options—a “safe” option we know what to expect from and a risky option with potential upsides—most people would choose the safe option to avoid regret.
Schwartz points out that regret aversion can also cause people to delay making decisions—called inaction inertia—due to the potential for regret. Meanwhile, they miss out on the more attractive option and are faced with deciding on a less attractive one. Again, they put off a decision, and the cycle continues.
For example, imagine a new digital camera is on sale for 25% off. You want to buy it, but you’re concerned it’s still too expensive for a product that might not totally satisfy you. You wait too long, and after a week it’s no longer on sale. You still want the camera, but now you can’t justify buying it because you didn’t get it while it was on sale.
The ultimate consequence of decision avoidance can be regret for failing to make a choice. Inaction inertia, therefore, doesn’t prevent regret at all.
FOMO and Regret Aversion
One example of regret aversion you may have encountered is FOMO—the “fear of missing out,” often triggered by social media posts showing others having a good time. When you experience FOMO, you’ll likely make commitments you don’t want to make for fear you’ll miss something memorable. This is a classic case of regret aversion. Instead of choosing something you actually want, you’re choosing something to stave off future regret.
If you struggle with FOMO, it might be helpful to think of what you actually want in the moment, as opposed to what you think you might want in the future.
Regret also causes us to avoid “sunk costs,” or wasting resources we’ve already committed. Logically, we should base decisions on what’s best for us in the future. However, as explained in Chapter 3, we frequently do things we don’t necessarily want to because we’ve already committed ourselves and want to justify it. For instance, if you buy a movie ticket a week in advance but don’t want to go to the movie when the time comes, you’ll most likely go anyway because you purchased the ticket.
Schwartz argues that the desire to avoid sunk costs stems from feelings of regret and responsibility. Since we already made a choice or investment, we follow through to avoid regretting the decision (as previously noted, this type of thinking is known as the sunk cost bias). But we don’t satisfy ourselves, or even avoid regret, by trying to justify choices we made in the past.
High-Stakes Sunk Costs
Schwartz discusses the sunk cost bias in the context of individual choices, but organizations can also succumb to the sunk cost bias, with significant consequences.
A high-profile example of a large organization falling victim to the sunk cost bias is Walgreens, which maintained a partnership with the fraudulent blood-testing company Theranos even after suspecting Theranos’s testing equipment didn’t work.
In Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, John Carreyrou details how Walgreens gave in to sunk costs. When Walgreens began to have doubts about Theranos’s technology, it didn’t cut ties, in part because it had already spent a significant amount of money on building clinics and didn’t want to back out of a high-profile commitment.
Schwartz contends that expanded choice, and the maximizing tendency it encourages, amplifies regret.
With expanded choice, virtually every decision we make has many options. Since there are many options, there are many opportunities to make a choice that will cause regret. Expanded choice increases regret by making bad choices more likely.
Schwartz notes that an increase in choices also implies an increase in opportunity costs. Increased opportunity costs means that every decision entails many alternatives to weigh, creating potential anticipatory regret and post-decision regret: You worry that you’ll make the wrong choice, and once you’ve chosen, you wish you’d chosen an alternative.
Regret is a much more potent issue for maximizers when there is expanded choice. Aiming to choose only “the best” will create regret whenever a chosen option isn’t completely satisfactory, which is almost all of the time. Satisficers, since they are content with “good enough,” don’t regret their choices as often as maximizers.
Maximizing and Regret
Studies have shown that regret is one of the key negative impacts of maximizing. One study even suggested that quality of life for maximizers is affected only when the maximizer feels regret.
Because maximizers don’t have consistent standards, and instead constantly consider what better options there are, they have the potential to regret any decision they make. Thus, maximizers feel regret constantly. This can lessen quality of life, because significant regret can harm mental health, causing anxiety, depression, and dissatisfaction.
Therefore, learning to be a satisficer has the potential to lessen regret and improve satisfaction with your life. If you’re a maximizer and struggle with decision regret, try taking steps to satisfice, like setting standards, making firm decisions, and accepting options that are “good enough” instead of perfect.
While Schwartz has described the pitfalls of regret in relation to decision-making and expanded choice, he also emphasizes that regret has several useful purposes.
First, anticipatory regret forces us to take our decisions seriously, since we’re already concerned about the outcome before we’ve made the choice. Post-decision regret helps us to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.
Regret can also compel us to act in order to reduce the impact of our past mistakes, or to help to mend the damage they’ve caused. When you express regret, it tells others that you’re sorry for the harm you’ve caused, and that you aim to make better choices in the future.
These positive effects show that regret is a necessary, useful emotion. What Schwartz emphasizes is how regret can go too far, particularly when faced with expanded choice.
For those who have major issues with regret, such as maximizers, taking steps to reduce regret can positively impact their lives. Schwartz offers that some ways to reduce regret include practicing upward counterfactuals and aiming to satisfice in your decision-making.
How to Benefit From Regret
To make sure you benefit from your regret, try taking these steps. These will help you consider how you can use regret to make better choices in the future, instead of stewing over your regrets.
Acknowledge the regret you feel, but look for positive choices you can make in the future, instead of dwelling on the past.
If you struggle with regret spirals, find some ways to cut them off. It’s helpful to find tasks or projects to work on, since those will take your focus elsewhere.
Remind yourself that you can see the events you regret from a different point of view, and you can find positives in any decision.
Talk to yourself about your regrets like a trusted mentor or loved one would, instead of talking to yourself negatively.
Use your regret to determine what’s important in your life, and take this knowledge into your future decisions.
Take action to make better decisions in the future.
Taking action is especially important because it helps you lessen future regret. For example, if you lost a job because you showed up late too often, you’d likely feel regret because of the consequences of your lateness. You could use this regret effectively: When you start a new job, you could make it a priority to always be on time.
Everyone occasionally regrets a choice they’ve made. In this exercise, consider how regret has played into your decision-making.
Think of a time when you regretted a decision. What made you regret this choice?
Was this regret productive, or did it make future decisions more challenging? How so?
If you don’t think the regret was worthwhile, how can you address regret in a healthier way moving forward?
In the past two chapters, Schwartz analyzed what happens when we feel we missed out on alternative choices. In this chapter, he explains why we may be disappointed even with positive choices we’ve made, and how we can move past our disappointment. He explores:
Schwartz asserts that even when we make good choices, we often end up disappointed in the long run because of adaptation: When we get used to things, they lose their novelty and we begin to take them for granted.
Adapting to the things that give us pleasure is called hedonic adaptation. Hedonic adaptation can occur as a natural response over time, or in response to a changed reference point. For instance, if you eat a slice of the best chocolate cake you’ve ever had, other chocolate cakes will start to pale in comparison. Because you’ve had a highly pleasurable experience (your new reference point), you’ve unconsciously set your standards higher.
When hedonic adaptation sets in, pleasure is replaced by comfort. Of course, comfort isn’t a bad thing, but when we want to feel pleasure, comfort seems insufficient. For example, if you eat that same chocolate cake again once a week for months, it’ll eventually feel less exceptional than it did at first, becoming more of a regular comfort than a special pleasure.
Schwartz explains that we tend not to expect hedonic adaptation. When we make a choice expecting excitement and pleasure, we don’t realize that pleasure will decline as we get used to it. For example, imagine buying a new pair of shoes you’ve been eyeing for months. You’ll be excited at first, but after a few weeks, the novelty will wear off and you’ll be used to wearing them. We repeat this pattern every time we make a new and exciting purchase, even though we’ve experienced hedonic adaptation before.
How Much Can We Control Our Happiness?
The fact that we can’t control the happiness we get out of experiences over time due to hedonic adaptation raises the question: How much of our happiness and pleasure is actually within our control?
Research shows that about 40% of the happiness we experience is under our control—while about 50% of our happiness seems to be genetically influenced and 10% relates to circumstances we can’t control, the remaining 40% is in our hands. This suggests that, while we can’t dictate exactly how much happiness we receive from our choices, we can still affect how much hedonic adaptation impacts our overall happiness. For example, you might not have been satisfied by a recent vacation, but you can improve your happiness by focusing on what you did enjoy about it.
Those who realize the impact hedonic adaptation has on their lives usually learn to live with it—they realize that making purchases or pursuing novel experiences all the time can have diminishing returns. However, others attempt to outrun hedonic adaptation, constantly accumulating new commodities to keep experiencing pleasure.
Schwartz contends that this is an ineffective strategy. Nobody can achieve pleasure all the time through buying exciting new things, and those who seek this strategy end up stuck on a “hedonic treadmill”: constantly pursuing novelty without sustaining it once reached.
The Link Between Shopping and Unhappiness
An example of the hedonic treadmill that most of us have experienced is the desire to buy more and more things. Buying a coveted item, or even a random product that piques your interest, makes you feel good in the moment, yet hedonic adaptation usually kicks in pretty quickly. It can be easy to get trapped in a pattern of purchasing products to get a regular little jolt of pleasure.
An Atlantic article about how unfettered shopping can damage supply chains illustrates the futility of buying things to create happiness. The author comments that feeling bad makes people buy things to feel better. Yet studies have shown that accumulating material possessions makes you less happy. Shopping is just one example of how hopping on a hedonic treadmill can make you less satisfied.
Schwartz notes that it’s hard to predict how satisfying our choices will be, especially months from now. Due to adaptation, people emotionally adjust to good and bad experiences, yet people tend to be unaware of this adaptation effect.
He cites a study that asked a group of people to predict how certain experiences would make them feel, and asked another group who had those experiences how they ended up feeling. People in the first group predicted they’d have stronger emotional reactions to an experience than were reported by those who actually experienced it.
Since our decisions almost always involve predicting how a choice will make us feel in the future, our inaccuracy in determining that can lead to bad decisions.
Affective Forecasting
The ability or inability to predict our future satisfaction is called “affective forecasting,” a concept developed by psychologists Dan Gilbert and Tim Wilson.
The researchers concluded that people aren’t particularly good at affective forecasting, because they don’t often predict how quickly they’ll adapt to events, good or bad. Like Schwartz, the researchers emphasize that people will likely predict that they’ll feel great when something good happens and feel awful when something bad happens, not anticipating the adaptation that will diminish their feelings.
Interestingly, the researchers also found that smaller events can have larger effects on us than we imagine. Our brains kick into action and adapt when major events happen, but not as much when smaller events happen. Because of this, we might feel worse when we’re inconvenienced than when actual harm befalls us. So while Schwartz emphasizes that we adapt to significant events, keep in mind that the reverse is often true as well.
Schwartz argues that expanded choice makes our relationship to adaptation more difficult, because we have more opportunities to be disappointed by our choices. Our decisions are also more difficult and time-consuming when we have more options to choose from, meaning that our disappointment can be heightened when we don’t feel as good about a choice as we’d expect. If we spend a lot of time on a choice, we hope it will be satisfying, so it can feel depleting when we lose pleasure we received from a difficult choice.
This problem is heightened for maximizers, since they put more weight on each of their decisions. As maximizers strive for perfection in each of their decisions, feeling dissatisfaction from a decision will make them feel worse than a satisficer who is occasionally dissatisfied with a decision will feel.
The Benefits of Restricting Pleasure
When dealing with adaptation, it might be tempting to search out new opportunities for pleasure, especially if you’re a maximizer who always wants the most pleasurable experience. However, there’s evidence that restricting your pleasure can make you happier.
One study showed that a group of people who ate lots of chocolate received less pleasure than another group that had been denied chocolate for a while and then was allowed to eat it at the end of the study. Another study showed that people actually get more pleasure from watching TV when there are commercial breaks. Both of these suggest that when pleasure is occasionally restricted, adaptation doesn’t kick in as strongly.
Maximizing, then, appears to be a bad strategy for increasing your pleasure and resisting adaptation. Instead, giving yourself breaks from pleasurable experiences, or saving those experiences for special occasions, will allow you to feel enjoyment without adaptation setting in.
While adaptation can cause challenges, particularly when making decisions about our futures, Schwartz says we can integrate it into our lives by being aware of it. Adaptation can be important when we’re in difficult circumstances, but it can cause unnecessary emotional distress when our circumstances are largely positive. For example, if you move to a new city, you might be excited at first but eventually get used to your new surroundings and second-guess your decision. Even if that city’s the best place for you to live, hedonic adaptation might cause you to feel dissatisfied with it.
Schwartz advises that being aware of the effects of adaptation can lessen its negative effects. When we remind ourselves of the impact of adaptation on our lives, we can work around it and make more informed decisions, knowing we’re likely to adjust to the outcomes. To use the city example again, you could remind yourself that adjusting to a new environment is normal, and growing pains aren’t a sign that you’ve made the wrong choice.
Additionally, Schwartz says that practicing gratitude can help. If adaptation is defined by taking things for granted, actively practicing gratitude for the positive aspects of our lives can help to counteract this.
Counteracting Hedonic Adaptation
Besides gratitude, several other strategies can help to address the negative effects of hedonic adaptation:
Focus on experiences, rather than results. For example, if you’re planning a vacation, you’ll feel better by staying in the moment and appreciating each day, instead of worrying over whether it’ll be a good or a bad vacation.
Imagine downward counterfactuals—thinking about how your circumstances could be worse. This can help to put your situation in perspective.
Give back to others. Activities like volunteering, donating to charity, or helping loved ones can help you focus on others, rather than worrying about satisfying yourself.
Another way to counteract the negative emotional impacts of adaptation is to add variety to your life, according to a study from psychologists Kennon Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky. When we vary our experiences, we’re less likely to feel the effects of adaptation. While this doesn’t mean we should be chasing novel experiences constantly, seeking out variety can improve our happiness. For instance, if you get used to a restaurant you like, you can try going to a few new restaurants.
You’ve probably had a pleasurable experience that’s eventually worn off. Think about how you respond when this occurs.
Reflect on an exciting experience you had, or a purchase you made. When did the excitement begin to wear off? How did you react?
Think about something in your life that you’ve adapted to, but that you’re still grateful for. How does this aspect of your life make you feel? And how will you practice gratitude for this more regularly?
Think about a purchase or experience you’re planning. How do you expect it’ll make you feel? When you begin to adapt to those feelings, what can you do to avoid the hedonic treadmill of continually searching for more exciting experiences?
Schwartz posits that one reason we may feel regret or disappointment in our choices is that we compare them with others’ choices to gauge whether we’re choosing well. Too much comparison, especially social comparison, can lead us to bad judgment in our decision-making.
In this chapter, Schwartz lists common comparisons we make, discusses the effect of high expectations on our comparative decision-making, and describes why social comparison can be one of the most damaging kinds of comparison.
Schwartz identifies four common types of comparisons we make in order to judge our decisions:
These comparisons can make our choice seem better or worse, depending on what we’re comparing it to. When our choice seems worse in comparison, we sense gaps between what we wanted and our outcome.
Schwartz cites social scientist Alex Michalos, who identified three types of gaps:
Schwartz also adds a fourth: The gap between what we expect and what we have. He added this gap because he believes many people have become accustomed to high-quality experiences and goods, leading to disappointment when something doesn’t meet our high standards.
The comparisons we make to judge our choices, and the gaps we feel between the outcomes of our choices and alternative outcomes, create regret and stress.
Closing Professional Gaps
Schwartz focuses on how to mitigate the impact of comparison on our thinking, but sometimes these comparisons and gaps can help us acknowledge what we want in our lives: If a choice doesn’t live up to expectations, or we feel that we don’t have what we truly want, we can sometimes take steps to reach what we aim for.
Our professional life is an area where we might make comparisons and see gaps. Ways to close the gap between what you want and what you have include taking on stressful tasks instead of avoiding them, prioritizing your work, and holding yourself accountable.
Neutral (or reference) points, an aspect of prospect theory discussed in Chapter 3, shape how we make comparisons, potentially causing disappointment.
Schwartz explains that when we make comparisons, we use neutral points to guide our decisions: They can be past experiences, imagined outcomes, others’ experiences, and so on. However, these points of comparison are anything but neutral. For instance, if we set an unrealistic neutral point, we might be disappointed with the experience we have.
Remember the example of James, who was shopping for a sweater? He was looking for a sweater that was $20 or less, because $20 was the reference point he had set. Another shopper might have a reference point of $50, or $100, depending on their income and the quality of sweaters they’re used to buying. James would be disappointed if he could only find sweaters that were over $35, but the shopper used to $100 sweaters would be thrilled if he found a $35 sweater he was happy with.
As explained earlier, reference points are different for different people, so disappointment stemming from this comparison is subjective.
Thinking, Fast and Slow and Reference Points
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman elaborates on how reference points factor into the way we choose subjectively among alternatives (prospect theory).
The endowment effect, or the sense that something is “yours” even if you’ve only had it for a short time, creates new reference points: You quickly get used to the idea of owning something, and the fact of your ownership becomes your new reference point. This is why it feels like a loss to give up something that you’ve had for even a brief time.
Similarly, when we set goals, they become reference points—even when they’re arbitrary. Because of this, we feel that we’ve gained something when we reach a goal, and we feel that we’ve lost something when we miss the goal.
Kahneman acknowledges the inherent bias and unreliability of reference points, yet he also underscores that reference points affect the way we all live our lives and make decisions. So when making choices, keep in mind that you’re likely comparing your options against a reference point that may or may not be helpful.
Schwartz argues that the gap between what we expect and what we have is exacerbated by expanded choice.
As noted earlier, with expanded choice, we have higher expectations (or reference points) for goods and experiences. This is especially true for maximizers, who are almost guaranteed to feel disappointment in their choices because their reference points—imagined ideal outcomes—are unrealistic.
Schwartz recommends lowering our expectations to reduce disappointment and increase pleasure. Experiences that are exceptionally pleasurable should be exceptions rather than the rule. For instance, you might save a bottle of expensive champagne for New Year’s Eve (a special occasion), instead of drinking it whenever you feel the impulse. Our expectations become easier to meet, and truly great experiences become all the more pleasurable when they happen infrequently.
The Burden of High Expectations
High expectations can cause issues in various areas of our lives. In the Harvard Business Review, CEO Peter Bregman writes about how holding high expectations for himself and others led him to unnecessary dissatisfaction and hurt his relationships. Because of his high expectations, he’d been overly hard on himself for occasionally being indecisive, and he’d been harsh toward his daughter for occasionally acting impulsively.
Bregman concludes that compassion for yourself and others can ease the burden of high expectations. This can also apply to decision-making. For instance, a maximizer’s expectations might be so high that they’re overly critical of themselves for making a choice that falls short. A maximizer could lessen this difficulty by understanding that not every decision they make is perfect and accepting occasional mistakes in their decision-making.
In market democracies, social comparison—comparing ourselves to others—affects decision-making the most, according to Schwartz. As with counterfactuals, we can compare ourselves to others positively or negatively. For instance, if you’re the first in your college graduating class to get a full-time job, you may feel accomplished in comparison to your peers. However, if you’re passed over for a promotion later, you may feel inferior to colleagues who were promoted.
Schwartz explained earlier that upward counterfactuals often make us feel worse, while downward counterfactuals make us feel better. This is often true, as well, with upward and downward social comparisons—but not always. For instance, you might feel good if people whom you know and like do well; on the other hand, you might feel bad if people you know are much worse off than you are.
Another distinction between the experience of counterfactuals and social comparisons is that we have less control over the latter. Social comparisons are an unavoidable aspect of society and daily life, and as such we have little to no control over them. While we can control the counterfactuals we imagine to a certain extent, we can’t always help comparing ourselves to the people we see and interact with every day.
Upward and Downward Social Comparison
Whether we make upward or downward social comparisons depends on the circumstances. Upward comparisons are more likely when the comparer makes them privately, does not think of themselves as inferior, and is personally invested in the positive characteristics of the person they’re comparing themselves to. On the other hand, downward comparisons are more likely when the comparer feels that their identity or well-being is vulnerable, as downward comparisons boost self-esteem.
While Schwartz has argued that, with exceptions, upward comparisons make people feel better and downward comparisons make people feel worse, some researchers think that the emotional effect of social comparisons depends almost entirely on the individual. For example, if your best friend gets a promotion at her job, you might feel happy for her, even if you’re not satisfied with your job. On the other hand, if another friend of yours gets fired from his job, you might feel bad for him, instead of feeling happy that you’re better off.
Schwartz notes that a motivating factor behind social comparison is the desire for status. However, achieving status is difficult in a society of expanded choice: Everyone has more ways to accrue status, so it’s harder to get ahead.
For example, people have traditionally sought status within their own social circles. Yet social media platforms to which everyone has access have widened the arena.
One way people try to gain or express status is through positional competition: competing among others for scarce resources or positional goods, such as a luxury car or a room at a 5-star hotel. By accruing positional goods, you gain social status. However, as more people try to attain them, it becomes more competitive.
Schwartz argues that society encourages us to compete for scarce resources. Status and positional competition motivate us to compare ourselves and our choices to others’, yet ultimately, scarcity makes this pursuit profoundly unsatisfying.
Social Status and Games
Accruing status is a common goal throughout life and society. For instance, in A Theory of Fun for Game Design, Raph Koster details how social status affects game playing.
Koster writes that the drive to achieve social status is common across games of all kinds. The clearest example of how you can achieve social status through games is that many have winners and losers—the drive to win a game indicates a desire for status. Some games, such as Monopoly, also involve jockeying for territory or property.
Since all people attempt to attain social status to some extent in their daily lives, it makes sense that it would also play a role in escapist activities.
While social comparison and the drive to accrue status cause challenges for everyone, Schwartz notes that, once again, maximizers suffer the most acutely because of their drive to have the best.
Schwartz cites research showing that those most likely to be negatively impacted by social comparison are generally unhappy people and maximizers. When given a task, these people were only happy when they found they were doing better than others, and they were unhappy when they were doing worse than others, regardless of their actual skill.
Schwartz notes that it is unclear whether maximizing causes people to be unhappy, or unhappiness breeds maximizing tendencies, but it’s likely that both are true. It may seem contradictory that maximizers are impacted by social comparison: In their quest for “the best,” it may seem improbable that they’re concerned with what other people have. However, you can only really determine what “the best” is by comparing the outcomes of your choices to those of others. A maximizer might buy something because they believe it’s better than a similar product their friends own.
Social Media, Social Comparison, and Maximizing
Social media encourages people to make constant social comparisons, which can be harmful psychologically.
Because people tend to post idealized images of themselves on social media, users make frequent upward comparisons. When subjected to a constant stream of images that cause upward social comparison, people may experience depression, lower self-esteem, and negative body image. These results are particularly strong for those who are pessimistic.
If a maximizer sees a stream of images of people doing better, it likely will make them more unhappy than a satisficer would be, since maximizers are more affected by others’ success.
Schwartz contends that expanded choice makes social comparison both more common and more emotionally difficult. When presented with more options than we know what to do with, it’s natural to look to the results of others’ decisions for guidance.
And since social comparison tends to make you feel worse, judging your choices by the choices of others is likely to do the same.
Dealing With Social Comparison, Expanded Choice, and Social Media
Thanks to social media, we have endless opportunities to feel inferior to other people. Here are a few tips for avoiding the negative effects of social comparison:
Avoid comparing yourself to the most exceptional people you can think of.
Target your social comparisons to people you think you could learn something from.
Reflect on the positive attributes of your life.
Some social media-specific strategies you could try are to unfollow people who cause you to make stressful social comparisons, or limit the amount of time you spend on social media each day.
Social comparison affects everyone. While we can’t escape it, we can understand and change how it impacts our lives.
Think of a recent occasion when you compared yourself to someone you know. Was it an upward comparison (someone you think is better off) or a downward comparison (someone you think is worse off)? How did this comparison make you feel?
How did this comparison affect you? For example, was it productive, or did it cause you emotional stress?
Going forward, what can you do differently if you find yourself making an unhelpful comparison?
In this chapter, Schwartz examines the negative psychological consequences of choice in more detail. He argues that expanded choice is a factor in rising rates of depression, and that depression can be particularly likely for maximizers.
Schwartz discusses the effects of optimism and pessimism on choices, the influence of expanded choice and an individualistic culture on depression, and a possible link between depression and maximizing tendencies.
In his earlier discussion of learned helplessness, Schwartz argued that a loss of control causes negative psychological consequences, such as an inability to choose. He expands on this point, adding that our subjective responses to loss of control influence how we fare psychologically.
While a loss of control alone may not cause depression, it can spur thought patterns that do. Schwartz identifies three binaries that determine how we respond to failures and losses of control:
Global, chronic, and personal responses are pessimistic, while specific, transient, and universal responses are optimistic. If you frame every failure as a result of your personal inadequacy, without much you can do to improve, you’re more likely to develop depressive tendencies. On the other hand, if you view your failures as isolated incidents largely due to external circumstances, you can more easily move past them.
With this in mind, Schwartz observes that blaming yourself for all of your perceived failures and losses of control causes psychological damage. He also notes that, in an expanded choice society with innumerable options, it’s a lot easier to blame yourself for choices that fail.
The Benefits of Optimism
Optimism can help improve your mental health, so if you tend to be pessimistic, learning how to think optimistically will benefit you. Earlier, we discussed Martin Seligman’s concept of “learned optimism,” which shows that people can learn to be optimistic by choosing to view difficulties as specific, transient, and universal.
In his book Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman discusses the positive effects of optimism. According to Goleman, optimistic people tend to be motivated, flexible, and goal-oriented, seeing failure as something to overcome rather than something that defines them. He also cites research suggesting that optimism can lead to strong performance in college, more so than high SAT scores.
While our responses to losses of control can shape our mental health, Schwartz argues that our society sets us up for psychological trouble through excessive choice and overemphasis on individualism.
Middle-class Americans (and those in comparable market democracies) technically have more control and choice than ever before. Yet depression and suicide rates have risen consistently, especially among young people. Since feeling in control is linked to mental health, this can seem contradictory.
However, Schwartz believes that rising depression and general unhappiness are linked to rising expectations of choice and control. As we’ve become accustomed to great degrees of control over our lives, we expect even more control. Since our expectations are high, we’re increasingly likely to be disappointed. Schwartz points out that societies where people have less control have not seen rising rates of depression comparable to countries like the U.S., suggesting that their lower expectations for control may play a role in determining their overall satisfaction with life.
Along with control, individualism and personal responsibility have been rising as cultural values. As a result, we are taught to seek excellence, and when we fail, it becomes easy to blame ourselves, even when we aren’t totally in control of our circumstances. The national preoccupation with thinness and weight loss is an example of this: Though none of us are totally in control of our appearance and weight, our culture has convinced us that we are.
Another negative consequence of individualism is fraying social ties. Schwartz has already discussed the positive health benefits of strong social ties. Since individualism now takes precedence over social ties, he argues that more people have become isolated, causing dissatisfaction and loneliness.
Rising Rates of Depression
Since the book’s publication in 2004, depression in the United States has continued to rise. This is particularly notable among young people, as 15.08% of American youth experienced a major depressive episode in 2019, a 1.24 % increase from the previous year.
Based on Schwartz’s ideas, it makes sense that an individualistic culture can lead to a greater likelihood of depression. There’s even evidence that people who live in collectivistic societies are genetically less likely to experience depression.
Rising depression, however, cannot solely be attributed to the issues of an overload of choice and reliance on individualism that Schwartz focuses on. Numerous other societal issues can impact mental health—for example, people who belong to groups that experience oppression or discrimination tend to have higher rates of mental health issues. Among them, L.G.B.T.Q. youth are more likely to experience depression than cisgender and heterosexual youth, and young girls are more likely to experience depression than boys.
Schwartz adds a caveat to this conclusion: Individualism, heightened control, and expanded choice can strongly benefit certain individuals.
Everyone is distinct psychologically, and certain people are well-suited to meet these values and create fulfilling lives for themselves. However, even if some individuals thrive, Schwartz contends that this does not negate the broader social damage incurred by these values.
Happiness, Individualism, and Consumerism
In his 2018 book The Happiness Fantasy, Carl Cederström argues that those who promoted individualism and expanded choice are most likely to benefit from them.
Cederström contends that counter-cultural movements in the 1960s popularized the ideas of self-fulfillment as a path to happiness. This perspective was co-opted in the following decades by corporations, who geared their marketing toward the promise of individual fulfillment, while political leaders perpetuated the idea that individualism and consumerism can lead to happiness. Cederström doesn’t believe that contemporary ideas of individualism, consumerism, and uninhibited freedom of choice lead to happiness, although they underlie the idea of happiness in Western societies.
Corporations stand to benefit the most from values like individualism and freedom of choice in the market, so it’s logical that they shaped these ideas. Cederström also notes in an interview that, anecdotally, the people he found who were most satisfied with this vision of happiness were men. While Schwartz writes that individuals who thrive with individualism and expanded choice are basically anomalies, Cederström would likely argue that they stand to benefit most from these values: Essentially, they’re the people and groups who have the most power socially.
As one might expect, maximizers seem likely to experience depression because of two characteristics that make them susceptible: impossibly high expectations, and a tendency to blame themselves for any decision that doesn’t satisfy them.
Schwartz argues that maximizers are more likely than the average person to experience depression as a result. Bolstering his point, Schwartz points to studies he’s conducted that indicated that people with maximizing tendencies tend to score higher than the average person on assessments of depression.
The Science Behind Depression and Maximizing
Schwartz found the link between depression and maximizing in a 2002 study he conducted with several other researchers. They provided the participants with a questionnaire measuring their maximizing tendencies, and they found that those who scored high were also likely to experience depression, in addition to heightened regret and decreased happiness and optimism.
While this doesn’t definitively establish that maximizing is the cause of these experiences, Schwartz believes they’re linked. The dissatisfaction that maximizing causes, then, goes beyond decision-making and may significantly impact psychological health.
As Schwartz explains, our outlook when our choices go wrong can affect our emotional life.
Describe a recent choice that failed—maybe an expensive purchase didn’t live up to expectations, a trip that went poorly, or a miscommunication with a friend. How did you feel (as though the failure reflected your inadequacy, or was an explainable one-time incident) and why?
How did your response affect your ability to move forward?
How can you respond productively the next time a choice doesn’t work out the way you expect?
In this final chapter, Schwartz lays out a series of recommendations for effectively dealing with expanded choice in our daily lives. Each set of recommendations references an area of concern discussed in the book.
Schwartz’s first recommendation is to be selective when making choices.
When making decisions, he says the subjective result—how a decision feels to you—is more important than the objective result. There’s no need to choose from unlimited options because there’s no point in searching for the “best” option; doing so actually will make you feel worse. Because of this, reducing your options can help you to make decisions that feel better.
Schwartz recommends taking these steps toward reducing your choices:
By taking these steps, Schwartz says you’ll get a better sense of which decisions are necessary to you, how many options you need to consider, and how much energy you need to expend on any given decision.
(Shortform note: Another way you can learn to be selective in your choices is to make a habit out of narrowing your options to two, when feasible. Researchers from the University of Basel in Switzerland found that, even when presented with numerous options, people tended to focus on the two most appealing ones. Deliberately cutting your options to two can eliminate some extra thought and effort when making a choice.)
Schwartz’s second recommendation is to deliberate among options when making decisions, instead of making an uneducated guess.
Deliberating is the process of making decisions with thought and care. Guessing, on the other hand, is making a choice without any thought—simply picking from an array of options. Since we’re presented with an overwhelming number of choices, it can be easy to become a guesser, even for important decisions.
The process of reviewing your decisions, which we described earlier, helps you to determine which decisions should be carefully chosen and which can be guessed at without much thought.
Schwartz states that determining when to deliberate and when to guess will help you to:
How to Deliberate a Decision
To come up with a good decision while also not overthinking it, revisit the steps Schwartz suggested in Chapter 1:
Determine your goal or goals.
Consider how important each goal is.
Lay out your options.
Evaluate how each option can advance your goals.
Choose the best option.
Based on how your decision turned out, use what you learned to adjust your future goals and how you go about meeting them.
The Harvard Business Review offers an additional recommendation for making difficult decisions: Use a timer to give yourself time to deliberate while providing a deadline to make a final decision.
Schwartz’s third recommendation is to use satisficing as a decision-making strategy.
Schwartz has extensively discussed the downsides of maximizing and the upsides of satisficing. Maximizing is possibly the worst strategy to deal with expanded choice, since it both expends valuable time and energy and leaves the chooser unhappy. Satisficing, on the other hand, gives people the opportunity to stress less and make subjectively good choices.
If you have maximizing tendencies, Schwartz recommends taking three steps toward satisficing:
How to Satisfice
Schwartz’s recommendations to identify the areas in which you already satisfice, then apply the process to more decisions, is likely the smoothest path to satisficing. You might also try incorporating the second-order method of setting standards to streamline decisions: determining what you generally require from your options. For example, if you’re planning a trip, you might set a standard of going somewhere warm, or if you’re buying a pair of jeans, you might set the standard of not paying more than $45. These provide you with a helpful limit, while also ensuring that you’ll be satisfied with your decisions.
Schwartz’s fourth recommendation is to resist obsessing over the opportunity costs involved in making a decision.
We need to know what our primary alternatives are in order to judge the decision we make. But we can run into trouble with opportunity costs if we dwell on them too much—for instance, turning over every single option repeatedly, or putting so much pressure on yourself to identify the “best” option that none satisfies you. For people who have this problem, Schwartz recommends limiting your consideration of opportunity costs, using these strategies:
How to Limit Consideration of Opportunity Costs
Schwartz notes that we often focus on opportunity costs when buying consumer goods—it can be tempting to always seek out new alternatives, because they have attributes that the things you already own don’t. Because of this, one way to limit considering opportunity costs unnecessarily is to be more deliberate about what you buy and when.
Schwartz recommends making your purchases consistent and being skeptical of marketing suggesting that products have “improved.” One article also recommends being grateful for what you have, buying only what you need in the near future, and reminding yourself that not buying anything is fine.
Schwartz’s fifth recommendation is to make strong decisions without looking back.
As mentioned, when we’re able to reverse decisions, we’re less satisfied with the decisions we make. Since we’re technically able to walk back the decision, it becomes tempting to perpetually scope out other options, neglecting the choice we’ve already made.
Schwartz recommends putting your energy into the choices you make, rather than waffling on whether you could’ve made a better choice. This is especially important when it comes to social and intimate relationships, since these require long-term effort.
How to Make Firm Decisions
Psychology Today offers these tips for sticking with your choices:
Trust that the choice you made was the right one.
Stop examining other options once you’ve made your choice.
Communicate your satisfaction with your choice to other people to make it feel more settled.
Schwartz’s sixth recommendation is to practice gratitude for the choices you’ve made.
Our choices are affected by the real or imagined alternatives that we compare them to. Because we’re always considering alternatives that could technically be better than what we chose, it can be easy to take our choices for granted.
Schwartz advises us to avoid this preoccupation with alternatives and dissatisfaction with our choices by actively practicing gratitude. If we reflect on something about the decision that we’re grateful for, we’ll feel happier with it.
Schwartz recommends starting a regular routine of practicing gratitude—for example, making notes every day of what you’re grateful for. It might not be instinctive at first, but starting a routine of gratitude can help to change your perspective.
How to Practice Gratitude
Besides writing down what you’re grateful for, here are some other ways to practice gratitude:
Express gratitude to your community by volunteering.
Verbalize your gratitude to loved ones.
Find gratitude for what you’ve learned from difficult experiences.
Schwartz’s seventh recommendation is to reduce the impact of regret on your decision-making.
Excessive regret can cause stress in our decision-making and sometimes make us avoid decisions entirely. For those who struggle with regret, taking steps to minimize regret can ease the decision-making process.
Schwartz recommends taking these steps to reduce regret:
How to Minimize Regret
To reduce regret’s impact on your life, it’s also important to accept that you’ll sometimes feel regret for the decisions you make. Here are a few tips on how to accept regret for past decisions and move forward:
Accept the circumstances your choice caused, instead of trying to escape them.
Show yourself compassion instead of blaming yourself.
Use what you learned from the decisions you regret to choose differently in the future.
Schwartz’s eighth recommendation is to accept hedonic adaptation as a natural effect of making choices.
As we’ve discussed, after we make decisions that excite us, we often end up disappointed when the excitement wears off. This adaptation is inevitable, and we can acclimate ourselves to it by remembering that pleasure gives way to comfort over time.
Schwartz recommends taking these steps to adjust to the process of adaptation:
How to Adjust to Hedonic Adaptation
Another way to adjust to hedonic adaptation is to add small pleasures to your daily life. Doing little things like buying your favorite coffee, meeting a friend for lunch, or taking a walk in the park on a nice day can go a long way toward adding pleasure into your daily life, even if you’re losing pleasure in other aspects of your life.
Finding new, ongoing hobbies can also help with hedonic adaptation. For example, you might try taking a dance class, learning to bake, or joining a book club. These can bring pleasure to your life over time, as opposed to material purchases that can only be enjoyable in the short term.
Schwartz’s ninth recommendation is to set realistic expectations for the outcomes of your choices.
Our expectations shape whether or not we’re satisfied with our choices. If your expectations are sky-high, then it’s inevitable that you’ll end up disappointed sometimes. However, if you keep your expectations realistic, then you can feel more consistently satisfied with your choices.
Schwartz recommends taking these steps to adjust your expectations:
How to Temper Your Expectations
Lowering your expectations can be tough on a psychological level, particularly if you’re used to maintaining very high expectations. There are several strategies for easing into lower expectations, as outlined in this PsychCentral article. The first is simply to notice when you’re setting your expectations too high, as this can help you be consciously aware of it. You can also consider how high expectations have affected you in the past, be compassionate with yourself and others when choices don’t live up to expectations, and be flexible when setting expectations.
Schwartz’s 10th recommendation is to make fewer social comparisons.
We make social comparisons every day to help us make choices and gain status. But, while common, social comparison typically makes us dissatisfied and unhappy.
Though social comparison is impossible to curtail entirely, Schwartz makes several recommendations for reducing it:
(Shortform note: Limiting how much social comparisons impact you can be easier said than done. One writer shares how she personally dealt with social comparisons: She gave a name to her “inner critic” in order to look at her social comparison impulses objectively, practiced self-care, and reflected on important achievements in her life.)
Schwartz’s 11th recommendation is to embrace reasonable constraints on your freedom of choice.
When choices proliferate, they eventually start to control our lives. Even simple, routine choices can become challenging. So spending less energy and time on inconsequential decisions reduces stress and increases control.
Automating unimportant or second-order decisions helps us to prioritize more important decisions. For example, making decision rules and setting standards simplifies our decision-making. Ultimately, adding constraints helps us process the unprecedented array of choices before us.
(Shortform note: There are numerous ways to place reasonable constraints on your decision-making. In one article, psychologist Elizabeth Scott lists several different options. Some of these echo Schwartz’s recommendations, such as using second-order decisions like building routines. Scott also recommends turning to trusted role models and experts for difficult decisions and being willing to say “no” to requests from others that would require you to make more choices.)
Schwartz has detailed the difficulties that expanded choice causes, and he has listed strategies for combating it. It’s likely that one or more of them will be relevant to you.
Which of Schwartz’s strategies (recapped in Part 4) for reducing the stresses of too much choice seems most helpful to you and why?
How will you incorporate this strategy into your decision-making process?
Describe an upcoming decision in which you can try this strategy.