Does Less Choice Make us Happier
In modern day western culture, we live in an affluent world full of choice and decisions. Generally, as time progresses, remaining pleased with a decision you made is likely to make you happy. Whereas becoming displeased with a decision you have made could make you unhappy, depending upon the importance and the ramifications of that decision. So the question is, what makes you become unhappy with a decision?
Usually, the unhappiness or stress is caused when it becomes apparent that the decision you made didn’t turn out to be the best one. Who will you blame for this? Yourself most probably, after all you were the one that made the choice. You will end up feeling regretful. Another source of unhappiness is the choosing process its self, the fear of regret and the desperate need to avoid it.
I’ll give you an example to demonstrate this. My farther recently had a decision to make regarding three different pension schemes. Without boring you with the details, I’ll just say that they were significantly different, but none of them were substantially better than the others. This was causing him quite a lot of unrest and displeasure, even though they were all very good financially and most people would have been delighted with any one of the options. The reason for this stress was because of the multiple choices that he had. If he was only offered one of the three options, he would have been very pleased with it. It wouldn’t have caused him months of unrest and worry about which option would be the best one.
So there is this idea that the more you have to choose from, the harder it is to make a choice and be satisfied with it, which leads to more people being unhappy with the decisions they make. We’ve all been in the situation where we order a meal from a restaurant, only to be dissatisfied with it when everyone else’s meals come out and you wish you had chosen one of theirs instead.
In many situations, if we only had fewer options to choose from, sure we might not have as much abundance of choice (some would call it ‘freedom’) but we would probably be more happy with the choice we made because there is less opportunity to think that we got it wrong and then blame ourselves for getting it wrong.
In most cases, I’m quite good at accepting the decisions I make, even if they were not the best in retrospect. But this is because I’ve thought about all this and I’ve seen on many occasions how decision making and regret can make people unhappy. I’d rather be more accepting and have more of an “oh well, nothing I can do now except learn from it” sort of attitude.
I’ll end with this illustration which was shown in a lecture by Barry Schwartz. It’s a great depiction of the old proverb the grass is always greener on the other side. This is another thing that can limit your happiness given a particular choice or sittuation. If you are always thinking about what could have been or could be, you will never live in the moment and always be looking at how you can change a given situation to make it better, rather than enjoying what you have.
What is RSS
How is the type of choice relevant? I mean, it seems like we have a very large (possibly infinitely large) number of possible choices every day. Should I walk to the left of that lamppost or the right? Should I type “probably” or “maybe”. Do I pick up my drink now, or do I just finish this email first.
Surely if choice made us unhappy we would all be continuously distraught by now?
@Tim
The importance of the choice, i.e what the consequence are, is the defining factor in this argument. Trivial choices are unlikely to affect our mood (or at least wont affect it for any significant period of time), whereas more important choices can have a huge effect on a persons mood. Some are more susceptible to this than others.
There are certainly situations where a large choice is a good thing. I used the restaurant example in the article to describe how a large choice can cause you to enjoy your meal less because you might end up wishing you had ordered something different when the meals come out. However, with less to choose from it might be more difficult to find something that is to your taste.
If you have two choices in front of you, A and B. You choose A and it goes tits up. You might be thinking to yourself, Damn I should have chose B. Whereas if you only had one choice in the first place, A. When it went pear shaped you would think, it’s not really my fault, it was the only option.
In conclusion, the argument is only valid in certain situations and also depends upon the person.
I see where you’re coming from here i was buying a new phone a week ago and i couldn’t decide which one to choose, there was a million different ones.
I wonder if this is particularly true of choices where the options are similar in net value but involve competing concerns, where one thing important to you is sacrificed to another thing that’s important to you. When you don’t have that, you won’t have regrets. When you do have it, you might miss it if you had no choice, but you might regret it if you do. But consider the case where you have several options, and one is clearly superior. Do you think you’d be happy if you didn’t have that option? Perhaps. But you might be happier if you did and were able to choose it.
I very much agree with this (and love the drawing). You might like a great piece on this topic that aired on NPR a few years ago:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5402259
@Russ Wood
I think that we use a lot of a process called confabulation, to go back and explain our situation and decisions in a rational way. We go back, and explain exactly why we choose that meal, “it looked nice”, or how we came to choose a particular subject to study.
However, it is unusual to hear people assign things to unconnected events. For example, if you had decided to go out the night you saw that documentary about neuro-surgery on the TV when you were young. You may never had become a doctor. You might not even remember that that was the reason.
Going left around the lamp post instead of right might make you miss your train, so you never bump into the person that tells you all about how interesting oceanography is.
I think it is rare that we can identify which choices really have the biggest impacts. And I suspect that our rationalisations for how we ended up in particular situations are often just made up after the fact.
One of the tools that is important in what I do, is the idea of “good enough” decision making. So if I have thought of 5 ways of doing something, I don’t necessarily try to pick the best one. As that would take to long. I generally use a measure of which ones are good enough to eliminate obviously bad ideas. I then pick from the remainder using a combination of randomness and aesthetics.
Another interesting and related idea is from economics. Its called rational ignorance. Its used to describe a situation where the costs of getting the information to make a good choice (for instance ordering everything on the menu to see what it is like before choosing which one to eat) are higher than the value of the outcome of the choice.
In any case, I don’t really buy the Schwartz construction of choice. It seems to be a very “man-as-consumer” focused view of the world.
@tim
In your example, going left instead of right around a lamp post might make something different occur, but does it make any difference to your mood or state of mind, or at least a difference that you are aware of? Probably not. You’re not going to be thinking, damn I should have gone left around that lamp post because now I might be a marine biologist, whether that would have been the case or not. You just wouldn’t even think about it, so that decision wouldn’t have an impact on your mood, an impact that you are aware of as being a result of that decision.
The point I’m trying to make is, if you don’t know if a choice might have made a large impact, then that choice wouldn’t have an effect when thinking back on things you could have done differently, thus neither having a positive or negative affect on your mood. Whereas a choice that you do know did make an impact on where you are now, e.g. (all be it quite trivial and short term) sitting eating your dinner after choosing something from the menu that you regretted, might well have an affect on the enjoyment of your meal and you know that fact. If you were on your own in the restaurant and you didn’t get to see any of the other meals, then yeah you may have regretted getting the thing you got, but you wouldn’t know so it wouldn’t change your enjoyment of the particular meal you chose.
Personally, I take a similar line to you, in that I’m satisfied with a good enough decision having eliminated all the wost ones. That’s the way to be in my opinion and if you can be like that then none of this regret caused by decision making really gets to you.
Part of it is a man as a consumer view of the world. But that is because the majority of modern day western culture is a consumer culture and that culture is what is being commented on. But it’s not all about decision in purchasing goods and what not. I’m talking about all kinds of decisions, from choosing a university course or a job position, being in one team and always thinking about being in another because you have a misconception that the other team is better. What ever it may be.
@Jeremy Pierce
That’s true. You may be happier in some cases if you did have a different option and were able to choose it. But if you didn’t, then you wouldn’t know so it wouldn’t affect your mood. However as you say, if you have to choose between two conflicting things of equal value, or two choices, neither of which had a good outcome. Then not having that extra option (if it is better) would mean you wouldn’t be as happy, whether you knew about the extra option or not.
So in conclusion. Less choice doesn’t always make us happier. It actually depends entirely on the situation and of course your personal way of dealing with decision making. Which, in this discussion I am aiming to make people think about.
Perhaps I should adjust the title.
Exactly. Although, it could well be those kinds of un-noticed choices that have the largest impact on your life. The choices you don’t even really realise you made. So, I think that this idea that more choice makes you unhappy or is bad for you is a misnomer. A non-sense, except in a very situations. I think some choices are genuinely difficult and stressful, but usually only because they have relatively predictable outcomes. But these seem to be few, and seem often to involve only a small number of selections. Some very stressful choices only have two options.
I don’t really see how the idea of “less choice” is ever likely to apply in those situations. Less university course? The outcome of the decision is still going to have a massive impact.
I disagree. I’m sure people like Barry Schwartz and the TED talk crowd would like us all to believe. Since they have got very rich off of that idea. But I don’t believe it.
In any case, it is nothing like a settled argument as to whether such a thing as consumerism even exists. See, for instance,
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=NjRxSBP0JqYC&lpg=PA57&ots=hSIWnKjW_O&dq=david%20graber%20consumer&pg=PA94
It seems to me that there are a small number of situations, such as having to choose between 10 different brands of almost identical beans, that this argument can be applied. And there does seem to some experimental evidence to support that.
I suppose it is nice to then write a book about it and make yourself famous… but I somehow doubt the evidence can really support the sweeping statements that it has lead to.
@tim
The amount of choice you have will surly have no quantitative or tangible effect on the rest of your life if you don’t even realise you have made the choice or even if you had an alternative choice or not. If you don’t know and there is no possible way of finding out whether that choice lead to one thing rather than another, then how can a choice like that even enter this debate.
This argument is in the context of conscious choice, where you know there are several options to choice from and you know (in the future) that the choice you made back then lead you to where you are now or at least contributed. The way you walked around a lamp post might have contributed, but how would you ever know? So how could you ever have a feeling about a choice like that, how could a choice like that have an effect on your mood (in terms of happiness, regret and such like). The outcome of that choice might have an effect, but the actual act of making the choice surely cannot.
So you don’t beleive the argument can be applied to the example I used about the pension decision, or the enjoyment of a meal you regretted choosing in a restaurant? Because there is no doubt in my mind that my dad would have have been much happier if he only had one pension scheme to choose from and no regret if the one he did choose doesn’t turn out to be very good.
Whether consumerism exists or not may not be a settled argument. But its hard for me to to buy the argument that it doesn’t when I see examples of it daily. Marketing, advertisement, unnecessary commodities, working 12+ hour days, designer labels, child labour. All of these things are inventions of human consumerism and all of these things exist in abundance in the western world or because of the western culture.