The Paradox of Choice Page 4

  This kind of job mobility offers many opportunities. Being able to move around, changing employers and even careers, opens doors to challenging and fulfilling options. But it comes at a price, and the price is the daily burden of gathering information and making decisions. People can never relax and enjoy what they have already achieved. At all times, they have to stay alert for the next big chance.

  Even how we dress for work has taken on a new element of choice, and with it, new anxieties. The practice of having a “dress-down day” or “casual day,” which began to emerge a decade or so ago, was intended to make life easier for employees, to enable them to save money and feel more relaxed at the office. The effect, however, was just the reverse. In addition to the normal workplace wardrobe, employees had to create a “workplace casual” wardrobe. It couldn’t really be the sweats and T-shirts you wore around the house on the weekend. It had to be a selection of clothing that sustained a certain image—relaxed, but also meticulous and serious. All of a sudden, the range of wardrobe possibilities was expanded, and a decision-making problem emerged. It was no longer a question of the blue suit or the brown one, the red tie or the yellow one. The question now was: What is casual? A New Yorker piece about this phenomenon identified at least six different kinds of casual: active casual, rugged casual, sporty casual, dressy casual, smart casual, and business casual. As writer John Seabrook put it, “This may be the most depressing thing about the casual movement: no clothing is casual anymore.” So we got the freedom to make an individual choice about how to dress on a given day, but for many, that choice entailed more complications than it was worth.

  Choosing How to Love

  I HAVE A FORMER STUDENT (LET’S CALL HIM JOSEPH) WITH WHOM I’VE remained close since he graduated from college in the early nineties. He went on to earn a PhD and currently works as a researcher at a major university. A few years ago, Joseph and a fellow graduate student (let’s call her Jane) fell in love. “This is it,” Joseph assured me; there was no doubt in anyone’s mind.

  With his career on track and a life partner selected, it might appear that Joseph had made the big decisions. Yet, in the course of their courtship, Joseph and Jane had to make a series of tough choices. First, they had to decide whether to live together. This decision involved weighing the virtues of independence against the virtues of interdependence, and measuring various practical advantages (convenience, financial savings) of living together against possible parental disapproval. A short time later they had to decide when (and how) to get married. Should they wait until their respective careers were more settled or not? Should they have a religious ceremony, and if so, would it be his religion or hers? Then, having decided to marry, Joseph and Jane had to decide if they should merge their finances or keep them separate, and if separate, how they should handle joint expenses.

  With marital decisions settled, they next had to face the dilemma of children. Should they have them? Yes, they easily decided. However, the question of timing led to another series of choices involving ticking biological clocks, the demands of finishing PhDs, and uncertainty about future employment circumstances. They also had to resolve the question of religion. Were they going to give their kids a religious upbringing, and if so, in whose religion?

  Next came a series of career-related choices. Should they each look for the best possible job and be open to the possibility that they might have to live apart for some time? If not, whose career should get priority? In looking for jobs, should they restrict their search to be near his (West Coast) family or her (East Coast) family, or should they ignore geography completely and just look for the best jobs they could find in the same city, wherever it was? Facing and resolving each of these decisions, all with potentially significant consequences, was difficult for Joseph and his Jane. They thought that they had already made the hard decisions when they fell in love and made a mutual commitment. Shouldn’t that be enough?

  A range of life choices has been available to Americans for quite some time. But in the past, the “default” options were so powerful and dominant that few perceived themselves to be making choices. Whom we married was a matter of choice, but we knew that we would do it as soon as we could and have children, because that was something all people did. The anomalous few who departed from this pattern were seen as social renegades, subjects of gossip and speculation. These days, it’s hard to figure out what kind of romantic choice would warrant such attention. Wherever we look, we see almost every imaginable arrangement of intimate relations. Though unorthodox romantic choices are still greeted with opprobrium or much worse in many parts of the world and in some parts of the United States, it seems clear that the general trend is toward ever greater tolerance of romantic diversity. Even on network television—hardly the vanguard of social evolution—there are people who are married, unmarried, remarried, heterosexual and homosexual, childless families and families with lots of kids, all trying each week to make us laugh. Today, all romantic possibilities are on the table; all choices are real. Which is another explosion of freedom, but which is also another set of choices to occupy our attention and fuel our anxieties.

  Choosing How to Pray

  EVEN THOUGH MOST AMERICANS SEEM TO LEAD THOROUGHLY SECULAR lives, the nation as a whole professes to be deeply religious. According to a recent Gallup poll, 96 percent of Americans believe in “God, or a universal spirit,” and 87 percent claim that religion is at least fairly important in their own lives. Though only a small fraction of this 90+ percent of Americans participates regularly in religious activities as part of communities of faith, there is no doubt that we are a nation of believers. But believers in what?

  Whereas most of us inherit the religious affiliations of our parents, we are remarkably free to choose exactly the “flavor” of that affiliation that suits us. We are unwilling to regard religious teachings as commandments, about which we have no choice, rather than suggestions, about which we are the ultimate arbiters. We look upon participation in a religious community as an opportunity to choose just the form of community that gives us what we want out of religion. Some of us may be seeking emotional fulfillment. Some may be seeking social connection. Some may be seeking ethical guidance and assistance with specific problems in our lives. Religious institutions then become a kind of market for comfort, tranquility, spirituality, and ethical reflection, and we “religion consumers” shop in that market until we find what we like.

  It may seem odd to talk about religious institutions in these kinds of shopping-mall terms, but I think such descriptions reflect what many people want and expect from their religious activities and affiliations. This is not surprising, given the dominance of individual choice and personal satisfaction as values in our culture. Even when people join communities of faith and expect to participate in the life of those communities and embrace (at least some of) the practices of those communities, they simultaneously expect the communities to be responsive to their needs, their tastes, and their desires.

  Sociologist Alan Wolfe recently documented this change in people’s orientation to religious institutions and teachings in the book Moral Freedom: The Search for Virtue in a World of Choice. Wolfe conducted in-depth interviews with a wide variety of people scattered throughout the U.S., and what he found was near unanimity that it was up to each person, as an individual, to pick her or his own values and make her or his own moral choices.

  For people who have experienced religion more as a source of oppression than of comfort, guidance, and support, freedom of choice in this area is surely a blessing. They can elect the denomination that is most compatible with their view of life, then select the particular institution that they feel best embodies that view. They can pick and choose from among the practices and teachings those that seem to suit them best, including, paradoxically, the choice of conservative denominations that are attractive in part because they limit the choices people face in other parts of their lives. On the positive side, an individual can experience a personal form
of participation consistent with his or her lifestyle, values, and goals. The negative is the burden of deciding which institution to join, and which practices to observe.

  Choosing Who to Be

  WE HAVE ANOTHER KIND OF FREEDOM OF CHOICE IN MODERN SOCIETY that is surely unprecedented. We can choose our identities. Each person comes into the world with baggage from his ancestral past—race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, social and economic class. All this baggage tells the world a lot about who we are. Or, at least, it used to. It needn’t anymore. Now greater possibilities exist for transcending inherited social and economic class. Some of us manage to cast off the religion into which we were born. We can choose to repudiate or embrace our ethnic heritage. We can celebrate or suppress our nationality. And even race—that great sore of American history—has become more fluid. As multiracial marriages become more common, the offspring of those marriages display a variety of hues and physical features that make racial identification from the outside more difficult. And, as society becomes more tolerant, it permits racial identification from the inside to be more flexible. Furthermore, because most of us possess multiple identities, we can highlight different ones in different contexts. The young New York immigrant woman from Mexico sitting in a college class in contemporary literature can ask herself, as class discussion of a novel begins, whether she’s going to express her identity as the Latina, the Mexican, the woman, the immigrant, or the teenager as class discussion unfolds. I can be an American who happens to be Jewish on my job, and a Jew who happens to be American in my synagogue. Identity is much less a thing people “inherit” than it used to be.

  Amartya Sen has pointed out that people have always had the power to choose identity. It has always been possible to say no to aspects of an identity that are thrust upon us, even if the consequences are severe. But as with marriage, choice of identity has been moving from a state in which the default option was extremely powerful and the fact of choice had little psychological reality to a state in which choice is very real and salient. As with all the issues I’ve been discussing in this chapter, this change in the status of personal identity is both good and bad news: good news because it liberates us, and bad news because it burdens us with the responsibility of choice.

  What It Means to Choose

  NOVELIST AND EXISTENTIALIST PHILOSOPHER ALBERT CAMUS POSED the question, “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” His point was that everything in life is choice. Every second of every day, we are choosing, and there are always alternatives. Existence, at least human existence, is defined by the choices people make. If that’s true, then what can it mean to suggest, as I have in these first two chapters, that we face more choices and more decisions today than ever before?

  Think about what you do when you wake up in the morning. You get out of bed. You stagger to the bathroom. You brush your teeth. You take a shower. We can break things down still further. You remove the toothbrush from its holder. You open the toothpaste tube. You squeeze toothpaste onto the brush. And so on.

  Each and every part of this boring morning ritual is a matter of choice. You don’t have to brush your teeth; you don’t have to take a shower. When you dress, you don’t have to wear underwear. So even before your eyes are more than half open—long before you’ve had your first cup of coffee—you’ve made a dozen choices or more. But they don’t count, really, as choices. You could have done otherwise, but you never gave it a thought. So deeply ingrained, so habitual, so automatic, are these morning activities that you don’t really contemplate the alternatives. So though it is logically true that you could have done otherwise, there is little psychological reality to this freedom of choice. On the weekend, perhaps, things are different. You might lie in bed asking whether you’ll bother to shower now or wait till later. You might consider passing up your morning shave as well. But during the week, you’re an automaton.

  This is a very good thing. The burden of having every activity be a matter of deliberate and conscious choice would be too much for any of us to bear. The transformation of choice in modern life is that choice in many facets of life has gone from implicit and often psychologically unreal to explicit and psychologically very real. So we now face a demand to make choices that is unparalleled in human history.

  We probably would be deeply resentful if someone tried to take our freedom of choice away in any part of life that we really cared about and really knew something about. If it were up to us to choose whether or not to have choice, we would opt for choice almost every time. But it is the cumulative effect of these added choices that I think is causing substantial distress. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, we are trapped in what Fred Hirsch called “the tyranny of small decisions.” In any given domain, we say a resounding “yes” to choice, but we never cast a vote on the whole package of choices. Nonetheless, by voting yes in every particular situation, we are in effect voting yes on the package—with the consequence that we’re left feeling barely able to manage.

  In the pages that follow, we will begin to look at some of the ways we can ease that burden and, thereby, lessen the stress and dissatisfaction that comes with it.

  How We Choose

  Part II

  CHAPTER THREE

  Deciding and Choosing

  CHOOSING WELL IS DIFFICULT, AND MOST DECISIONS HAVE SEVERAL different dimensions. When leasing an apartment, you consider location, spaciousness, condition, safety, and rent. When buying a car, you look at safety, reliability, fuel economy, style, and price. When choosing a job, it is salary, location, opportunity for advancement, potential colleagues, as well as the nature of the work itself, that factor into your deliberations.

  Most good decisions will involve these steps:

  Figure out your goal or goals.

  Evaluate the importance of each goal.

  Array the options.

  Evaluate how likely each of the options is to meet your goals.

  Pick the winning option.

  Later use the consequences of your choice to modify your goals, the importance you assign them, and the way you evaluate future possibilities.

  For example, after renting an apartment you might discover that easy access to shopping and public transportation turned out to be more important, and spaciousness less important, than you thought when you signed the lease. Next time around, you’ll weight these factors differently.

  Even with a limited number of options, going through this process can be hard work. As the number of options increases, the effort required to make a good decision escalates as well, which is one of the reasons that choice can be transformed from a blessing into a burden. It is also one of the reasons that we don’t always manage the decision-making task effectively.

  Knowing Your Goals

  THE PROCESS OF GOAL-SETTING AND DECISION MAKING BEGINS WITH the question: “What do I want?” On the surface, this looks as if it should be easy to answer. The welter of information out there in the world notwithstanding, “What do I want?” is addressed largely through internal dialogue.

  But knowing what we want means, in essence, being able to anticipate accurately how one choice or another will make us feel, and that is no simple task.

  Whenever you eat a meal in a restaurant, or listen to a piece of music, or go to a movie, you either like the experience or you don’t. The way that the meal or the music or the movie makes you feel in the moment—either good or bad—could be called experienced utility. But before you actually have the experience, you have to choose it. You have to pick a restaurant, a CD, or a movie, and you make these choices based upon how you expect the experiences to make you feel. So choices are based upon expected utility. And once you have had experience with particular restaurants, CDs, or movies, future choices will be based upon what you remember about these past experiences, in other words, on their remembered utility. To say that we know what we want, therefore, means that these three utilities align, with expected utility being matched by experienced utility, and experienced uti
lity faithfully reflected in remembered utility. The trouble is, though, that these three utilities rarely line up so nicely.

  Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues have shown that what we remember about the pleasurable quality of our past experiences is almost entirely determined by two things: how the experiences felt when they were at their peak (best or worst), and how they felt when they ended. This “peak-end” rule of Kahneman’s is what we use to summarize the experience, and then we rely on that summary later to remind ourselves of how the experience felt. The summaries in turn influence our decisions about whether to have that experience again, and factors such as the proportion of pleasure to displeasure during the course of the experience or how long the experience lasted, have almost no influence on our memory of it.

  Here’s an example. Participants in a laboratory study were asked to listen to a pair of very loud, unpleasant noises played through headphones. One noise lasted for eight seconds. The other lasted sixteen. The first eight seconds of the second noise were identical to the first noise, whereas the second eight seconds, while still loud and unpleasant, were not as loud. Later, the participants were told that they would have to listen to one of the noises again, but that they could choose which one. Clearly the second noise is worse—the unpleasantness lasted twice as long. Nonetheless, the overwhelming majority of people chose the second to be repeated. Why? Because whereas both noises were unpleasant and had the same aversive peak, the second had a less unpleasant end, and so was remembered as less annoying than the first.