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.

Tim :

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.

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.

Russ Wood :

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.

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.

Russ Wood :
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

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.

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.

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.

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.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5402259