The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz [Book Summary – Review]


In nowaday’s rich community, we encounter daily an infinite set of decisions, starting from the fashion we choose to the food we eat at lunch break. It’s all about the decision that provides us with satisfaction and allows us to express ourselves. Or that’s what we believe.

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The Choice Paradox switches this common sense upside down and suggests that to encounter affluence of selection may be very commanding that it makes psychological discomfort, concerting it into a tough choice for us.

When we decide at last, just for the different alternatives to be there, in fact, begins to torture people. Throughout this summary, you’ll learn the way and the reason such options lessen the joy of our choices.

Gratefully, The Choice Paradox reveals to us the way we can follow to avert the bad impacts of selection exerted by striving for any range of proper limitations. Ideas are shared about how to clarify selections and to be happy with the options we consider.


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Chapter 1 – The number of selections human beings encounter daily has raised greatly in contemporary years.


Before some decades, choice in a few places of the everyday routine was, in fact, fairly restrained.

For instance, only thirty years ago, all services were controlled by monopolies, thus, consumers didn’t have to go through challenging choices regarding who was responsible for supporting their mobile or electric service. Thus, when the case became choosing pedagogy, schools regularly asked all pupils to finish a couple of years’ courses of general learning, with just seldom, yet the options of courses were limited.

However, when the community has developed, the order of selections in daily life has extremely grown. We now encounter a need for making decisions that is unique in the history of mankind.

Nowadays, for example, schools are like mental shopping centers, embracing a concept that encourages independence of selection in the first degree. Also, the College of Swarthmore, a modest one with just 1350 pupils, has around 120 various subjects to satisfy the standard education necessity, from those pupils should register only nine. Actually, in the majority of advanced colleges, students have the option to seek nearly an unspecified study area they prefer.

This s excess of choice is utilized in other places too – in utility sponsors, for instance, whose unconditional and competitive approaches in telecommunication and energy industries have brought a confusing order of selections. Furthermore, we’re nowadays introduced with a huge compulsory of several types of health plans, pension programs, and curative services.



It looks as regardless of the concept of the daily life we go back to, the number of decisions lays there for us has grown during the recent decades.

Thus, if we are opting for utility service or making a decision about a professional route, the current community introduces to us plenty of options.


Chapter 2 – If we have more choices, it becomes more difficult to make the right decision.


“Having coffee or killing myself” said Albert Camus, an existentialist philosophy expert, stating the aspect that everywhere and any minute in our lives there’s a choice to be taken.

Not just this, yet there are options all the time to our decisions. Fortunately, however, the majority of our behaviors are very spontaneous, therefore we cannot notice the options. Hence, there is a small amount of psychological truth to this independence of selection: as selections walk by, wearing underwear and cleaning our mouth do not matter.

Yet nowadays, we are regularly being introduced to different alternatives that need more energy than at any other time.

Different alternatives in economics and medicine, for instance, need deep study, and the majority of people just don’t think they have yet the most primitive qualities or education to make their mind, informed choices regarding these sophisticated aspects of our lives.

For example, not very far from this period, the only medical plan that existed has been Blue Cross. Yet, in this time, the options of medical plan systems and companies have turned in extremely sophisticated, and anyone who is well aware of what health insurance includes is not easy to be found.

Furthermore, encountering these needy options loads up a massive sense of obligation on a person. Certainly, recent decades have witnessed burgeoning providers for and reliance in the open economy, moving the obligation of selections further from the authorities and onto each person.



That works just fine for the smaller monetary selections in the world. Yet, when the case is to decide on a better medical plan, pension program, or curative services, the benefits of people are enormous. For instance, a false choice by an old citizen can cause total financial waste, making the individual choose between meal and medication.

This growing impact of such needy selections, where there exists a complete obligation, lets it be more difficult to decide intelligently and can turn our independence of selection deadly strain. 


Chapter 3 – When there are a lot of choices, we may fall into a blunder.


Realizing what we need in the first place suggests that we can predict how a single option or else one will shape our thinking. Although such an idea seems easy, it’s, in fact, a very tough chore.

Also, when picking from only a collection of options, people’s selection is liable for a mistake. It’s because of the idea that our decisions are partly controlled by our previous experiences, which are usually subjective.

The psychology specialist Daniel Kahneman demonstrated that the way we recall a previous incident relies nearly totally on how that incident affected people in the most negative condition and at the time it was completed.

In case, for example, you remember a journey you went on, your opinion on the journey will possibly be governed by the greatest or the most terrible incident – for instance, struggling with your husband/wife – and how the journey completed: for instance, the last day’s climate.



Moreover, our anticipations regarding the way a decision will cause us a certain feeling are seldom true. Such a result was illustrated in research where experts told university pupils to opt for collections of fast foods to have in the break time of their seminar hours every week.

Part of the students proceeded to opt for a week every time, therefore, they just needed to figure out what they would like to have a snack at the time. The students decided on their preferred snack, which continued to be the same for each seminar break.

Yet, the second part of students was told to choose a different snack each for 3 weeks, and those students chose various, incorrectly assuming that there would be a possibility of getting bored with their preferred snack.

Therefore, this group urged to anticipate the fast food they would like to have from different snack options for three weeks revealed shorter satisfaction with their decisions.

This aim to commit mistakes can just get worse since the quantity and sophisticated manner of decisions grows. Thus, if the pupils in the example mentioned earlier ought to pick from hundreds, rather than a lot of fast foods, they might have faced yet more difficult moments thinking of their desire. 

Yet, not just does confront more choices make it harder to pick right, but it also strips the happiness we feel with our decision in the end, as you’ll see in the coming section.


Chapter 4 – As alternatives increase, we become less happy with our choices.


Suppose you’re thinking of a holiday: is it going to be a tour around northern California? Instead, would you go to a house on a beach around Cape Cod for a week? 

Regardless of your choice, it has to do with skipping the chances the second alternative would’ve offered.

This is referred to as opportunity cost, which is a basic element of selection. For example, the opportunity cost for a holiday around Cape Cod would be the capability of going to the amazing cuisines in California.

Sadly, opportunity costs minimize our whole happiness in the decisions we make eventually.

Such information was stated by research questioned people the extent to what they would spend on joining the newsletters of big journals. Few subscribers were revealed a single journal, while others found the same journal as the same as other journals. In nearly every situation, people’s answers put less assessment of the journal when they found it at the same level as the rest. 

Thus, every time we make decisions related to opportunity costs, people have less fun with their decisions than the times when the options were not known. Therefore, the more options we have, the higher our knowledge of our opportunity costs, therefore, less joy we’ll get from the decision we make eventually.



Think of this research: a couple of groups faced many kinds of pastes on a testing table. The first group could test just half a dozen of various pastes and the second group, two dozens. The team that had more options to test more types was too less able to finally purchase a single type of the jam than the team that was introduced to just half a dozen. 

How come?

When a chooser limits their choice to a specific jam, the several charming characteristics of the jams left out from the choice accumulate to shape the selected paste as less excellent. Thus, the more paste, the more the opportunity cost, therefore, the less charming the selected paste would appear.

That reveals that expanded choice lessens both our will to determine and any happiness to be received from the thing we pick. 


Chapter 5 – People get familiar with anything and as an outcome, their decisions seldom take us to an expected pleasure.


Do you remember the previous moment you purchased a truly pretty item? Let’s assume that was a piece of amazing electronic equipment that you had thought it through for quite a while. In case you are the same as any human being, your happiness with that piece had faded away after some time.

Mankind, like every species, reacts lighter and lighter to any happening incident as the incident continues – we just get accustomed to it.

What happens is called an adjustment, and this is a common aspect of people’s psychology.

For example, a village tenant who goes to Manhattan could be consumed by the metropolitan, however, a person living in New York, who is accustomed to it, would happily be unconcerned.

Sadly, due to this structure, any activity we might live as a good one won’t keep on for the duration we believe it would.

For instance, think of our adjustment to joy (“hedonic adaptation”). In case an incident triggers our feeling of joy by, suppose, twenty “degrees” at first sight, it may trigger it by just 15 in the second dose, and 10 in the third. Finally, the incident may not even trigger it anymore. 

In a popular instance of hedonic adjustment, research targeted both satisfied and unsatisfied repliers to assess their happiness. Few had been awarded $50.000 to $ one million in national lotteries in the recent year, and others turned into half-paralyzed or quartered-paralyzed because of accidents.



Outcomes revealed that lottery prize owners were not satisfied as others and that the disaster sufferers yet doomed to be satisfied (although kind of less satisfied than others on average). This showed that human beings also adjust to the most terrible and the greatest of luck.

Thus, even if you might think that buying a new laptop would make you very happy forever, any experience you could conclude from it perhaps won’t last that long.


Chapter 6 – The consuming number of selections adds to the outbreak of dissatisfaction in the modern community.


It looks like the US community develops more in wealth and citizens turn to have more freedom to try and perform everything they desire, they are in shorter and shorter of satisfaction. 

Think of the idea that the US GDP – a major measure of good fortune – has beyond just multiplied by two in the recent three decades, while the US “happiness quotient” was in continuous drop.

Individuals who claim “very happy” have nose-dived in the recent three decades, the tensest demonstration being the heightened currency of clinical melancholy. Admittedly, by a few statistics, melancholy was approximately 10 times more likely in 2000 than in the last century. 

Then, what’s the reason for this broad dissatisfaction?

Easily said, we’re ruined with the selection.

At the times we are introduced with apparently infinite alternatives but decisions we end up appear not to meet our expectations, we favor to condemn ourselves – which reveals real misery.



Just like psychology specialist, Martin Seligman found out, failure or shortage of dominance drives to melancholy if an individual clarifies the reason for the error as worldly (“In anything, I failed”) constant (“I continue to be an error ”) and private (“It looks like it is just me that fails anytime”).

These kinds of extreme self-blame increase in a globe of absolute choice. It’s pretty simpler to condemn yourself for unexpected outcomes in that globe than in another where alternatives are restricted. This is due to us having the freedom to be in control of our destinies, we then wait for becoming so by default. Afterwise we got only ourselves to condemn. 

What this promotes to this has been the generation of opportunities provided by the developed world, accompanied by the importance of our liberty of selection, which can reveal that we condemn ourselves extremely when we don’t succeed to decide right.

And as extreme self-condemn can drive us towards melancholy, there is positive justification to think that our community’s plenty of selection is related to the developed disease of dissatisfaction.


Chapter 7 – Decisions are more challenging and less satisfying if you wish extra limits: a person who strives and takes what’s best.


Assume that you want to buy a sweatshirt. When you aim to have the ultimate greatest deal that could be had and thus feels the necessity to see the options to make certain that you have settled on the desired one, you may be an extra-limit person.

According to a selection tactic, extra limits are a consuming mission as such desire tends to choose nothing but the greatest. For such a person, each option can trap that person to an infinite confusion of ideas.

For instance, because there are infinite potentials everywhere, and nothing but the greatest would achieve satisfaction, extra limits people urgently take much time on item comparison, both prior and preceding they decide to buy it.

Researches performed by the writer and his associates revealed that when encountering a choice, extra limits people pay great effort on attempting to picture all other potentials – also those options that are just hypothetical. For example, when faced with a selection between a cozy, cashmere sweatshirt and a costless one, an extra-limit person would be very fast to picture checking a costless cashmere sweatshirt.

Not just extra limits people consume themselves in such path, yet when they’ve eventually passed the hardship of deciding, and select, the possibility for them would be more than others to be unhappy with that.



For such justification, extra limits people are precisely sensitive to “buyer’s regret”. For example, extra limits person who achieves in purchasing a pretty sweater after a hard search will, however, be bothered by the alternatives they didn’t get the chance to check. Their concept of “the possible things that may happen” consumes them, showing the product they selected less charming.

In a life of endless selections, it is hard and emotionally tiring to be an extra-limit person, never deciding for lower than the greatest.

Yet, as we’ll find out in the following, one does not need to remain as an extra-limit person. There’s an easy selection you could make and this would let you live a more peaceful life: be a satisficer. 


Chapter 8 – Decisions would be less challenging and more satisfying when you become a satisficer: a person who’s capable to accept the “good enough”.


We’re all familiar with those who can pick things fast and definitely. Such individuals became satisficers and they have been featured by possessing a specific norm they commit to when deciding, rather than owning “the greatest” as the ultimate target.

Satisficing has been a reasonable decision tactic – it indicates keeping on looking until you get the prospect that fulfills your norms, and it ends at this moment.

A satisficer person’s life is separated into two sections: choices that fulfill their norms and choices that don’t. Thus, while making a decision, they just need to consider the choices among the initial section.

For example, a satisficer searching to purchase a fresh sweatshirt will choose the one she sees that matches her expectations of size, material, and cost. A satisficer doesn’t worry about how good the sweater or the price is.

Yet, other than just avoiding wasting time, can you see the benefit for satisficers?

They would be more comfortable with the decisions they make – prominently – they’re more comfortable with their lives, as well.

As satisficers don’t match between infinite options when deciding, they don’t face the drop in the satisfaction that happens in studying what the rest of the alternatives might have provided them.



And because they don’t seek excellence when selecting, they won’t waste time considering the hypothetical excellent life in which alternatives are there that grant total satisfaction.

Such a concept makes it too simpler for these people to be happy with their decisions, and with their lives as a whole. Actually, in surveys investigating satisfaction and positivism, satisficers would be comprehensive high-scorers. 

Confronted, as our community is, with infinite options, you’d be lucky to become a satisficer, as the possible alternatives would not influence your selections a lot. The positive thing is that the majority of the people can be satisficers, also those who comprehensively sense consumed by selection. Everything needed is to drop off any standards that “the greatest” is achievable.


Chapter 9 – People’s social networks and psychological health advance if we accept specific voluntary restrictions on our liberty.


The absolute liberty of decision in many approaches to life might drive us to loneliness and bring us more depression than we imagine.

As a community, we might gain and waste more fortune than before, yet, we do not have time for the individuals close to us as well. Certainly, the politics scholar and writer Rober Lane illustrate that our grown wealth and liberty are taking from us a large drop in the class and amount of social connections, which brings a huge drop in our health.

These connections are basic to the well-being of our souls, also if they join and restrain us to a degree. Dedication to and being part of social communities and organizations is nearly a cure for dissatisfaction.

Think of the narrow-connected conservative society of the individuals of Amish. The event of melancholy between their individuals is below twenty % of the country percentage – an outcome of their solid society membership. 



Yet, building and sustaining significant social connections need dropping off our realized liberty of decision and a readiness to be moderately joint or restrained by those connections. For example, meaningful social participation in families, close friendships, civil communities, and similars, suggests submitting the self to maintain the strength of relations.

Yet, in what way can we accomplish such a thing? By utilizing regulations to restrain ourselves and determine the selections we are confronted with, we can have a more flexible world and lessen the possibility of psychological depression.

For example, in case you embrace the regulation that you would not deceive your spouse, you can rub off the suffering and intriguing choices that might pop up in the future. However, you have to get the training to stick by those regulations.

As absolute liberty can prevent the person’s social connections and chase what that person desires the most, it sounds like some extent of restraint would bring everybody for good. By putting effort into limiting our choices, we can become capable of deciding less and sense well.


The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz Book Review


Routine choices have massively turned into sophistication because of the consuming varieties of options that the developed community offers to us. As the amount of choices raises, so do the bad impacts that choice can bring along with our mental health. Like many choices, we get, as much hard it turns to be to make the right decision and less happiness we will earn the things we decide on. Hence, it looks like a certain extent of voluntary restraint would get everybody a better condition. By easily choosing less, we would probably become satisfied.


Check your selections!

An easy practice can assist you to limit your choices to enable you to select less and improve your feeling: step one, check a few latest selections, both grant, and simple. After that, list the stages, time, study, and worry that paid in making those decisions. Such steps will provide you with a summary of the prices related to the various types of selections and aid you to build later regulations that control the way many choices you have to think of, or the amount of time and effort to spend in deciding process.



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Savaş Ateş

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