The Paradox Of Choice – Book Summary
In The Paradox Of Choice, Barry Schwartz state that when people have no choice, life is almost unbearable. But as the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear. As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.
The fact that some choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better. There is a cost to having an overload of choice.
Clinging tenaciously to all the choices available to us contributes to bad decisions, to anxiety, stress, and dissatisfaction—even to clinical depression.
Choosing well is especially difficult for those determined to make only the best choices, individuals I refer to as “maximizers.”
There are psychological processes that explain why added options do not make people better off: adaptation, regret, missed opportunities, raised expectations, and feelings of inadequacy in comparison with others.
I will argue that we:
- Would be better off seeking what was “good enough” instead of seeking the best
- We would be better off if we lowered our expectations about the results of decisions.
- Would be better off if the decisions we made were nonreversible.
- We would be better off if we paid less attention to what others around us were doing.
“Tyranny of small decisions.” We say to ourselves, “Let’s go to one more store” or “Let’s look at one more catalog,” and not “Let’s go to all the stores” or “let’s look at all the catalogs.” It always seems easy to add just one more item to the array that is already being considered.
Everything in life is choice. Every second of every day, we are choosing, and there are always alternatives.
HOW WE CHOSE
Deciding And Choosing
You cannot make a good choice if you just listen to one individual; you have to look for several other people. Most people do this one negative response that cancel other many suggest that are positive.
Sometimes other people vivid experience will make you to revise your opinion, if you are not careful you will cancel incredible information and reviews of thousand people just because of what your friends are saying.
Group predictions are better than the predictions of any individual.
Most of us are loss averse. Endowment effect– once something is given to you, it’s yours. Once it becomes part of your endowment, even after a very few minutes, giving it up will entail a loss.
A chooser is someone who thinks actively about the possibilities before making a decision. A chooser reflects on what’s important to him or her in life, what’s important about this particular decision, and what the short- and long-range consequences of the decision may be.
A picker does none of these things. With a world of choices rushing by like a music video, all a picker can do is grab this or that and hope for the best.