And there's a parent fish and a baby fish. So there's a cartoon that I show often, when I give talks, of a fishbowl. RAZ: So here's the thing, I hear that and I'm thinking, OK, this is about as American as it gets, right? I mean, you can choose whatever you want. And what I got was good, but it wasn't perfect. The reason is that with all of these options available, my expectations about how good a pair of jeans should be went up. Why? I wrote a whole book to try to explain this to myself. So I spent an hour trying on all these damn jeans and I walked out of the store - truth - with the best-fitting jeans I had ever had. My jaw dropped and after I recovered, I said I want the kind that used to be the only kind. And the shopkeeper said: Do you want slim-fit, easy-fit, relaxed-fit? You want button fly or zipper fly? You want stonewashed or acid washed? You want them distressed? Do you want boot-cut? Do you want tapered? Blah, blah, blah. SCHWARTZ: This hit me when I went to replace my jeans after years and years of wearing these old ones. It just turns out not to be true, psychologically. SCHWARTZ: And that's perfectly sensible, logically. SCHWARTZ: And so the logic here is that when you add options, you don't make anybody worse off because you can ignore them, and you make somebody better off. The fact that there are alternatives makes my life better. SCHWARTZ: I don't like Rice Krispies and Corn Chex. I mean, imagine you have cereal for breakfast every morning, and you alternate between Rice Krispies and Corn Chex. It's paralysis rather than liberation, which sounds. RAZ: Too much choice actually makes us less free. The more options there are, the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option that you chose. The second effect is that even if we manage to overcome the paralysis and make a choice, we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice then we would be if we had fewer options to choose from. Why? Because with 50 funds to choose from, it's so damn hard to decide which fund to choose that you'll just put it off till tomorrow, and then tomorrow and, of course, tomorrow never comes. You offer 50 funds, 10 percent fewer employees participate than if you only offer five. A colleague of mine got access to investment records from Vanguard, the gigantic mutual fund company of about a million employees and about 2,000 different workplaces.Īnd what she found is that for every 10 mutual funds the employer offered, rate of participation went down 2 percent. I'll give you one very dramatic example of this - a study that was done of investments in voluntary retirement plans. With so many options to choose from, people find it very difficult to choose at all. One effect, paradoxically, is that it produces paralysis rather than liberation. SCHWARTZ: So I'm going to talk about what's bad about it. The mistake that we've made is to think that since choice is good, it's only good. SCHWARTZ: Absolutely, and it is a good thing. RAZ: How - how can that be? I mean, choice is what we all want, right? I mean, choice is a good thing. This, I think, is so deeply embedded in the water supply that it wouldn't occur to anybody it is not true. And the more freedom they have, the more welfare they have. The more choice people have, the more freedom they have. The way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice. SCHWARTZ: The official dogma of all Western industrial societies runs like this: If we are interested in maximizing the welfare of our citizens, the way to do that is to maximize individual freedom. Why we are happy, why we live more fulfilling lives because of our limitless choices. SCHWARTZ: A hundred and seventy-five salad dressings in my supermarket, if you don't count the 10 extra virgin olive oils and 12 balsamic vinegars you could buy to make a very large number of your own salad dressings, in the off-chance that none of the 175 the store has on offer suit you. RAZ: This is Barry Schwartz, a social psychologist, and this is from his TED talk. 5 - who doesn't like to have lots of choices, right? Like, say, for example, salad dressing.īARRY SCHWARTZ: I want to say just a word about salad dressing.
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