50 Psychology Classics (51 page)

Schwartz cites a study in which two groups of college students were asked to rate boxes of chocolates. The first group was given only a small box of six chocolates to taste and rate, the second was given a box of thirty. The result: Those offered the smaller array were more satisfied with the chocolates they were given (they literally “tasted better”) than those given the greater choice; they even opted to be paid for their time in the form of chocolates rather than cash.

This is a surprising result, since we would assume that greater choice makes us feel better about the choices available—it is a form of power. In fact, when offered less choice, we seem to be more satisfied with what we are given. Schwartz says that this indicates a particular type of anxiety found in rich, developed nations; that is, too much choice can adversely affect our happiness, since it does not necessarily mean greater quality of life or more freedom.

Schwartz skillfully points out the rising costs of having to make more and more decisions.

Technology was meant to save us time. Instead, he notes, it has brought us back to foraging behavior, as we now have to sift through thousands of options to find what we really need. Once, for instance, people had little or no choice in who provided their phone or utility services. Now the options are often so bewildering that we end up sticking with our old provider, just to avoid the hassle of considering all the various deals on offer.

In the world of work, while our parents may have spent their whole career with one company, today's generation routinely change jobs every two to five years. We are always on the lookout for something better, even if we are relatively happy in our current position.

In our romantic lives, again the choices are legion. Even when we have settled on “the one,” we have to decide: Whose family should we live near? If both of us are working, whose job will determine where we live? If we have children, which one will stay at home with the kids?

Even with religion, Schwartz observes, we now follow the faith of our choosing, not the one our parents gave us. We can choose our identities, the very stuff of who we are. Although we are all born with a certain ethnicity, family, and class, such things are now seen as nothing more than “baggage.” They used to tell others a lot about who we are, but now we can assume nothing.

With so many factors that were once out of our hands now choices, something else is brought into play—the human mind's susceptibility to error, which Schwartz goes to some lengths to illustrate. Given this susceptibility, the chances of making a “correct” decision most of the time are pretty low. The consequences of some mistakes may not be great, but others are; choosing a marriage partner, for instance, or which college to attend, will shape our lives. The more options we have, the more is at stake if we make the wrong decision. Our reasoning becomes, “If there was so much choice, how did we get it so badly wrong?”

Schwartz highlights three effects of the mushrooming in our choices and options:

Each decision requires more effort.

Mistakes are more likely.

The psychological consequences of those mistakes are greater.

Given that we often make wrong decisions, and given the sheer number of decisions we need to make, surely it would make more sense to seek what is “good enough” rather than always seeking “the best”? Schwartz is fascinating in his division of people into “maximizers” and “satisficers.”

Maximizers are people who are not happy unless they have obtained “the best,” in whatever circumstance. This requires them to look at every option before coming to a decision, whether they are trying on 15 sweaters or 10 potential partners.

Satisficers are those who are willing to settle for what is merely good enough without needing to make sure there is some better option. Satisficers have certain criteria or standards that if met will make their decision for them. They don't have an ideological need to obtain “the best.”

The concept of satisficing was introduced by economist Herbert Simon in the 1950s. Simon's fascinating conclusion was that, if you take into account the time required to make decisions, satisficing is actually the best strategy.

Schwartz wondered: Given the effort they put into choosing, do maximizers actually make better decisions? He found that objectively the answer was yes, but subjectively it was no. By this he means that maximizers may arrive at what they believe is the best available choice, but the choice will not necessarily make them happy. They may get a slightly better job with slightly higher wages, but they are unlikely to be satisfied with their position.

Being a maximizer can exact a bitter toll on our life. If everything we do has to be just right, we lay ourselves open for hefty self-criticism. We crucify ourselves for choices we made that didn't turn out right, and wonder why we never explored other options. The phrase “shoulda, coulda, woulda” sums up the state of many a maximizer in a tangle over their decisions, and Schwartz sums up their lot with a cartoon of a downcast freshman sporting a college sweater emblazoned with “BROWN, but my first choice was Yale.”

In contrast, satisficers are more forgiving of themselves for mistakes, thinking, “I did what I did based on the choices before me.” Satisficers don't believe they can create a perfect world for themselves, and so are less bothered when—as is normally the case—the world is imperfect.

Studies show that maximizers are generally less happy, less optimistic, and more prone to depression than their satisficing cousins. If you want more peace of mind and life satisfaction, be a satisficer.

In the last four decades, Schwartz notes, Americans' per capita income (with inflation taken into account) has doubled. The number of homes with dishwashers has gone from 9 to 50 percent, and the number of those with air conditioning has increased from 15 to 73 percent. Yet there has been no measurable increase in happiness in the same period.

What does provide happiness is close relationships with family and friends, and there is the paradox: Close social ties actually
decrease
our choices and autonomy in life. Marriage, for instance, lessens our freedom to have more than one romantic or sexual partner. If this is so, it follows that happiness must be linked to having less, not more, freedom and autonomy. “Then can it be,” Schwartz asks, “that freedom of choice is not all it's cracked up to be?” After all, the time we spend having to deal with our thousands of choices is time that we might have invested in our precious relationships. Choices may not only not improve the quality of our life, but may actually lessen it. In this equation, some level of constraint may be liberating.

Schwartz notes a study in which 65 percent of people said if they got cancer, they would want to control what treatment they received. But among people who actually have cancer, a full 88 percent did
not
want to choose. We think we want choice, but when we actually have it, it becomes less attractive—too much choice actually causes us distress.

Schwartz points to studies suggesting that the need to consider tradeoffs in choices makes people both indecisive and less happy. When confronted with two attractive options to buy, for instance, we are in fact not likely to buy either.

Perhaps the key to understanding why more choices do not make us more happy is that they increase our level of responsibility. In this context, there is significant research showing that we are happier when we know our decisions are not reversible. This is because when we make a decision that we know can't be changed, we work to justify that decision in our mind and put all our psychological weight behind it. Flexibility in our attitude to marriage, for example, will naturally weaken the marriage.

Once, if you lived and worked in a blue-collar neighborhood with all your friends in the same boat, you may have been pretty happy with your lot. But with the advent of television, the internet, and so on, we have an enormous pool of other people to whom we can compare ourselves. Even if we are relatively well off, there are always others who are richer. These are what Schwartz calls “upward comparisons,” and they tend to make us jealous, hostile, and stressed, and to lower our self-esteem.

The “downward comparison,” in contrast, involves us noting how fortunate we are compared to those who have little. Such comparisons boost mood and self-esteem and lower anxiety. Simply saying to ourselves every morning and evening “I have a lot of things to be grateful for” and thinking about them brings us closer to reality and increases our happiness. Grateful people are healthier, happier, and more optimistic than people who are not.

Because more choices bring more opportunities for comparison, the recipe for happiness is simple and twofold:

make your decisions irreversible; and

constantly appreciate the life you do have.

An abundance of choice is one of the main sources of psychological pain, since it involves the anxiety of missed opportunities and the regret of paths not taken. Yet this peculiar sort of misery, which was once experienced by a relative few, has been turned into almost an epidemic with rising wealth and increased choice. In a global village, we can't help but wonder why we are not as famous as Madonna or as rich as Bill Gates, and how banal or restricted our own life seems by comparison.