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Is Too Much Choice Stressing Us Out? (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In the decades following World War 2, there was a dramatic expansion in choices for consumers. Where before there were only a few brands of bread, now there were dozens. Marketers were relentless in trying to fill every niche, to capture every last market segment. But in the 1990s and 2000s, we started to realize that this wasn't inherently a good thing. Choice paralysis demonstrably exists. It's made us start asking questions like: do we really need 30 types of jam on a store shelf? Is there a good reason for a firm to offer over 150 different pension plans? It turns out, no. Employees are much less likely to actually choose a plan when confronted with so many. In worrying about finding the best choice, they accidentally pick what is by far the worst: nothing. Barry Schwartz, a psychologist who helped bring this idea to the fore, has been advocating for less choice, and offers this suggestion: "The secret to happiness is low expectations."
Often, it seems what they really need is an informed third party to assist them in whittling down their options to a manageable choice threshold.
Looking at you America: 30 types of jam, 60 fragrances of febreze, and still two political parties... See? They're keeping it simple for us.
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Whenever we don't have many choice, for example: High Speed Internet and Cable TV, is a virtual monopoly or duopoly.
We get gouged on pricing, and shoddy service.
And then you develop what's called a "preference". There's also this social thing called "word of mouth" that you can use to communicate benefits. Also, stores/shops usually carry a selection, not a complete catalog of everything on the planet.
Choice is good, and the good news is you're not locked in. If you don't like it, you can try again the next time, and maybe even get a reimbursement from a quality guarantee, many products have this. If you just don't have the time to get informed and need to make a rush decision, there are even many review sites that offer a meta score and you can just pick something from the top of the list and get a quick bluirb that will give you a bearing.
Or just go with your gut.
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Personally, I can get by just fine with three choices in jam.
Most everyone I know can manage with three to four choices in jam.
But they're not the SAME three to four choices!
So by the time your grocery is stocking everyone's three to four choices, it has 100 or so different things on the shelf.
Ditto bread, meat, veggies, soap, shampoo, etc.
IOW, a large number of choices isn't a bad thing. Unless you're just too stupid to be allowed to make choices in the first place....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
There is a HUGE difference between "30 types of jam" and "over 150 different pension plans".
At the most basic level, you will know that you picked the "wrong" jam in the near future and still be able to get a different one.
With a pension plan you won't really know until it is too late and you won't have any option.
Which is why most of us do NOT have a problem picking up a loaf of bread and a jar of jam.
...In worrying about finding the best choice, they accidentally pick what is by far the worst: nothing....
What is "accidental" and "worst" about picking nothing. To me that means that the person didn't really want/need the item in the first place, and the plethora of choices led the person to make the correct choice, ie., nothing.
The poor choices large subsets have made on behalf of everyone unfortunatly have included communism in the past, leading to just one brand of bread, available for just an 8 hour wait in a city block length line.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I think a big factor here is whether the choice relates to a luxury or a necessity. And to be clear, I'm going to stretch the definition of "necessity" slightly, to include things such as pension plans. In fact, the words "luxury" and "necessity" aren't really quite the right ones here, but I can't think of better ones.
When it comes to necessities, what we generally want is security. We want to find something that works for us fairly quickly and to then have the mental security that comes from being able to stick with it. This is why so few people switch banks or utility providers, even though they could often save money by doing so. Being bombarded with options when buying something you need (rather than something you want) is stressful. You'll be likely to fixate more on the downsides of making the wrong choice rather than the upsides of making the right choice.
When it comes to luxuries, on the other hand, we tend to like choice. If we can afford high end food products, we like to be able to choose from lots of different varieties. If we're buying a luxury car, we want to be able to pick and choose options. Having choices makes us excited about our shiny new purchase.
The complicating factor here is that the line between necessities and luxuries isn't static and won't be the same for everybody. If you have a lot of disposable income, you will probably approach your food-shop as though you're shopping for luxuries. If you're struggling to make ends meet, you will be firmly in necessity mode (I've been in both camps).
It's not even all about income. I can illustrate this with a comparison between myself and my mother. We both actually have fairly similar levels of disposable income, but our interests and priorities are very different.
I'm a big PC user; I enjoy gaming on a high end PC. I bought a full new PC recently. Deciding I couldn't be bothered with a self-build this time, I looked around for UK-based vendors who would allow me to customise my build extensively before they put it together. I took time to do my research, picked out the case, the motherboard, the CPU, the RAM, the graphics card and all the rest. And yes, I quite enjoyed this. I chose the vendor I did largely because they offered me this degree of control, rather than an off the peg system.
My mother, by contrast, does not like PCs. She needs one, but she doesn't like that fact and doesn't treat it as anything more than a tool. When her old laptop died and she needed a replacement, she found the degree of choice available first confusing and then infuriating. We eventually solved it after I looked around for 3 acceptable options and narrowed the choice down to those for her ("this one costs a bit more but has a bigger screen, that one costs a bit less but might be a bit slow to start up").
Flip things around to the last time we bought new sofas; I spent an afternoon browsing online for something that was about the right size, reasonably cheap and not a horrible colour clash for my living room. My mother spent a month and a half of weekends walking around show-rooms and comparing textile samples.
We each believe that the other is completely mad. But what it really comes down to is a value judgement over "luxury" vs "necessity" and how that impacts on your approach to choice.
China and the Soviet Union are not, were not and never were Communist. They were fascist dictatorships that happen to borrow rhetoric from popularists like Karl Marx. Jeez, it's 2015. Do we still believe in McCarthyism? Maybe if it weighed the same as a duck...
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Russia was industrialized before the Communists. If they accelerated the process, the problem is that they also committed genocide in the process. Not just modern "faux genocide" but the real thing where body counts are in the millions and populations never quite recover.
The change to communism really didn't alter the nature of Russian society as basically feudal. It just changed the identities of those in power. The same goes for post-communist Russia.
No choices is a key feature of communism however. The central planning by people that think they are smarter than anyone else leads to the failure to address even basic hygiene.
The "chaos and confusion" are a necessary consequence of an economic system that will actually meet all of your needs.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
And every aisle too. Not just on islands. :)
Personally, I find that the only time choice is a problem is when all of the options presented to me are inadequate and I need to try to select the least bad. Happens a lot with computer stuff and when voting in general elections, not so much at the grocery store or hardware store.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey