Product Description

The author of The Battle for Human Nature explains why too much choice has led to the ever increasing complexity of everyday decisions, why too much of a good thing has become detrimental to human psychological and emotional well-being, and how to focus our lives on making the right choices. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23057 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Customer Reviews

great book that will fall on deaf ears
this is a fantastic book that manages to articulate a set of ideas and experiences that I have had for a long time. namely that whilst choice has been fetishised in western societies, and become an unquestionable good, in fact a lot of the time choice a) it makes us uncomfortable (and unable to choose!) and b) doesn't deliver what we expect. this book predominantly deals with a).

one of the main points in the book is that different types of people deal with choice differently. satisficers will choose something that meets their needs, whilst maximizers will try and find the "best" option from all the choices available (it's not a simple split, some people approach different choices in different ways but anyway....). I definitely fit into the latter category. however what this book explains is that as a result maximizers will often be unhappy. this is so on the money. the amount of time I spend agonizing over some choices, and then questioning them afterwards to ensure that I didn't miss something.

there are some really interesting examples in here that I've been boring people to death with. for example the one about people buying jam. they are far more likely to buy one jam when there is only a choice of half a dozen than when there is a choice of twenty or more. it seems we get paralysed by too much choice. similraly there is a great story about people's responses to a hypothetical choice between using different vaccines - one guaranteed to cure one third (but only one third) of those it's used on, and an experimental one that will cure everyone if it works but there's only a one in three chance it will work. how you phrase the proposition has a big impact on how people respond. finally there is genuinely surprising (to me anyway) evidence that people in more restrictive communities are happier.

that said I have found quite a few people hostile to the idea that choice can be a bad thing when I've discussed this book with them. it's currently politically correct to advocate freedom of choice and want to expand it. as such I find that some politico types (more commonly but not always right-wing) are extremely threatened by any criticism of choice.

but to me that demonstrates why this is such a useful book.

Too Many Choices
I remember reading about ten or twelve years ago of Russian immigrants to the West who were overwhelmed by the choices in the average supermarket. Accustomed to a choice of cereal or no cereal, they became paralyzed when confronted with flakes, puffs, pops, sugared or not, oat, wheat, corn, rice, hot or cold, and on and on. Now, according to Barry Schwartz, we are all overwhelmed by too many choices.

No one is immune, he says. Even if someone doesn't care about clothes or restaurants, he might care very much about TV channels or books. And these are just the relatively unimportant kinds of choices. Which cookie or pair of jeans we choose doesn't really matter very much. Which health care plan or which university we choose matters quite a lot. How do different people deal with making decisions?

Schwartz analyzes from every angle how people make choices. He divides people into two groups, Maximizers and Satisficers, to describe how some people try to make the best possible choice out of an increasing number of options, and others just settle for the first choice that meets their standards. (I think he should have held out for a better choice of word than "satisficer.")

I was a bit disappointed that Schwartz dismissed the voluntary simplicity movement so quickly. They have covered this ground and found practical ways of dealing with an overabundance of choice. Instead of exploring their findings, Schwartz picked up a copy of Real Simple magazine, and found it was all about advertising. If he had picked up a copy of The Overspent American by Juliet Schor or Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin instead, he might have found some genuine discussion of simple living rather than Madison Avenue's exploitation of it.

I enjoyed the first part of The Paradox of Choice, about how we choose, but the second half, about regret and depression, seemed to drag. Fortunately, I was able to choose to skim the slow bits and move right to the more interesting conclusion, about how to become more satisfied (or "satisficed") through better decision-making.

Are you sure you need a 60G iPod ?
I had a guilty secret. I'd buy a gadget, think it was great for a while, stop using it and then feel guilty about getting the thing in the first place. Being a typical bloke, I rarely talked about this to anyone and thought it was just me being pathetic. Then I read this book and realised, yipee !, I'm just a shallow consumer and virtually everyone else feels the same - to a greater or lesser degree.
Schwartz exhaustively mines this tendency and matches a good overall structural discourse with really interesting snippets from psychological research. My only problem with the book is the ending, having devoted around 200 pages to analysis the last chapter about what to do about choice is quite perfunctory (don't compare too much, expect to be disappointed etc.).
Plus there's a real howler (for me anyway) right at the end when he states that you just have to accept that the 'best things in life' only go to those who do 'better'. But by 'best things' he means a bigger house or a faster car i.e. small incremental 'improvements' over what you already have. To be fair he does also state that you should be happy with 'adequate' but there was still that nasty allusion to the fact that you should 'know your place'. Better to simply laugh at the idiots out there who wreck their lives in the persuit of gadget happiness.
Mind you, have you seen that new iPod ?