17: Maximizing, satisficing and the paradox of choice

Social Action at Swarthmore College. He studies the link between economics and psychology, offering startling insights into modern life. He's author, among many books, of the bestseller of the Paradox of Choice, Why More Is Less? Barry, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me today. My pleasure, Scott, so I. I've been a long admirer of your work, as has a lot of people, especially in the field

of positive psychology. You know, one of these great myths is that the more we have choices, the more we will be happy, the more that will you know that abundance is good. You really busted this myth, I thought, in a really big way, suggesting that more twists actually make us miserable. I thought you could maybe talk about the initial theory a little bit for listeners who may

not be as familiar with it as I am. Sure. Well, first, the little background the theory that the stuff I wrote about replaced or challenged is very intuitive, and it seems like it can't almost can't be false. You know, if there are five cereals in the supermarket and you're content, and I add three more, somebody will be happy about that and you'll be unaffected. So adding options is going to make somebody better off, and it's not going to

make anybody worse off. So we should take every opportunity to add as many options as possible. That seems straightforward, It seems reasonable, it seems rational, seems true, and psychologist, there's in years studying the importance of control to well being, and of course control over your life means that you have choices. So choice is good because choice means you have control, and control is an essential ingredient in to

well being. So all of that is background, All of that is reasonable, and there's a lot of empirical evidence

on the importance of control. So the shock really was not results suggesting that choice is not good, but rather that it isn't only good, And a point can be reached where the benefits from choice basically have asimptote and have flattened out, and all the drawbacks of having too many choices start to kick in paralysis, the likelihood you'll make a bad decision because it's become so complicated, the likelihood even when you make a good decision that you'll

feel dissatisfied because it's easy to imagine that some other decision would have been better. So choice is good, and what we assumed about that is true, but it isn't only good. And what my book focused on is the dark side of choice. Yeah, and also it really much is like, you know, like a kind of an an inverted u shiate curve of some sort or something where there is an optimal amount of choices upon which you get diminishing returns, even leading into negative you know, Yes,

that's right. And actually I wrote a paper with Adam Grant, who teaches at Wharton, in which we suggested that there may be many, many, many things in psychology where the curves and inverted you you know, arousal is good, too much arousal is bad. Some sharing and cooperation in the workplace is good. Too much sharing and cooperation in the workplace and it starts to become unproductive. Working together as

a team is good. Too much working together as a team and everything gets routinized and you lose your spot eighty and it becomes bad. So we basically think that you inverted you as ubiquitous. And what prompted us to write this paper was that it's a way of understanding choice. Some choice is good. Too much choice, and it starts to produce the negative, start to outweigh the positives. Yeah, I really like that. I personally, I've been working with that,

Susan Kane a bit. I'm trying to do some studies to see if there's too much extra version is bad. For instance, well, I think there's some reason to believe that they're that that's true published version span and too much, you know, such aversion is certainly bad, you know. Susan's point is that is that you know, maybe wat's too much or what's too little is less about an organization

and more about an individual. So what you want to do is, if you have you know, talent and individuals who work best alone, let them you know, she's not suggesting that introverted organizations are better than extroverted ones or the reverse. She's suggesting that individuals thrive more in one or another environment, and the introverts have basically been locked out because of this ideology about sharing and open office

and all that stuff. So yes, absolutely, yeah, I'm gathering some of Adam's best students from Orton to work on some research projects with me over the next year, with Susan and Adam on this personality by environment interaction, which is so so key. Is that interaction, not just getting other dispositions right. So you gave a TED talk in two thousand and five, and I think that it's fair to say that is one of the first and last talks ever given at TED in shorts. Let me explain myself.

It was the common diference was in Oxford, England, summertime. It was ninety degrees, very unusual in England. Nothing was air conditioned, people were sweating like pigs. Everybody was dressed the way I was dressed. And you know, all you were doing was talking to people in the theater. There was no online so I never gave it a thought. You know, here everybody is comfortable, trying to be comfortable because it's so hot, So why shouldn't I do that too?

And I love. Three months later they asked me to sign a release. I did, and I figured, what difference does that make. It's not like anyone's ever going to watch this thing. Seven million views, I think more than seven or but but you know, there was no YouTube when this started, so watch videos online. Nobody did back then. It's hard to believe that the world has changed so much. Look, you were good in that video. I wouldn't worry about it.

I was good. That was good. I embarrassed my wife by dressing that way, and the next time I gave it ted talk, she put her foot down and I actually dressed like a grown up long pants sport jacket, looked very respectable. You're repeatedly playing, you know, right outside my door, you know, the positive Psychologist, you know, every

morning I come in, I'm like, there's Barry. Yeah. So I would like to talk a little about how maybe some of your ideas have changed since you wrote your book, uh ten years ago, because I haven't following the the replication so one there was like a replication failure, but then you know or there was like a you know, a meta analysis like a zero and then but then I've also seen research showing that at least within the

particular tomeans like with sales, it's still as robust. So I would just love, Yeah, I'm just gonna be quiet and listening to you. So the meta analysis, which got a lot of attention, showed that the average effect size is just slightly bigger than zero. But what that misrepresents what the findings are, which is that there are a bunch of studies that show more choice is good, and there are a bunch of studies that show more choices bad, and they average out to a mean effect of zero.

So what we know is virtually every study that varies the number of choices gets an effect. It just isn't always negative. They and the people who did them analysis looked very hard to see if they could find what the mediators were determined, and they weren't unable to. But there's a more recent meta analysis that suggests that there are mediators and they can be identified and they account for much of the variation. So I think now what you'd want to say is that the too much choice

effect is real. It happens under circumscribed conditions. Though circumscribed conditions are not narrow, they're fairly broad. But it doesn't happen to everybody in all situations. So I think that the people drew the wrong conclusion from the original meta analysis, and we're in a different place now, so my views about this have not really changed. I never thought that

this was a universal finding. For example, you might love car buying, and if you do, there won't be too many options because you'll roll up your sleeves, you'll immerse yourself in all the details. You'll make yourself an expert on what the latest models have to offer, and it's for you. It's part of the pleasure of buying a car. Oh, but you don't feel that way about buying genes. I might feel that way about about choosing addition or restaurant,

but not about buying a car. So there's bound to be different situational differences and individual differences in tolerance for this kind of information. Exactly, I really am mentioned So I'm in personally interest in the individual differences aspect very much. So do they find any personality traits were mediators? They did not. They did not. We you know, with my collaborators. I did some research which has also turned out to

be somewhat controversial. We identified a personality trait that we call maximizing, which is trying to get the best, as opposed to satisfying, which is looking for good enough. And we found there are individual differences, and people who score as high maximizers are less happy, less optimistic, borderline clinically depressed. And the reason that this matters is that in a world with limited options, suppose you're a satisficer and there are two kinds of genes, what will you do? You'll

try them both. I suppose you're a maximizer and there are two kinds of genes. What will you do? You'll try them both, So it doesn't really matter. But suppose there are two thousand kinds of genes. Now, a satisfieser who is looking for good enough will try on genes until he or she gets a pair that's good enough

and then stop looking. The maximizer needs the best, so you have to look at all over, which is impossible, so you end up, you know, eventually, just picking something and convinced that if you'd look longer and had more patience, you'd have found something better. So in a world of exploding options, being a maximizer is really not good for one's mental health, not to mention that it takes an enormous amount of time and effort to try to achieve it. So that's what we found, and we created a scale,

and there's been controversy about the scale. It is very much an imperfect scale. We ended up coming up with a modified version of it ourselves, which has better psychometric properties. Other people think that the scale should be different. So this is an ongoing debate that I must say I have much less interest in than maybe I should. I'm sure eventually well people will figure out what a good scale is for measuring the idea. Uh. And so that's

a personality variable. And we found in the study that came out after my book was published that people who score high as maximizers who are looking for jobs college seniors, they get better jobs and they feel worse about the jobs they get. They do better and they feel worse. And this has kind of been my summary of the price of the benefits and the costs of being a maximizer. Maximizers will do better and they will feel worse about

how they do. It's maximizing correlated with the need for ambition, high ambition. We didn't look at we looked at perfectionism, we looked at optimism, and we didn't look at ambition. We didn't need for achievement. He didn't look for We didn't look at that. You know these are right for right for investor, Maybe I will. And I'm curious also in how the dopamine system plays a role here with your theory, I think there's a there's a strong interaction here.

We know that one of the key differences between extroverts and introverts actually is that extroverts tend to have a higher dopamine production or release at when it comes to competitive rewards. So I could imagine maximizers it being somewhat domain specific in the sense you're trying to maximize or you get very excited abouy by many options within particular domains, like competitive rewards like money, sex, social status, those kinds

of things. So you may find that that there might be maximizers for petitive awards, or maybe maximizers for like career decisions, maximizers for I don't know if you looked at the domain specificity or or if we looked a little bit. Yeah, we looked a little We certainly have never looked at the physiology. We looked a little bit for domain specificity and never found anything. I don't think we in the right way. I expected there'd be domain specificity.

And one of my current pet concerns has to do with a particular domain of two domains, choosing a college and choosing a job, because I think the college choice problem is destroying our youth, and I think the job choice problem is destroying our young adults. And it's partly that you know, there is this notion there is the best college to go to, and damn it, I'm going to get in, and there is a best job to

get and I'm going to get it. And pressure that kids put on themselves, or their parents put on them, or some or their peers put on them, or all of the above is really just wreaking havoc on the well being of the most privileged, affluent kids in the history of the world. There was a long article actually in the Sunday Review section of the New York Times this Sunday, triggered by this apparent suicide epidemic in Palo Alto in high school about why it's happening, when it

why does it happen when it happens? And suicide epidemics are rare, so you know, that's the canary in the coal mine. But you know, substance use, anxiety disorder that those things are not rare. And I think it really a lot of it comes from this, this commitment to tow the idea that only the best will do. I mean, there's so many implications of your theory. You know. Obviously for a selection of meats, have they done a lot of research on the proliferation of like pornography, for instance,

among among the this this generation. Have you confided I don't know. I mean maybe maybe there is some research. I think a fair amount of research on these you know, dating sites too. Yeah, which got you know, which superseded what used to it was something that used to exist, speed dating, where you would actually go and spend an evening and meet six, eight, ten people for very short conversations and if you're interested then email addresses will get exchanged.

Nowadays you can do all of this online, so the evenings together in a hotel ballroom are less common. But I think it is a real issue. You know, there is a sense now that, because of the availability of at least profiles online, that you're choosing a mate from a set that's essentially infinitely large, right, And I think that if that's what you think you're doing, you'll live your life alone. Yeah, And I wonder how many of

these options really in reality would be like possible. So, I mean, we do have this tendency when we're with one option to think about all the other available options. But how many of those other available options really, in reality are are good? I bet we our brain like automatically thinks that there's a lot more better option. The grass is greener, much more so than it actually is greener. Oh,

I'm sure that that's true. And you know, there's a there's a writer named Laurie Gottlieb who's become some sort of a psychotherapist, and she wrote a book called Marry Him about her efforts to find a partner with her biological clock ticking. So it's high pressure. And she goes to see this matchmaker guy and comes in with a list of attributes that her mate needs to have, and you know, it's like five thousand items long. He looks at it, he laughs, and she says, what's so funny?

He says, well, I think there are probably maybe five to ten people in the world who meet criteria. And then he just pauses a beat and he says, and what makes you think that any of them would be interested in you? Right? We assume, like you know, in our imagination, that it's all anything goes. So, so she this, actually this and my work or so, she says, actually got her to change her thinking and start looking from

good enough instead of the perfect partner. But you know, you can't say to people all you need is a good enough life partner. No, I can't say, first of all, when people here good enough, what they hear as you're settling, you have no standards. And that's not what good enough means. Good enough. You know, if you want to go to one of the twenty five best liberal arts colleges in the country that reflects pretty high standards, you know, that's twenty five out of how many thousand schools. It just

doesn't have to be Swarthmore. It could be something. It could be Oberlin, could be Franklin and Marshall. Right, that's so. And so there are people with high standards, reasonably high standards, and they're very different from people who think they need to get the best. Yeah, you're very quotable. I think at one point you said something like I'm going to call you a couple of times in this interview, but I think once I heard you see something like good

enough really is almost always good enough? Or something. Yes, I think if there's a single sentence from my work that people should memorize, that's yeah. So a little background on me. I did my undergrad at Carnegie Mellon and I studied with HERB Simon right up to when he passed away in two thousand. Studied with Herbs. I was his last research assistant. That's quite something. Oh my gosh,

it was such an honor, such an honor. So I would first hand, you know, saw the satisficing theory and that he wont to know what prize for, you know, and heard about it. I took his class, his graduate level class, and he talked a lot about it. So I'm very familiar with the idea of satisficing. I mean, I see so many similarities in your own work to that idea. Was it like it was so it seemed like a very natural extension. Were you when you were

coming up with this research program everything. How much were you influenced by HERB Simon? That's one question, but there's a fundamental difference. Simon's focus was on hottentitive limitations, so he wasn't saying don't maximize. He was saying, we can't maximize. We don't have the resources to that. Right. So, if you're only interested in describing how decisions get made, he said,

a more realistic model is a satisficing model. You choose what's good enough, but you're alert to what's better, so that over time, the standard of good enough keeps going up and up and up and up and up. So for him, he was not offering people advice about what to do. He was offering a description about what we do do in contrast to what the rational choice theorists say, which is that we maximize. He said, that's just based on a completely unrealistic psychological theory. Yeah, no, he does that.

And he was so grounded in the decision and problem solving literature and heuristics, the heuristics literature, so you know, he he was not interested individual differences. He was very interested in like general problem solving strategies that people use. And then you know, obviously applying that to these things. So you do show that, and so that is definitely one major major extension is showing that no, we can,

it's just not conducive to happiness. The second thing is is really, you know, having your foot firmly planted in the field of positive psychology and being able to contribute to the debate or discussion surrounding what is the best contributor to a life well lived or well being or a deeper sense of well being. And the idea that satisficing is is more wink tightly linked to well being

than maximizing. I think is actually a really important not no actually about it, but it is a really important insight and and you know, for people trying to live their own life life lives, it can be very I think it'd be very difficult for all of us to to not think, well, we've just settled by satisficing the people that you've encountered who are just really really happy in life, who are good with choosing the good enough option.

What are these people like? How are they able to overcome that sort of thing nagging in the back of their head saying, well, how do I know if I've just settled. I don't know the answer to that. You know there are, I mean, I'm one such person. I never ever, I don't think I've ever made a decision where the aspiration was to get the best. Why that is, I have no idea. You know, it wasn't certainly wasn't delivered on my part. It just seems to be the way I'm built. I have two kids, one of whom

is very much like me. The other one is really has a hard time making decisions because she can't turn off the only the best we'll do engine. She knows it about herself. Some of these decisions she enjoys, so you know, she's not tortured by him. But it's not like if she were tortured by it, she'd shut it down. This is the way she goes through life. I have no idea what makes for this difference. I think it would be terrifically interesting to study how children learn how

to make choices. And this astonishing thing to me is that there's no literature on this. There was no literature on this when I wrote my book, and there's no literature on this yet, and there really should be, since in the modern world, choice making is a major problem, and we don't have a clue about how kids develop a sense of and so to me, the question about how do you become a maximizer or satisfies or begs

for you some sort of a developmental study interventions. Yeah, well, before you do the intervening, let's see what are the key influences that determine what pattern of decisions you know. I have speculated that parents inadvertently turn their kids in to maximizers by being maximizers on their kid's behalf. So before kids are making real decisions, parents make decisions for them. And I've never heard of parents say I only want once good enough for my children. Parents don't say that

the best that's right. So you watch your parents making decisions, and their parents don't think you're watching, but of course you are, and you learn more from that than you do from anything they tell you. And the model that you end up with is when it comes to making decisions, only the best will do. That's the way mom and dad do it for me. Now, I don't think parents mean to teach that to their kids. I don't even know that they mean to act that way themselves. But

so that's a speculation. There's no evidence one way or another. You know, we have all these assumptions. We assume that, like you're aware of the model of DC and Ryan, you know the fundamental humans, and autotomy is one of them. Yes, so how have you made contact with that literature? Well, so the mistake, I'm respectful of that, and I think they're right about the importance of autonomy. The mistake is to equate autonomy with choice. Okay, you know, when there's

too much choice, it actually takes autonomy away. I just heard it talk today given by guy a doctor who also is a first break researcher and decision making named Peter Euble, gave a talk at Penn and he's sort of interested in how patients make decisions. You know, you get a prostate cancer diagnosis, what do you do. What's the role of the doctor, what's the role of the patient. What kind of information should the patient get? Who decides?

And one of his points is that the way the medical community has responded to the criticism that it's too paternalistic is it puts the decision in the hands of the patient and then showers the patient with so much information that the patient is totally bewildered, so that in effect, what ends up happening is the patient chooses whatever the

doctor prefers. So it looks like you're you're putting the patient in charge, But what you're doing is you're blitzing the patient with information so that the patient has no recourse but to say, what do you recommend? Doc? And then now you feel licensed to make a recommendation because you've been asked for one. So so I think you are not producing autonomy when you give people a blizzard of information. You are disempowering people. That's not the intent often,

but that's the result. So I think it's the failure to appreciate the inverted you that leads people to e quate choice with autonomy. Choice and autonomy go together until they stop going together. Choice goes up, autonomy goes down. Yeah, it's we keep coming back to the inverted use shape currently keep coming. I think that really is the way to understand this. So I really like your fish bowl analogy. I really like it a lot. You don't have freedom, you have paralysis, right, A fish is out of the

are you of paralysis? I'm trying to think in terms of like an educate educational implications for this. We want to give students the autonomy to figure out who their self is or you know, like try different identities on to see what really interests them, what their passions are. I mean, have you thought about in the sense in the sense of which you can have too much? Not again,

because your point is very well taken. Autonomy is not the same thing as choice, Like in a school environment, how we can maybe give too many choices of courses a take or things to discover? Oh? Absolutely, absolutely, And you know it's funny. There's a there's an organization that I have a great deal of admiration for called Complete College America, Okay, and its focus is on the other

end of the distribution. The kids would go to junior college and community college and are you know, working full time and trying to get at least an associate's degree. The graduation or kids in these sort of will take anyone institutions is something on the order of twenty percent. Not only does nobody graduate, but kids take tons and tons of credits for which they are paying money that they don't have a lot of that don't even move closer to degrees. And the reason is wether a couple

of reasons. One is that they're inadequately advised, which is partly that these schools don't have any money to have an adequate advising system. But the rest of it is that these schools copy the elite universities and what they see at Harvard and Stanford and forthmore is give kids lots of choice. So they give their kids, students lots of choice, and the result is that they simply get lost.

They get it's all bewildering to them. And if you start structuring the programs and taking choice away, you dramatically increase the successful completion and you dramatically increase wasted credits. So I think there is a right amount of choice to give students, to let them, as you put it, you know, sort of figure out who they are, cultivate self, and pursue their own unique interests in talents. We have no idea what that optimal amount is, but I can

tell you with some confidence that more is not better. Yeah, you know, I am struck by a documentary I once watched on North Korea, and you find that some people who spent most of their or all of their childhood in North Korea who then end up in South Korea or even America, and they're interviewed about, Oh, it must have been terrible, it must have been horrible having no

you know, freedom, et cetera, et cetera. I was really struck by how some of them were, like, you know what, I was much happier in North Korea than I am in America. I just think of your theory when I when I see things like that, you know, I think we maybe. Of course, I'm not saying that, like it's all wonderful North Korea. That's you know, That's not what

I'm saying. But I'm saying that. I think it's interesting how the extent to which you know, sometimes the most simple things in life or being kind of are some of the most simple decisions of life, being outsourced to someone else can really be lead to high well being. I think that's right, you know. And you know, advice I give people when they insist on asking me advice. One of the best advice I give, aside from good enough is almost always good enough, is choose when to choose.

And what I mean when I say that is, you know, delegate some decisions. You need a new cell phone, don't research it, talk to your friend who just got a new cell phone? What'd you get? I got an iPhone? What do you think of it? It's pretty good get an iPhone? Is it the right phone for you? Maybe not? Is it going to be perfect for you? Probably not. But you've taken a torture is process and turned it into a five minute process. And is it going to be a good Of course it is going to be

a good enough phone. So so this really is in aspect the strategy of taking advantage of the kind of collective wisdom of people and restricting your agonizing and handwringing to decisions where you think you don't know who to get advice from, and there aren't many decisions like that. Yeah, I'm now thinking about since we activated the schema of

her Simon. At his funeral, I remember friends and family mentioning how he used to eat the same sandwich every day, and he used to walk the same path, you know, to work every day at the same time that he he just found it, you know, just take up too

much cognitive resources. To the journalist Michael Lewis, who's written you know, like a million best sellers, interviewed Obama and in the course of the interview, the question of Obama's wardrobe came up, and he has I don't know if half a dozen suits and he always wears a white shirt, and Michael Lewis asked him about it. He said, you know, he said, I make a lot of decisions every day. The last thing I want to do is have to

decide what I'm going to wear. Yeah, so he's basically engineered his environment so that that decision is off the table. Walt taste thing very personal. I you know, I've decided I just can't decide every morning what I'm going to wear. I just can't deal with it anymore. I have a rotation now of like maybe seven things, and I've just decided, you know, I'm just going to rotate it around. No one's going to figure out the pattern, like even if

they who cares? Yeah, who cares? I'm with you. I made a slim I made a slightly different but a decision about that with which I had the same effect, and that is I wear jeans every day. Yeah, so the only thing I have to think about is what shirt to wear. And for years I basically had seven or eight identical shirts. So what that meant is that I look the same every day. I had a uniform. It was the Schwartz uniform, and I was happy as a clam. Is it the same pair of genes that

you wear? I have a couple of pairs of genes. You know, eventually they start to get sort of smelly and you gotta watch them. Okay, so I wrote it, But they're all they all look the same, they look the same. Not selecting the right genes for this Wednesday, I'm just selecting what your ever pair of genes is next in line. Absolutely, the idea is really to look the same and not have to think about what I wear. Ever,

just transition for a second. There's some interesting research in the creativity literature, which is what my area of main ex area of expertise is, showing that constraints is very conducive to creativity. Sure, so I wonder if you made

any linkages to that literature. There is some interesting research suggesting that, like you have like science fiction and writers, and you ask them, you know, think of a whole new planet something that you know, like just like you give no constraints whatsoever, you say, think of what a whole new species and a whole other planet would be and you find that what they come up with is more similar to humans than if you give them constraints on that. So there's a famous Cogno science study along

those lines. Well, it makes perfectly good sense to me, and that really is what that fish bowl cartoon is about. You know, Creativity is variation within constraint. It's intelligent variation. And when you take the constraints away, when you make everything possible, it turns out nothing is possible. Now, is this going to be true of everybody? No, there are going to be people who actually can cope with a completely unconstrained environment and produce things that no one would

ever have thought of and that are remarkable. But for the most of us, creativity comes with only when the possibilities are limited. Yeah, I see that, You see that improvisation, You see that in all sorts of stuff. No, I think it's just like it's like close to a universal truth. Now,

what exactly are the right constraints? It's a complicated thing to figure out, of course, But the idea that the way you solve that problem is just by taking all the constraints away and letting people figure it out for themselves, I think is just irresponsible. Yeah, but you know, when you're teaching at the university, you really shouldn't be irresponsible about stuff like that. I agree. I'm just a couple more questions and we're done. I'm going to be very

mindful of your time. You have another great quote, say the secret to happiness is low expectations. Yes, I love that. Now does that I mean does that apply to like the mating demean as well? I think so. Yeah. Now, of course that's an overstatement. I think the right way to say it, but it's not nearly as sexy is the secret to happiness is lower expectations. I like that? Or how about why don't you say good enough expects? Well, but you know it's you know this really it has

stuck in people's minds is quote. And the reason I wrote that and say it is that I think we're living in a world of absurdly high expectations, at least among the quote elite, the highly educated and affluent people that only the best will do. They expect perfection, and the result is that whatever happens, no matter how good it is, is disappointing. So that with that as background, I think saying the secret to happiness is low expectations is okay because I'm saying it to people who have

absurdly high expectations, you know. I think the insight here is that how satisfied we are within fairly broad limits, how satisfied we are with anything, is sort of how good it is in relation to how good we expected it to be. So there are two ways to be satisfied. One is for the thing to be really good, and the other is for your expectations to be really modest.

You know, you will be happier if you have modest expectations and you eat a meal that exceeds them a little than if you have very high expectations and eat a much better meal that doesn't meet your expectations. Absolutely, I don't expect anything out of this world that I think is maybe too extreme. I think, you know, you should expect things of the you know, goods and services you buy, and you should expect things of the people you interact with, but not too much. So I wanted

to talk policy implications. Something I found very interesting the public polic implications you made is that you argue that income redistribution would make everyone better off. Do you still hold that argument? I do I do you know this? I think is a bit of overstatement on my part for dramatic effect, But the read the logic behind it's sort of obvious. How if you give poor people more money and thus more choice, you'll make them better off. Poor people have too few choices, so by giving them

more choice to improve their lives. And the way to give them more choices by giving them more income, since in our society the limited income is really the choice constraint, it's the choice limited So that seems to me pretty straightforward. So why is it that wealthy people would also be

better off? Well, the argument there is that wealthy people have too much choice, so if you take some of their income away and thereby reduce their options, then you're moving them closer to the peak of the inverted you instead of the downside of it, so they end up better of And you know, I don't know that that's really true. First of all, if you're really rich, a lot of the choices you face are completely inconsequential, because if you make a mistake, you'll just get another version

tomorrow and you won't give it a moment's thought. Or you'll have a staff of people who are making your choices for you. But you can imagine not rich, but you know, sort of upper middle class college professor types, lawyer types, not rich enough to have a staff, but basically rich enough so that they can have whatever they want. A plague by the problem of too many Where should we eat? In Philadelphia tonight, Hunt, there are twenty six thousand restaurants for us to choose from in a two

mile radius. Where should we eat? Not if you're on a diet, not if you're on a diet, and not if you're making twenty thousand dollars a year. Yeah, all those restaurants that are available to the upper middle class are not available to the working class. And if you gave them a little bit more income, their choice set would expand and that would be good. And if you took that income away from the lawyer, his choicet would re reduce and that would be good. So that was

the argument. I like it. And then the practical applications for like clinical disorders like depression. You think, do you think a major source of depression might be having too many choices? Well, I think a major source of stress and anxiety is having too many choices. It looks like, you know, there's a correlation between maximizing score and score on paper and pencil measures of depression. Now it's just

a correlation. So you know, maybe people are depressed because they keep on making decisions at disappointment to disappoint them. Maybe people are depressed because they can't pull the trigger, they can't make decisions at all. Maybe people are maximizers because they have made have a history of decisions that haven't worked out well, which is what has made them depressed, and it pushes them to you know, to adhere, to hire and higher standards. So you know, I don't know

what the causal story is. Nobody does, but there's at least a correlation between them. And it's plausible to me that having a maximizing orientation in a world of unlimited choice is a contributor to depression. Is there a correlation between maximizing and neuroticism and the Big Five? We don't know. I don't know. I'll run the study, go ahead, I'll put that up on but you're able to check it out ter make sure that somebody else hasn't done it.

That's a good point. Hey, thank you so much for being so generously your time today and the incredible work you've done for all of us. Thanks for listening to The Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as performative and popper looking if I did. If you don't read the show notes for this episode or your Pants episodes, you can go to the Psychology Podcast dot com