Barry Schwartz: The Paradox of Choice

Educator Barry Schwartz is walking the audience through the arguments in his book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. He's using New Yorker cartoons (which he says he's paid for) rather than just bullet-point slides, a good choice for a conference lead in.

In a study published in the Harvard Business Review, Capability vs. Usability, people said they were more interested in capability (more features) than usability (less and better). "So people like a lot of stuff in their stuff," says Schwartz. But, if you give them time to use their gazillion features, they will then choose a much simpler one. "The problem," said Schwartz, is that people don't seem to know this about themselves...People want capability, but they prefer usability."

It's a do-it-yourself world, Schwartz says, a blank slate we're supposed to write on. Is that good or bad? Yes, he says. But he's only going to explore the negative aspects right now. "Instead of liberating people," says Schwartz, having so many choices "...seems to paralyze them." He offers a range of examples - buying jam, speed dating, investing - where decisions are more easily made with fewer options.

More choice may let people do better, Schwartz says, but they will often feel worse. He provides a variety of reasons why, but they're all essentially aspects of buyer's remorse. What's the answer? In some cases, it may be "libertarian paternalism" - essentially "opt out" - where defaults are offered that reduce choice, making decisions for you if you're essentially choosing to do nothing. 

An old friend of mine, H.B. Gelatt, an author and futurist who's been writing about "creative decision-making" for decades, explored this idea quite some time back. Like Schwartz, H.B. maintained that people have difficulty making decisions when they have too few choices or too many choices. Too few resulted in annoyance that the optimum option isn't available to you, and too many made you freeze up.

What's different today is that the number of choices has exploded. The era of personalization, micro-markets, and one-off production means that choices - from the store shelf to the online world - are constantly expanding, to the point where near-infinite customization for many products and services will soon be in reach.

Schwartz ends without giving much in the way of recommendations for how to make this easier for your customer, except to say that the default choice offered to them will become increasingly more important.

gB