The Burden of Choice

Virginia Postrel has just written a useful article on "Consumer Vertigo". Her target is the growing body of literature making the case that the explosion in choice we experience as consumers in market societies is creating growing unhappiness and anxiety rather than satisfaction and fulfillment. She cites just two of the most critical books on this topic – Robert Lane’s The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies and Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice. (One wag in a review of Schwartz’s book on Amazon commented that he came across 20 books on the same topic and couldn’t make up his mind, so he didn’t buy any of them.)

In her critique of these books, Postrel observes:

For good scientific reasons, psychology experiments systematically screen out the habits and business practices that make real-life choices, especially shopping decisions, manageable. . . Businesses have strong incentives not just to offer options but to help customers navigate these choices.

She makes the case that abundant choice serves us well:

. . . something is missing from the simplistic argument that people would be happier if we went back to the good old days of one-cut-fits-all jeans. That something is pluralism. People are different – in size and shape, in personality, in tastes, in values. . . . Abundant choice accommodates this variation.

But she observes that greater choice has consequences:

In a world of choices, virtue comes from learning to make commitments without regrets. And commitment, in turn, requires self-confidence and self-knowledge.

Although she doesn’t develop this further, Postrel has hit on something really significant here that helps to explain the paradox of choice that is playing out around us: expanding choice begets even more choice.  The more choice we have, the more we have to decide what it is that we really want.  The more we reflect on what we really want, the more we end up getting involved in the creation of the goods that we buy and use. This in part explains why, in a growing range of domains, we are seeing customers get more actively involved in co-creation of products and services. The more we participate in the creation of products and services, the more choices we end up creating for ourselves.