Barry Schwartz

NOVELIST AND EXISTENTIALIST PHILOSOPHER ALBERT CAMUS POSED the question, “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” His point was that everything in life is choice. Every second of every day, we are choosing, and there are always alternatives.

Kahneman and Tversky discovered and reported on people’s tendency to give undue weight to some types of information in contrast to others. They called it the availability heuristic. This needs a little explaining. A heuristic is a rule of thumb, a mental shortcut.

Anchoring is why department stores seem to have some of their merchandise on sale most of the time, to give the impression that customers are getting a bargain. The original ticket price becomes an anchor against which the sale price is compared.

Economist Richard Thaler provides another example of sunk costs that I suspect many people can identify with. You buy a pair of shoes that turn out to be really uncomfortable. What will you do about them? Thaler suggests:

The more expensive they were, the more often you’ll try to wear them.
Eventually, you’ll stop wearing them, but you won’t get rid of them. And the more you paid for them, the longer they’ll sit in the back of your closet.
At some point, after the shoes have been fully “depreciated” psychologically, you will finally throw them away.

Twenty-five years ago, economist Tibor Scitovsky explored some of the consequences of the phenomenon of adaptation in his book The Joyless Economy. Human beings, Scitovsky said, want to experience pleasure. And when they consume, they do experience pleasure—as long as the things they consume are novel. But as people adapt—as the novelty wears off—pleasure comes to be replaced by comfort. It’s a thrill to drive your new car for the first few weeks; after that, it’s just comfortable. It certainly beats the old car, but it isn’t much of a kick. Comfort is nice enough, but people want pleasure. And comfort isn’t pleasure.

Faced with this inevitable disappointment, what do people do? Some simply give up the chase and stop valuing pleasure derived from things. Most are driven instead to pursue novelty, to seek out new commodities and experiences whose pleasure potential has not been dissipated by repeated exposure. In time, these new commodities also will lose their intensity, but people still get caught up in the chase, a process that psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell labeled the hedonic treadmill. No matter how fast you run on this kind of machine, you still don’t get anywhere. And because of adaptation, no matter how good your choices and how pleasurable the results, you still end up back where you started in terms of subjective experience.

At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates.

We would be better off if we embraced certain voluntary constraints on our freedom of choice, instead of rebelling against them.
We would be better off seeking what was “good enough” instead of seeking the best (have you ever heard a parent say, “I want only the ‘good enough’ for my kids”?).
We would be better off if we lowered our expectations about the results of decisions.
We would be better off if the decisions we made were nonreversible.
We would be better off if we paid less attention to what others around us were doing.

The large array of jams attracted more people to the table than the small array, though in both cases people tasted about the same number of jams on average.

According to a survey conducted by Yankelovich Partners, a majority of people want more control over the details of their lives, but a majority of people also want to simplify their lives. There you have it—the paradox of our times.