The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

There is an almost sacred belief in the world today: the more options you have to choose from, the better your life gets. More TV channels, more banks to open an account with, more health plans, more brands of rice on the grocery shelf. Psychologist Barry Schwartz wrote this book to show that the math doesn't add up the way we imagine.

Up to a point, more options really do help, because you go from no choice at all to real freedom. The trouble starts after that point: when the options pass a number your mind can compare properly, they stop adding freedom and start charging a price, in time spent thinking and in fear of getting it wrong.

Picture a trip to the neighborhood grocery store, with a whole aisle just for cookies and dozens of brands of laundry detergent. Each of those small choices seems silly on its own, but added up over the day they wear out your brain in a way we rarely notice.

That is the thread running through the whole book: the promise is that more choice means more freedom and happiness, but in practice, past a certain volume, it becomes a source of anxiety and even paralysis when it's time to decide.

Schwartz maps out how the number of decisions an ordinary person has to make has grown in almost every area of life. It's not just everyday shopping: it's choosing a college and a major, a retirement plan, a health insurance provider, a type of medical treatment.

In the past, a good share of these decisions came half made: you followed the family profession, stayed at the same job your whole life, had one or two TV channels to pick from at night. There was less freedom, but also less weight of decision sitting on each person.

Today, a worker earning a modest wage still has to choose among dozens of prepaid phone plans and several nearly identical digital bank accounts. A decision that used to be simple has become research that eats up free time nobody had to spare.

One of the most cited examples in the book comes from research by Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper, published in 2000, at an upscale grocery store. At a tasting table, the researchers offered either six flavors of jam or twenty-four flavors, alternating the two setups throughout the day.

The table with more flavors drew more curious people stopping to taste. But when it came time to buy, the table with fewer options sold far more. Faced with twenty-four different jars, a good share of people hesitated or walked away without taking anything.

It's like walking into a diner with a two-page menu and not being able to decide among so many things, while at the corner diner with three daily specials the choice happens right away. Schwartz uses this study as proof that the intuition that more options are always better for the customer is wrong past a certain point.