American psychologist Barry Schwartz criticizes the main principle of Western society: freedom of choice. From his point of view, the possibility of choice does not free, but, on the contrary, paralyzes us.
Today you can find dozens of salad dressings, hundreds of pairs of jeans in different colors and styles, thousands of laptops - the choice is yours. I wonder what we would do if all products were faceless, without good stories and vivid advertising campaigns? Actually, this is the question of why brands exist.
But there are more global issues, and let's start with them. We do not inherit personality, we invent it. And we can change ourselves as often as we want. This means that every day, waking up in the morning, you must decide who you want to be. Even the question of our personal identity has become a matter of choice. To be a man or to be a woman is up to you.
When it comes to marriage and family, there was a time when it was taken for granted that virtually everyone got married as soon as they could and then had children as soon as they could. The only real choice was with whom, not when or what to do after that. Today we are free in our choice. However, many did not even have a choice with whom to marry.
Having a wide variety of choices has two negative effects:
1. It paralyzes rather than liberates. With many options, people find it difficult to make any choice at all. Many are ready to postpone the task to "tomorrow" as much as they want, just not to suffer with the choice.
2. Even if we manage to overcome the paralysis and make a choice, we end up being less satisfied with the results of the choice we made than if we had fewer options for it.
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There are at least three reasons for this:
1. With such a huge assortment of salad dressings, if you buy one and it's not perfect, it's very easy to imagine that you could have made a different choice that would be better. It turns out that the imaginary alternative makes you regret the decision you made, and this regret reduces the satisfaction you experience from your choice, even if it was a good choice. The more options you have, the easier it is to regret anything that does not suit you in the choice you have made.
2. What economists call the cost of lost opportunity. Dan Gilbert also said, "How much we value things depends on what we compare them to." Thus, when there are many alternatives to evaluate, it is very easy to imagine the attractiveness of the rejected alternatives, and this makes us less satisfied with the option we chose. The cost of lost opportunities diminishes the satisfaction of the choices made, even if they are unusually good ones. And the more options we consider, the more attractive aspects of these options we include in the cost of lost opportunities.