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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."
Relentless growth relies on a large subset of the buying public being able to make poor decisions on what to buy, then having to replace that item shortly thereafter. This choice reduction seems like some commie nonsense to me.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
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.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
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.
Twinstiq, game news
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.
I have this friend that believes he'll never be disappointed if he just thinks the worst is going to happen at any given moment. Cynical as fuck but swears he is constantly pleasantly surprised. This just sounds like a fucked up way to live. Imagine the fear that must rule you if you need to go around expecting the lowest lows in order to be happy.
I don't think low expectations are the way to go, personally. Maybe don't expect anything at all either way. Stop trying to predict and frame everything. Stop managing your expectations altogether and just live in the moment. Focus on what you're doing now and try to get the most out of it. If you're letting bad jam bring you down then you need to step back and calm down. Forget the jam and read a book or start a new hobby.
Twinstiq, game news
This was my Mantra even before I was married, 30+ years ago. Take holidays. My wife has this Disney-esque image of how it will be. Mine is more like a bad, indie short. I am never disappointed or surprised.
I always say if you aim for the trees and miss, you have a lot less far to fall than if you aimed for the stars.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
It is not the amount of choice that is freaking us out, it is the amount of effort to get to know what the choice actually is and how to get it. Especially due to capitalism, full products are deliberately crippled to plunder the customers. Nowadays, you can have a full-time job managing a company's software licenses. And the bigger the manufacturer, the less sense the license model has.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
If you only make a single choice (and then simply stick with the choice), then your choice is basically arbitrary and defeats the purpose of having a wide variety of options. That's one of the arguments in the article: more choices aren't always better.
Word of mouth is also useless if others are making arbitrary choices and then simply sticking with them. It reminds me of a comic's (forget who) routine about getting advice on traveling. People who had been to a city once and only eaten at one restaurant would heartily recommend the restaurant even though they had no baseline for comparison. ("Yeah, I know this great restaurant in Toledo!")
Now, maybe you're making the argument that you only have to go through the process of choosing once (which will involve testing more than one selection), but few people do that. Mostly, they do what they decide above and just try a variety or two, say meh, and arbitrarily stick with their choice. How many varieties of peanut butter have most people tried? I'm guessing that mostly people have tried a smooth and a chunky (and maybe a natural), but I doubt many people have really compared brands. Why do "choosy moms choose JIF"? (Their advertising slogan.) Because moms have enough shit to do, so at one point in the past, they grabbed a jar of JIF and then just keep getting it because why not?
Arbitrary choices are not a good solution.
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.
Sounds like you weren't using the right shampoo...
You chose.....unwisely.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
I think that this is the main reason that Apple is doing so well. People understand exactly what they are getting when they choose an Apple product. You want a phone, You get to choose from 1 of 2 screen sizes, and 3-4 options for the amount of storage. That's a very easy decision to make. Same goes for their laptops. You get to choose ultra-thin or regular, then you get a few different options for screen size, and then you get 2 or 3 options that actually affect performance. Compare this to going to Dell, Lenovo, or HP. Whereas Apple might give you 10 options in total. The other guys will have 50 or more options to choose from.
Don't believe it's really that many, I just went to Dell's site. they have 3 lines for home use, without even getting into chrome books, they are Inspiron, XPS, and Alienware.
Inspiron has 3000, 5000, and 7000 series. Each of those has 4 different screen sizes. Each of those 4 screen sizes has on average 3 different performance/spec options. So, just from the Inspiron line, we have 3x4x3 options to choose from. That's 36 options. Alienware is a little more sane at only 16 options total, and XPS has 8 additional options.
That's a total of 60 options. And that's only looking at the "home" oriented laptops. I didn't dig down, but from the looks of it, there's even more choice in there. There is probably at least over 100 laptops to choose from when getting a Dell.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Choice getting you down? Are you paralyzed by the array of different breads available at the store? Well have I got the solution for you, friend: Bread Lines! Everyone waits in one long line, and you get handed bread. "What kind?" you ask? Sometimes it's rye, sometimes it's pumpernickel, sometimes it's nothing at all! The important thing is you don't have to worry. Let the State worry for you.
Psshh. You bread eaters sure do whine a lot. What with your warm social breadline networks, and your rotating flavors of bread. Show off.
Now the starvation economy, there's where choice isn't a problem. http://www.ibtimes.com/amid-no...
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
The idea is that there is an optimum amount of choice: we definitely need choices, but there is such a thing as too much choice. This shouldn't be a surprise: there's an optimal amount of everything, and the optimal amount is usually finite.
So yes, we need more choices in high speed internet. That doesn't mean that it's impossible to have too many choices; it's just hard to imagine since we're used to having too few.
When you start talking about problems such as the company offering 100 pension plans? Your problem isn't that the employee has too many options/choices. The problem is that the company didn't do enough homework of their own to weed out the inferior options. When my employer tells me they made a certain selection for our healthcare provider, our life insurance provider, or anything else related to the benefits offered -- I assume they made an effort to find the best possible value for the dollar spent. Maybe they could have chosen better than they did, and maybe not. But the point is, they tried to apply a "filter" and make a sensible decision. (Why wouldn't you, since you want your benefits package to look attractive compared with your competition?)
Every time we use the web, we're presented with literally hundreds of millions of "options" ... yet we're not overwhelmed to the point where we just give up trying to find content we need. That's because we have really powerful search engines like Google we use as part of the process. They act as our filters.
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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Correct. So the kind of little Nestor who fears being different can buy this year's Apple laptop and not worry about making the grave mistake of buying the "wrong" computer and facing the scorn of his social peers. There is even a feeling of membership in owning the Apple e-meter. To do otherwise would risk having the label "unmutual" cast upon one.
> But many people DO have trouble picking a jar of jam. From TFA:
These are also probably the same nitwits that cant use an iPad without on-site technical support. This should not be a race to the bottom to pander to the biggest MORONS in society. Society is enough of an idiocracy as is.
Restricting the choice of Jams makes it all sound so benign but it can be really quite sinister. Just ask any Soviet ex-pat, or better yet ask them to smile for you.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Reading that URL, it says "Kimg Jong Un-Orders Pig Farms" and that made me click through only to realize that Un was part of the name and not part of the verb.
Communism doesn't work. It involves a large scale transfer of ownership of the means of production to the working class, and it's been shown that in the battle between the military and ruling class that ensues when you try to do that it all falls apart.
This folks is why I'm a Democratic Socialist. You can live however the heck you want so long as you're not causing pain and suffering to others. Trouble is the 1% will _always_ cause pain and suffering, because as you and I are diminished they are raised. It really is a Zero sum game, but for social status and political power rather than raw economics.
Nice talking points you got there though. Did you get 'em from Rush Limbaugh? You know he just got 'em from Karl Rove right?
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"You people are too rich. You need to live more like the starving people in Africa."
-- The communist professor
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Try on brand on Monday. Try another brand on Tuesday. Try another on Wednesday.
Or let others do that for you: Just go to Amazon, and buy the brand with five star reviews.
Was going to say the same thing. If you walk into a Costco, you typically have only 2 -3 choices of brands for a particular good. Sometimes no choice. But Costco has found that people typically buy more and enjoy the experience more. This is a win for everybody. The customer is happier/less stressed about their choice, Costco gets more revenue from people buying more, and Costco also can keep their costs down by simplifying their inventory. I think a key component here, though, is that Costco has done a good job of whittling down the choices for us. If I'm buying ketchup, I have a choice between the cheap store brand, Heinz. Everyone knows Heinz. It's a safe choice. In cases where there is no choice, it's always the most well known/popular brand. What I don't have to do is choose between 3 crappy or unknown brands.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
The Paradox Of Choice is excellent. The most important point among a legion of somewhat unexpected findings is: people generally make choices either by optimizing and finding the best choice, or by setting a threshold and choosing the first option that exceeds that threshold. The people who generally use optimization strategies consistently make better choices than the people who set thresholds, but are consistently much less happy about both their choices and their lives. This appears to be because in the process of optimizing, they calculate the cost of all the choices they didn't make, in a sort of buyer's remorse, and that has a huge impact on their satisfaction with the choice they did make.
He spends a lot of time talking about how you can make good choices and be happy about them. One of the main ways of doing this is figuring out ways to reduce the number of apparent choices you have, so that the cost of the paths not taken is lower.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
If I walk into the gourmet grocery store and see they stock 30+ kinds of jam, I'm happy. I know that I don't like marmalade in general, but I do like whiskey marmalade; so when I see blood orange whiskey marmalade I'll give it a try. If it proves to be a bad choice, it's no big deal.
I'd say satisfaction with choice is mostly a function of the effort you need to make what you feel is a good enough choice. If you walk into the optician and you already know you want black plastic wayfarer frames with rivets at the temple, then you're glad that they've got enough of a selection to stock the Classic Nerd line. If you have no idea what you want on your face then you'd be happier with a store that offered you a choice of two or three frames. In fact if you study what a successful clerk in an optical megastore does, she (usually) steers you toward only two or three frames out of the scores of styles they offer.
Contrast selecting from 30+ jams with selecting from 30+ health plans, where the best choice depends on the unknowable (how unlucky will I be this year?), the difficult to know (what is my likelihood of using each of these particular healthcare services?) and the need-an-expert-to-know-for-you (what do all these provisos in the small print mean?).
Years ago I worked as lead developer for a small company developing a vertical market app in an industry that had never been automated before (then a very common scenario). The boss had a simple and seemingly fool-proof marketing scheme, based on commonsense psychology: to maximize sales volume he'd keep prices surprisingly low and to entice buyers he'd give them lots of options for how to configure the system exactly for their needs. Since this was a small company I often went to industry meetings to help out at the vendor booth, and I quickly realized that that commonsense psychology was at variance with actual psychology. People who were used to spending tens of thousands of dollars of equipment would find out that they could, in theory, get started with our software for as little as $200 and lose interest. People who didn't lose interest were quickly overwhelmed with the complexity of figuring out which items they needed to buy from the al la carte menu.
So I proposed this change: combine all those choices into a single entry-level package that would cost a typical customer $10K - $20K, including all the options they'd be likely to use and all the services they'd need to get up and running. It took a year of financial struggle for the boss to decide he was willing to take a cut in sales volume for a boost in profit margins. But when we made the change sales volumes actually went up. People who used to walk by our $200 offering would ask why it was suddenly more expensive, and then I'd show them what they got for $10K but the decision would be simple: is this a good deal or not? And since it was a good deal a lot of them bought, and became good long-term customers for training, consulting services and data.
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This was literally an objection that communism had to the west. Too many choices.
One of my favorite stores has been doing this since before I was born. TJ's doesn't have many choices, but they tend to have stuff I like. They only have a single choice for many many items. It is generally a good price, good quality, and not a major brand.
I really like it because I am not supporting all the stupid advertising, it saves me money, and I get to eat good stuff without wasting brain power on picking out which goddamn brand of peanut butter is least idiotic.
Man, you really need that seminar!