Interview: Barry Schwartz, author, "The Paradox of Choice"

Jan 20, 2005

Barry Schwartz is the author of The Paradox of Choice, an outstanding book; a psychology professor at Swarthmore College; and a speaker at the Gel 2005 conference.

He spoke with me about the paradox of choice and how it affects the customer experience.

Q - What is the "paradox of choice"?

Everyone agrees that having choice is better than not having choice. It seems evident that if choice is good, then more choice is better. The paradox is that this "obvious" truth isn't true. It turns out that a point can be reached where, with more choice, people are worse off.

People can't ignore options - they have to pay attention to them. If they make a choice, is there another choice would have been better? There's more effort put into making decisions, and less in enjoying them. What's nagging is the possibility that, if they had chosen differently, they could have gotten something better.

Here's a story from my own experience. While vacationing in this little town on the Oregon coast, I went to buy wine for dinner. I had to buy the wine from a store that had only five varieties, so I picked one. It wasn't great wine, but no one cared - what can you expect when there are only five options? In Manhattan, there are 20,000 options, so it's reasonable to expect that you'll find something close to perfect. But even if you find one that's much better than anything in that Oregon store, you end up disappointed - because your expectations can only go up with all those choices.

Q - What's the scope of the paradox of choice?

It's virtually pervasive, and in more areas than just in the world of consumer goods. But just consider those choices: Where to go on vacation; where to put your retirement funds; which digital camera to buy; what restaurant to eat in; what to order at that restaurant. You can't find, in affluent societies, an area in which the amount of choice people have isn't overwhelming. The one exception is in American electoral politics. This is another paradox. You can choose between a thousand varieties of orange juice but only two presidential candidates. This is not the way things should be.

Q - What about outside consumer goods?

I teach very talented students at Swarthmore. As they near graduation, when they have to decide what to be when they "grow up", I observe this complete panic and paralysis overtake many of them, because they realize any choice they make will be closing other doors that they'd like to keep open. There is an opportunity cost associated with every decision. It's so hard for some of them to decide that they spend years working at Starbucks, waiting for the answer to emerge.

Also in their personal lives - should they get married now or later, have children now or later? None of these were real choices when I was growing up. Not that there weren't choices - but the expectation was so clear, you could in effect treat them as non-choices. There was a question of who to marry, but not if you would marry; and that you'd have kids as soon as you could. That took off an enormous amount of pressure.

Some social science research says that one consequence of leaving your options open is that people are less satisfied with their decisions; if a decision is non-reversible, you'll make yourself feel better about the choice you made. If it's a reversible choice, you don't do that. You don't bring your romantic partner "back to the store," but because you might, you don't convince yourself that she's the love of your life. If people know they can undo their choices, they get less satisfaction out of them. People want to keep their options open. And that's not the road to happiness.

Q - And not in retail, either.

If you provide sales options in a retail store or website, you might think the way to attract people is to provide as many alternatives as possible. But that's wrong. You'll attract people, but they won't buy as much as they would with fewer choices.

Q - How then should a store be designed?

There's no general answer except "restrict options" - though in what way depends on what you're selling.

For example, e-commerce sites should be designed so that the complexity is hidden, so that people who really care, or know a lot, can find their way to the complexity, and the rest of us who can't be bothered to find it, won't have to. That's how software, websites, and retail stores should be designed.

There are a lot of little stores in downtown Philadelphia were I live - stores that sell things that don't go naturally together - like clothing and furniture. They're selling a certain aesthetic. How does a small store sell furniture? It puts a couple of things on display, and then offers a million items in the catalog. I don't feel overwhelmed when I walk in; instead, I'm in an environment where I can manage and negotiate. If you like a couch, and tell the salesperson you're interested, and ask if it comes in different colors or fabrics, the salesperson can trot out the catalog and then you can see the infinite number of couches you can get. First you've been seduced into wanting a couch by what appears to be the simplicity of the decision. That's the right way to design things in the modern world, where everything is too complex.

Q - I know you're interested in getting a major e-commerce site to try an experiment on the home page.

Yes, to illustrate my general view. Take any of the most commercially successful websites - Amazon.com, for example - and look at what they offer. Click Bestsellers; down come 20. My view is, when people look at 20 book titles, each of them is competing with the others, making the others less attractive. This one looks exciting, this one looks educational, this one is about my own childhood, but this one is exotic and will take me into a world of imagination. Each is attractive in some way.

The result is that you look at 20 and buy none. But what if Amazon did a simple experiment of not showing 20 books, but only the top five? You can always click to the next screen and see more. My prediction is that if you reduce the choice set, you increase the number of books sold. This should be true of anything you're selling - office chairs, CD players, vacation packages; the shorter the list, the more attractive the items on the list will be.

The counterargument is that we're a very diverse society, with different tastes, and if you present a list with five choices, a lot of people won't want any of them. But with 20, it's more likely to hit an interest of almost everyone. There's some truth to that. But if it doesn't end up actually convincing people to buy, because they're torn or conflicted, then you haven't accomplished the objective of making the sale.

I think it's at least worth trying the experiment, to see if reducing what a site offers, while eliminating some people altogether, might manage to convince many other people to buy. If I'm wrong, so be it; but there's good reason to think I won't be wrong.

Q - How far would you take your experiment before you offer, to quote Henry Ford, "any color, as long as it's black"?

There's not a set answer; it depends on the domain. People will chafe at choice restrictions more in some areas in life than others. We can only learn by experimenting. I think that somewhere in the range of six to twelve options is what most people would be comfortable with, most of the time. But we have to do the research on actual websites, in places where people make their choices and buy.

Q - Speaking of Henry Ford, how did you go about deciding which car to buy, in your most recent car purchase?

I bought it on the Web. I went to a website where it says "there's no negotiation, this is our price" - and I bought a car in ten minutes. But I've been driving a Toyota Camry since 1984, and this is my third one. Nothing ever went wrong in my first and second Camrys. So why would I buy anything other than a Camry? That made it simple. The only decision, then, was the color. My answer was (a) I don't care, and (b) I'm color blind. So my wife decided. I only care about two thing, that it's safe and doesn't break. Other people drive themselves nuts trying to find every possible thing right in the car they buy.

Q - What can customers do to avoid the paradox of choice?

Most importantly, learn that "good enough is good enough." It's what I call "satisficing" in the book. You don't need the best; probably never do. On rare occasions it's worth struggling to find the best. But generally it makes life simpler if you settle with "good enough." You don't have to make an exhaustive search - just until you find something that meets your standards, which could be high. But the only way to find the absolute best is to look at ALL the possibilities. And in that case you'll either give up, or if you choose one, you'll be nagged by the possibility that you may have found something better. We have evidence about this, by the way. People who are out to find the very best job ("maximizers") feel worse than people who settle for good enough. We've tracked them through and after college. Maximizers did better financially - they found starting salaries that paid $7,000 more than satisficers' starting salary. But by every other measure - depression, stress, anxiety, satisfaction with their job - maximizers felt worse.

Lesson number two, learn when to choose. Sometimes don't choose at all. Buy what your friend says, or Consumer Reports, or the Uncle Mark guide, telling you what to buy. It would be nice if everyone had a friend like Uncle Mark. You don't have to take their advice about everything - just some things, so you don't have to choose all the time.

Lesson number three, compare what you're doing to what other people are doing less. Some people, no matter how good their outcome is, compare themselves with people who did better. Don't do this. Instead, get in the habit of noticing about what you're grateful for in your decisions, instead of what you're disappointed with. It's almost a truism, it's so obvious, but it turns out that people don't do it naturally. Most people just need to practice. In my book, I mention a simple exercise people can do every day: at the end of day, in a notepad kept by your bed, write down two or three things that you're grateful for. Little things: a good newspaper article. Wonderful pasta for dinner. My wife looked especially attractive in her suit she wore to work. Over time, people find themselves identifying things to be grateful for more often, and they go through life happier, with more energy, with better social relationships. It doesn't take a lot to transform people's orientation, just by paying attention to what's gone well that day. So as you make decisions, what is good about them will become more salient, and what's disappointing will become less salient, and you'll be more satisfied with the decisions you've made.

Lesson four, arbitrarily limit the number of options you'll consider. If your friend won't choose your digital camera for you, then promise yourself that you'll go to only two websites and then stop your research and make a decision; or you'll buy the best choice in one store. It's just not worth it to look in every store, every website. With practice, people will stop being nagged with regret that if they'd looked in one more place they would've done better. Instead, it gives people more time for things that are really important, which is not which digital camera to buy.

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Here's The Paradox of Choice at Amazon.com.

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