Pushkin.
When our oldest grandchild was five ish, my wife went with her to the supermarket to buy a toothbrush, and she got to the toothbrush section of the aisle and there were one hundred and fifty or so, and she stood there, my five year old granddaughter, and was just completely overwhelmed and paralyzed and finally said, Grandma, would you pick?
Does this sound familiar? Maybe for you?
It wasn't toothbrushes, but what couch to buy or what doctor to see. Social psychologist Barry Schwartz, an emeritus professor at Swarthmore, has spent decades challenging the idea that more choice is always better.
It makes making decisions harder, it makes making good decisions harder, and it ends up making you less satisfied even when you manage to make a good decision, because you know, somewhere out there is something that is even better.
On today's show, Finding Satisfaction in a World full of endless choice, I'm maya Shunker and this is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. Barry Schwartz is an expert on decision making His latest book is called Choose Wisely. In it, he challenges some of the conventional wisdom tools people use to make decisions, as well as what it even means to make the right choice. We began with an overview of various models
of decision making. There are all kinds of ways that people make decisions, right. Some people go with their gut. Others choose a decision based on what they think will minimize regret. Others go with their faith. They ask God, can you just give us a quick history lesson on these different models and how the scientific understanding of decision making has evolved over time.
I'd be delighted in some respects. This is the story that the book Choose Wisely is trying to tell. You went through all of the kinds of approaches that people might have to make decisions that would occur to me. Going with your gut, relying on religious advice, relying on what your friends have chosen, relying on what respected elders have chosen, relying on habit, do the same thing today that you did last week. All of these are ways
to ease the burden of choosing. In effect, when you do any of those things, you're delegating the choice to some respected other person, either the previous you, or you know, an elder in the community, or a good friend or what have you.
What you just said reminds me of this very common refrain we have in these tough moments of decision making.
Can you just decide for me?
Yeah?
How many times do we ask that?
We asked set of physicians, we askset of our parents, we asked of our friends, of our spouses, Just make the choice for me.
In fact, a lot of.
Times in my life I've wanted the universe to eliminate an option, just so that I don't have to make the choice and have to deal with the psychic costs afterwards of regret and you know, questioning whether I actually made the right choice or not.
But here's the thing, from the perspective of the discipline of economics on the one hand, and the psychology of decision making, any one of those alternatives you described is inferior to doing it the right way.
And to clarify, Barry, when you say quote the right way, you're referring to a framework called rational choice theory, right. It is a model for how people ought to make decisions. And you actually take issue with this model, which we'll get to a bit later, but for now, tell us what this theory purports.
Rational choice theory, mostly the product of economists, is the view that the way to make good decisions, rational choices, is to assess how valuable each option is to you, and how likely it is to be as valuable as you think it is. Every decision is a prediction. We sometimes predict that we'll love a restaurant and we don't. Well of a car, and we don't and so on. You create a little spreadsheet, you fill in for every option those two numbers, and then you do the math.
That's the way rational people make decisions. And let me just say there's a cousin to this that is much more consequential in a way because it affects policy decisions of whole entities rather than just yours and my decisions as individuals. And it's called cost benefit analysis. You know, what's the best way to reduce our carbon footprint? Lots of people have different ideas about that, and the idea
is that probably is a best way. And the way you figure it out is you figure out how much it will cost to implement and how large the benefit will be and out of this analysis will come the clear answer to the question, and you implement it not just for your own personal use, but for the whole society's use. So we live with that kind of analysis all the time, and we're encouraged to do that kind of analysis when it's our own personal decisions. That's what
rational choice theory is. It critically depends on being able to quantify things.
Is that why you think people are drawn to this model because it gives them a feeling of both ease and a feeling of confidence that they have done the work, if you will, and they have arrived at the right answer.
I think maybe so. And let me say it isn't incidental that this theory is called rational choice theory. Rational is not a descriptor. Rational is an evaluative term. You know what that means is rational choice theory is the right way to make a choice theory? Yes, who wants to be irrational?
Yeah?
Of course, it's an affront to our intelligence to be told that we're being irrational.
Exactly, So there's an horrific attached to it. And if they see and read articles in the newspapers where policy decisions are being made using a framework very much like this. What more evidence do you need that this is what
the smart and powerful people do? But to me, the critical notion is that the fifty years of research by psychologists on the errors we make and two Nobel prizes in economics to psychologists who studied this and never not for a second was their questioning of whether the standard for what counts as a rational decision is the right standard. It was all just presupposed this is the right way to do it, and let's study the ways in which
people fall short. And the point of this book is to suggest that the normative standard of rationality is catastrophically bad. You can't really use rational choice theory unless you can quantify how good the various outcomes will be for you
and how likely they are to be that good. In other words, you need a value and a probability for everything you're thinking about, and they need to be on the same scale so that you can compare one option against another with respect to all the things that matter to you, so you can actually do the math. Putting discursive descriptions in that Excel spreadsheet isn't going to help you get to the answer. And the problem is we
give quantification more respect than it deserves. We are often driven by the dimensions that are most easily quantified rather than by the dimensions that are actually most important to us, and that will lead to decisions that distort what we actually care about.
There's also two other issues that I see.
One is per the end of history illusion, where we forget that we will keep changing. We assume we are a fixed entity and that all of our preferences will stay stable into the future, and that we will be excellent cognitive forecasters and be able to anticipate how we'll feel. We know from decades of research that's simply not true. We're very bad at predicting how future events will make
us feel. And then the second thing is that when it comes to large decisions, you have to differentiate when it comes to how much value you think you'll get from it, between what common in would call experiential happiness versus reflective happiness. So there are lots of choices we make where in the short term things are really hard. Think about having newborn baby, right, that's a really hard experience. You're not sleeping, you're barely eating, you're not allowing your
needs to be met. But there's a massive payoff when you take moments to evaluate, Hey, how's my life going? Do I feel fulfilled? Do I feel satisfied? And having that kid might give you a massive boost or maybe thirty years down the line, it gives you that massive boost, and then how do you differentiate between those in the Excel spreadsheet?
But you know, here too, the seduction of quantification screws you up because the long term satisfaction that you're talking about can't be quantified in the way that the number of hours of sleep you get at night and the number of hours you can spend working on your latest project. You know, those are quantifiable. So what is salient and pointable at and measurable in.
This case is all the bad stuff?
Yeah, you know, and the things you're talking about play second fiddle because we don't know how to quantify them. But you're absolutely right. And let me say, since this is your wheelhouse, that one of the problems that rational choice theory has is that it takes a snapshot of life in a given moment and freezes it and does not allow for you to change or the world to change.
You know, it.
Tricks us into thinking that decision making should be easy, and it's.
Not when I think about my subjective assessment of whether I made the best decision. So let's say I'm trying to choose the right car for me. Okay, we should not only integrate how well the car services my needs
and meets my various preferences and expectations. We should also consider these other more meta components, namely, how I feel about the decision that I made, whether it induces feeling of regret in me, whether I have psychic stress because I'm constantly reevaluating if it was the right choice or not.
Does rational choice theory account for the psychic factors? The again, when I'm calling metafactors of how we are in real time evaluating the decision that we made, Because if I'm really upset with the decision, or it's causing me a lot of consternation, that will eat away at my positive utility.
You ask very good questions, oh thanks very and every question has a more complicated answer, I'm afraid. So there are a couple of ways to treat this view. You have to consider what you might call transaction costs.
There is a price that you pay.
For complexifying your decision, and maybe it's not worth paying the price.
Like mental transaction costs to be clear.
Yes, and not just mental, you know, like it takes time, and that's time that you could be spending doing something else, doing your job better. So that's one problem. If you factor in the transaction costs, you might adopt a different decision strategy.
Yes.
The second thing is that, from the economist point of view, adding options and thus making the decision more complicated, can't be bad. And that can't be bad because if you're happy alternating between two breakfast cereals and I add a third one to the grocery shelf, you can ignore it. So adding an option doesn't make you worse off, and it may make somebody better off. And if it's true of a third option, it's the same thing as true of a fourth and a fifth and a fiftieth and
one hundredth. So that approach essentially doesn't acknowledge that the kind of cost you're worrying about exist. What I suggest in the book is that more is better than less, but a point is reached where still more starts to become worse, and it can become sufficiently worse that, instead of being liberated by all these options, you're paralyzed.
After the break, Barry gives us a path out of decision paralysis. We'll be back in a moment with a slight change of plans. Professor Barry Schwartz and I have been talking about the sneaky mental costs of decision making. One reason you might find choosing between options particularly stressful is because you're a maximizer. Psychologists contrast this with another type of decision maker, a satisficer. I ask Barry to explain the difference.
A maximizer is someone who's out for the best. Whatever that means. The best can be subjective. In fact, it is almost always subjective. But if you're buying a new appliance, you want the best appliance, And if you're buying a new car, you want the best car. And if you're buying a house, you want the best house.
YadA, YadA, YadA.
A satisficer is someone who wants good enough. If you're lucky, you look at one thing, it meets your standards and you're done. And in some areas that can mean very low standards, and in others that can mean very high standards. But once you find good enough, you stop looking. Yes, And the reason this is important is that in the world we currently live in, if you want the best, you have to look at every option. And as everybody knows, when you start looking at every option, you'll be dead
before you get to the end of the list. So it's become an unachievable goal to find the best.
Yeah, I love, I love that you articulate that a satisficer can have very high standards. Yep, it's just that it's good enough against the backdrop of those high standards, which does not mean that you are okay with bottom of the barrel outcomes, you know.
No, no, And it's really important this point because most people when they hear satisficing, which is a technical term invented by a Nobel Prize winning psychologist slash Economists seventy years ago, they don't hear it as.
A neutral description.
Yes they you know, when you say satisfice, what people here is.
Settling, Yes, exactly.
And nobody thinks that settling is neutral.
I mean it's used disparagingly. Yeah, in the context of relationships, for example, don't settle.
Absolutely, you know. And there so there's a word in parentheses that isn't stated, and that word is just he's just settling, which is an implicit criticism. And so I think everybody is pushing us, and we push ourselves not to accept good enough, because we should have higher expectations of ourselves, We should make more demands of ourselves, and so on. What we found and other people have found, is that it makes making decisions harder, in some cases
close to impossible. It makes making good decisions harder, and it ends up making you less satisfied even when you manage to.
Make a good decision totally, because.
You know somewhere out there is something that is even better. Absolutely, you know, if you get into ten colleges, you can torture yourself to oblivion trying to decide which of these colleges.
To go to.
When people a little older than you know, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference totally. There's a New Yorker cartoon that I show sometimes when I give talks on this of a young woman who's got a sweatshirt that says Brown parentheses. But my first choice was Yale. Now it's funny, but imagine spending four years at Brown, a wonderful institution, and every day you wake up with that sentence in your head. Yep, are you going to get as much out of being at Brown as you
possibly can not on your life. You'll spend every day you're at Brown thinking how much better life would be if only you'd gotten into Yale. So it's not a frivolous problem. It's a very serious problem. It's stabilitating. It makes people feel like they are consistently making bad decisions, and it undermines confidence and SAPs energy. So it's very, I think, very consequential.
Yeah, my friends who are on dating apps feel this acutely. You know, it used to be that you, well, back in the good old days, right, you had a few options. Maybe it's who you went to school with, or to church with, or saw your local community whatever. And now what's so interesting about the dating app thing is it's not even like you had the ten options laid out in front of you. It's that you know that if you keep swiping, you will keep getting more and more people.
So there is this counterfactual world of infinite options that lives in your head at all times, which can really eat away at your ability to satisfice.
A lot of the point of the paradox of choice is to show that even when people make good decisions by their own standards, they feel less good about them. Yeah,
for a variety of reasons. You know, if it's not perfect, you regret having chosen, if you haven't been able to look at all the options, You're sure that some option out there that you didn't get to would be better than the one that you ended up choosing, and all of that makes the quality, the subjective quality, the decision feel less good.
Absolutely, absolutely. I have so many reflections here.
One is I mean, you strike me as someone who's more of a satisficer than a maximizer.
Very much.
So I'm curious to know for people listening who are well one I'm imagining someone's listening, they might think, well, I'm not across the board a satisficer or a maximizer. There are certain areas of life, certain domains of life where I doesn't really matter to me what microwave I get. I'm a satisficer in that domain, but when it comes to my long term partner, I'm going to be a maximizer.
So they might have that response. What I want to know from you is, is a satisficing mindset something people can cultivate let's say that they're being driven crazy by their maximizing tendencies, can they do something about it very or we sort of destined just to be the way we are.
So I have two things to say. First, you're absolutely right that nobody's a maximizer about everything, which means, of course that we all know how to be satisfiers because there are some decisions where that's what we are, and people have that. Most people's intuitions are well, you know, with unimportant stuff, it's foolish to maximize. But when it gets to be important, why would you not look for
the best? And relationships is often where people you know can't imagine what it would mean to look for a good enough life partner. So there's one or two studies where they try to induce people to take up maximizing or a satisficing orientation and suggests that you can create satisficing orientation in people who, on the questionnaires that we develop look like they're maximizers.
How interesting.
What's unsatisfying about that is you don't know how long this lasts. You're in the lab, you get something to read or to hear, and it makes you a satisficer for the next thirty minutes.
And then what I'm imagining someone reading this right before they get proposed to or the issue a proposal.
I just need to last for thirty minutes.
Very yes, the unsolved, confident proposer. Yeah, probably ship that treatment condition to the partner so that you know this is the golden thirty minute window when you're going.
To say yes. Yeah.
But the other piece of evidence I have is that when the book The Paradox of Choice came out, which was twenty years ago, I've got hundreds, maybe thousands of emails from people who said I thought I was the only one who had this problem. I thank you so much for making it clear that the world has given me and a lot of other people this problem.
You mean when they said I didn't know I was the only one to suffer from this. It was the maximizing mindset right.
Correct, and it succeeded in changing the way they made decisions. So this is personal testimony. I obviously don't have any data about what A whether they actually did change the way they make decisions, and B whether that last.
I do think it's meaningful that if a short intervention where you're reading about someone who's a satisfier versus a maximizer can give you that little nudge to things slightly differently. That's meaningful because at least shows this is malleable enough. And I also think that the mere recognition of these
two concepts is powerful in its own right. I feel like when I was studying judgment and decision making during my post doc and was learning about these concepts, I'm just thinking through my daily decisions, and when I find that I've been in the Google search.
Rabbit hole for four hours.
Trying to figure out what couch I want, I can at least use labels to identify what's happening, and you can ask yourself this primary question, is this decision worthy of the maximizing mindset given the cost I will incur to my psychological well being?
I absolutely agree, and giving a name to things often in many ways, diffuses the impact that these things will have, and finding out that you're just one among many will make you stop feeling like that you have some pathology that needs to be corrected. So I think that's right. Naming things helps a lot, and it can lead to
very different strategies and very different approaches to making decisions. Yes, what I have just started doing is using a slightly different word to distinguish it rational, and the word is reasonable, And so it seems to me that what you want is reasonable choice theory, which acknowledges that not everything can be quantified, not everything can be compared to everything else.
All you can do is give it your best shot at thinking about the aspects of the decision that seem important, and how you'll respond to those aspects, and how the people you care about will. With the understanding that you should not expect a level of precision that is greater than the problem you are trying to solve, there are certain kinds of decisions where it seems quite reasonable to try to be as precise as possible. You know, if you're deciding what bet to make in a gambling casino,
you should know the odds. You should know how much you're going to win and how much you're going to lose. The precision is there, and there's no excuse for you not knowing it. But when you're trying to decide where to go on vacation, or what job to take, or how to discipline your kid who just transgressed, that kind of precision doesn't exist, and when you seek it or impose it, you're distorting the problem that you need to solve rather than illuminating it. But you know this is
not snap your fingers and it goes away. You've got habits. It's going to feel very uncomfortable in the beginning for you to break those habits, and you'll think, oh, what did I What opportunity did I pass up by not spending another ten minutes looking? But over time you will discover that you feel maybe even better about your decisions and your day has suddenly added a couple of hours. So how about reasonable choice theory instead of rational choice theory?
Love it very Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to see you again.
Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you know someone who's currently struggling with a tough decision, make sure to send them this episode. And if you found life making choices for you, make sure to read my new book, The Other Side of Change, Who We Become When Life makes Other Plans. You can find it wherever you buy books, or at the link in show notes. We'll be back in a week with another episode of a slight Change of Plans.
I'll see You then.
A Slight Change of Plans is created, written, and executive produced by me Maya Schunker. The Slight Change family includes our showrunner Alexander Garatin, our editor Daphne Chen, our lead producer Megan Lubin, our associate producer Sonia Gerwitz, and our sound engineer Erica Huang. Louis Scara wrote our delightful theme
song and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks to everyone there, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee