Consumer Vertigo

Outside the artificial constraints of a psychology experiment, people adapt pretty effectively to proliferating choices. We go back to our favourite restaurant and order the same dish because we know we’ll like it. We find toothpaste that suits us and stick to it. We don’t always choose anew.

“Consumers tend to return to the products they usually buy, not even noticing 75 per cent of the items competing for their attention and their dollars,” writes Schwartz. “Who but a professor doing research would even stop to consider that there are almost 300 different cookie options to choose among?”

And who but a polemicist pursuing an argument would completely ignore what these habits tell us about the world? In a familiar environment, people aren’t overwhelmed by choice. With experience, we learn to negotiate the alternatives. As Schwartz himself notes, “A small-town resident who visits Manhattan is overwhelmed by all that is going on. A New Yorker, thoroughly adapted to the city’s hyper-stimulation, is oblivious to it.”

Schwartz treats this habituation as entirely negative, since it’s why we lose our appreciation of once-new pleasures. “When it first became possible to get a wide variety of fruits and vegetables at all times of year, I thought I’d found heaven,” he writes. “Now I take this year-round bounty for granted and get annoyed if the nectarines from Israel or Peru that I can buy in February aren’t sweet and juicy.”

Habituation is indeed a fact of human psychology. That’s one reason we like novelty, including different cuts of jeans. But grumpy social critics like Schwartz never consider the obvious thought experiment: Would you like to go back to the world with fewer options? Granted, dealing with lots of choices causes frustration and regret. But would you really be happier, once you’d become accustomed to them, if those abundant choices disappeared?

Schwartz also treats self-imposed limits on choice - or on shopping around - as evidence that choice doesn’t really make people better off. He gripes, for instance, that “phone service has become a decision to weigh and contemplate” but, on the very next page, writes that “twenty years after phone deregulation, AT&T still has 60 per cent of the market, and half of its customers pay the basic rates. Most folks don’t even shop around for calling plans within the company.”

This inertia is perfectly reasonable and not at all a rejection of choice in general. It perfectly fits the conventional social science model. Thanks to competition, long-distance service is cheap. So people who don’t make a lot of calls have no particular reason to switch companies. They can stick with what’s familiar, ignore the rest, and still pay less than they would have 20 years ago. But those who care about phone service can shop around.

If something important is missing from the social scientist’s standard model, something equally important 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. Ergonomics experts say the average body doesn’t actually exist. Neither does the average mind.

Abundant choice accommodates this variation. A world of few choices, whether in jeans or mates, is a world in which individual differences become sources of alienation, unhappiness, even self-loathing. If no jeans fit, you’ll feel uncomfortable or inferior. If no housing developments reflect your taste for unique architecture, you’ll write screeds against philistine mass culture. If no one in the village shares your interests or turn of mind, you’ll never have intimate friends.

Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice is a book about psychology, not politics. It offers practical, personal advice. It tells readers to set standards and look for “good enough,” rather than holding out for the very best conceivable choice: to “satisfice”, in the jargon of social scientists, rather than “maximise”.

When you satisfice, you don’t let an impossible quest for the perfect destroy your enjoyment of the good. You look for a red cotton crewneck sweater that fits well and costs less than $50. When you find one, you buy it. You don’t run all over town trying to find a better, or cheaper, sweater. You don’t lie awake at night wondering if your sweater is the best of all sweaters.