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The paradox of choice: how to stop losing while choosing.
"There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision." — William James
There's good reason I've been eating the same breakfast every day for the past fifteen years. The very reason I keep wearing identical-coloured shirts.
It's that I am utterly unable to make decisions in the first two hours of the day. Or rather, utterly unwilling to spend any precious 7am bandwidth making inconsequential choices between eggs or yoghurt, navy or charcoal.
Choosing is losing, and nobody wants to feel like a loser first thing in the morning. Plenty of time for that the rest of the day.
And choose we must. Often. Researchers at Cornell University calculated that we make about 226 daily decisions about food alone, and estimate that the average adult makes around 35,000 decisions each day, a figure that increases as your responsibility levels go up.
Of course, the vast majority of those are micro-decisions we make unconsciously, as trivial as whether to blink. But those aren't the decisions I want to talk about here. Instead, I'll focus on the choices we make consciously, and what happens when we face too many of them.
The paradox of choice
We've become obsessed with freedom of choice over the past century and a half. Whether it's travel insurance, toothpaste or friends with benefits, we now expect an endless assortment of options to pick from at all times.
Choice is beautiful because it makes us feel like we have autonomy. It holds the promise that we can live our lives how we want, and present ourselves in whichever way we decide. These feelings of autonomy and freedom are essential to our wellbeing, and those who lack them often suffer negative psychological consequences.
And yet anyone who's ever visited a diner in the US will appreciate the stressful downside of having too much choice. After you've finally settled on a burger, a perky server starts rattling off twelve types of fries, then nine kinds of sauce. By the time you've decided (mayo, of course), you're a nervous wreck, convinced that for every choice you made the alternative might have been better.
Author Barry Schwartz calls this the paradox of choice. A paradox because even though we tell ourselves more options make it more likely we'll choose the one we're happiest with, the process of selecting actually requires great effort. The more options we have, the harder it is to know what's best, and the more likely we are to make a 'wrong' decision. This often leads to post-decision dissatisfaction, because we can never be sure we wouldn't have enjoyed the waffle fries even more.
What kind of decision-maker are you?
We can roughly classify decision-makers into guessers, maximisers and satisficers.
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman describes two modes of thinking: System 1, the fast and automatic thinking we associate with intuition, and System 2, the slow, deliberate thinking we link to logic. As I wrote in a previous article on intuition, both are complementary, and one isn't better than the other.
The guesser
The guesser likes to minimise effort and has developed a habit of choosing pretty indiscriminately, without truly considering the consequences. Some guesswork is harmless for the majority of decisions, but guessers rely a little too heavily on System 1, falling prey to a whole host of psychological biases and mental shortcuts that cloud their judgment. Most of us turn into guessers when confronted with too many options: System 2 decides there's simply too much to consider and becomes incapacitated, so we switch to gut feeling instead.
The maximiser
The maximiser doesn't guess; they deliberate. And god, do they deliberate. Maximisers only accept the best possible option, so they need constant assurance that their decision is the most optimal one, spending enormous effort exploring each course of action even when there's a clear front-runner. Several studies show maximisers are prone to self-blame and have a higher chance of being unhappy and perfectionistic. While they often arrive at objectively better decisions than satisficers, research shows they're more dissatisfied with their choices regardless of the outcome.
The satisficer
Like the maximiser, the satisficer is also a deliberator. But instead of looking for the best option, satisficers are happy to choose any 'good enough' one. It's not that they lack standards. They have a clear set of minimum requirements, and any option that exceeds them is fair game. Satisficers rely less on external sources, decide faster, and don't tend to agonise over past decisions.
How to get better at making decisions
So who's better off, maximisers or satisficers? It isn't as clear-cut as you'd expect. Maximisers do better on paper. One study showed graduates who were maximisers found jobs with starting salaries around twenty per cent higher than their satisficing peers. But as the title of that paper suggests, "Doing Better But Feeling Worse", those same maximisers felt far less satisfied. Satisficers, with lower expectations to begin with, allow themselves to enjoy the outcome.
In reality, most of us go back and forth between satisficing and maximising. Regardless of your preference, here are some tips for becoming a more confident decision-maker.
1) Have a strategy. Get clear on the overall objective behind your decision. To paraphrase Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism, this is the one decision that removes a hundred decisions. Decide your criteria, and for each, a way to score your options.
2) Define 'good enough'. Lay out your minimum standards. What's the threshold for an option to become acceptable? Instead of thinking of the outcome as 'right' or 'wrong', focus on making a really good decision instead.
3) Limit your options. Choice overload reduces the quality of our decisions because System 2 can no longer analyse everything. Narrow your options to a shortlist of three, then apply tips 1 and 2.
4) Set a deadline. Having a set date for making your decision prevents overthinking, even if the decision itself isn't time-critical. It creates urgency and stops you over-researching.
5) Pivot if necessary. In the words of Tony Robbins: "Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach." Be steadfast about your goals, but open to more than one route for achieving them.
6) Move on. If you're a maximiser, stop second-guessing. What's done is done, and you'll never know whether you'd have fared better in some other universe. Spend your bandwidth looking forward rather than back.
7) Take it, don't make it. 'Taking' a decision has a different ring to 'making' one. It suggests a higher level of commitment, and implies next steps and forward movement rather than looking back.
8) Let your psychological immune system kick in. This is our natural tendency to restructure our thoughts so we can make the best of any situation. If you dwell on all that could have been and never commit, you stop that immune system working.
9) Accept defeat. You won't always get it right, and that's fine. We've all made bad choices. It makes us more interesting people.
10) Flip a coin. My favourite. If you're really stuck between two options, flip a coin. Heads or tails, your emotions will tell you soon enough which option was the front-runner all along.
So there you go. Apply some of these and you can't go wrong. And whichever choice you make, you'll be okay.
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