The Flip Side of Same Coin —— 《The Paradox of Choice》

I used to be an extremist, I used not to ruminate the options I passed up, I used to reject to imagine how the alternative would have turned out and regret what I chose. But, something happened, and I was changed, and a real world paled in comparison to an imaginary world.

Since then, I have been plagued by grief. Since then, I have had to live with the sting what I could have...if only.... Since then, I have been spinning far down a vicious spiral - negative emotions trigger regrets and countfactual thinking, regrets and countfactual thinking trigger more negative emotions. Sometimes I feel like being stuck in the deep state of misery which couldn't have been worse any more. It turns out even worse later on. Sometimes I feel paralysed by the acute pain and emptiness, not because of too much choices but because of the consequences of past choices. Sometimes I even wonder whether I am able to arrest the strong downward pull and make a amendment. Silver lining is such a mess-the total failure of my life-trigger my curiosity about the mechanism of human's decision-making.

I had listened Schwartz's engaging TED talk before, I had searched his book for quite some time, finally I got it. Reading this book is to provide me an insightful study of choice, how we make decisions, what the flip sides of the coin of choice are, what's the price we must pay for abundant choices and what the tricks play in our satisfactions with the outcome of choices we made. It is persuasive and well-reasoned, it is thought-provoking. Inside it, there are some theories and research findings which I have also bumped into here and there. It is interesting to see how popular they are cross disciplines, and how ecomomics, behaviorism, psychology and sociology interconnect to each other.

Beginning with his shopping experience, Schwartz raised one question: "Choice is essential to our autonomy, freedom and well-being, but, is it true that the more choices people have, the better off they are?" His answer is not necessarily. Throughout this book, He convincingly lays out the following arguments:

1. We would be better off if we embraced certain voluntary constraints on our freedom of choice, instead of rebelling against them.
2. We would be better off seeking what was “good enough” instead of seeking the best.
3. We would be better off if we lowered our expectations about the results of decisions.
4. We would be better off if the decisions we made were nonreversible.
5. We would be better off if we paid less attention to what others around us were doing.

We may all know well about the value of choice:

• Instrumental value: It enables people to get what they need and want in life.
• Expressive value: It enables us to tell the world who we are and what we care about.(Choices have expressive functions only to the extent that we can make them freely.)
• Psychological value: It enables people to be actively and effectively engaged in the world

However, we might not be aware that we are tyrannized by the bountiful choices in mordern society, that is, we are paying for the growth of options and opportunities at cost of:

• Time
• Effort
• Psychological consequences

So he coins the term "The tyranny of Choice". To make it understandable, he explains:

• More choices means more trade-offs;
• More choices means making mistakes more likely;
• More choices make the psychological consequences of mistakes more severe;
• More choices can entail more complications than it's worth.
• More choices can occupy our attention and fuel our anxieties.
• More choices subtly shift the responsibility from choices provider to decision makers. (This point is very insightful and I can't agree any more.)
  

He reasons that choices are govern by memories and expectations, unfortunately, people is lacking of self-knowledge, neither our predictions about how we feel after an experience nor our memories of how we did feel during the experience are very accurate reflections of how we actually do feel while the experience is occurring. This is affected by:

• Peak-End rule: what we remember about our past experiences is almost entirely determineded by two factors:
• how the experiences felt when they were at their peak (best or worst)
• how they felt when they ended.
• e.x. intense pain + mild pain <>
• Availability heuristic: assume that the more available some piece of imformation is to memory, the more frequently we must have encountered it in the past.The factors affect availability to memory:
• frequency
• salience/vividness

• Adaptation: we get used to things, and then we start to take them for granted.
• perceptual adaptation: decreased responsiveness to sights, sounds, odors, any given environmental event as the event persists.
• hedonic adaptation: decreased “hedonic” or pleasure extent to an experience as it is experienced more and more

Besides, people's decision-making is also influenced by:

• The effect of framing(Prospect theory):
• We prefer a small, sure gain to a larger uncertain one.
• We will risk a large loss to avoid a smaller one. (Loss aversion)
• Endowment Effect: Once something becomes part of your endowment, even after a very few minutes, giving it up will entail a loss.

Then Schwartz talks about why and how we suffered from the problem of regret:

• Two types of regret:
1. Anticipated regret will make decisions harder to make
2. postdecision regret will make them harder to enjoy
• Factors affect the regret:
• omission bias: a bias to downplay omissions (failures to act) when we evaluate the consequences of our decisions.
• in short run: we regret actions that don’t turn out well more than we regret failures to take actions that would have turned out well.
• in long run: The omission bias undergoes a reversal with respect to decisions made in the more distant past. That is, as time passes, what we’ve failed to do looms larger and larger than what we did.
• “Nearness” effect: How close we come to achieving our desired result.
• Responsibility: bad results make people regretful only if they bear responsibility.
• Counterfactual thinking: thinking about the world as it isn’t, but might be or might have been, which will provide a never ending supply of raw material for experiencing regret. It establishs a contrast between a person’s actual experience and an imagined alternative.
  
• Upward counterfactuals:
  
• imagined states that are better than what actually happened
• it may inspire us to do better next time, but the flipside of it will diminish a sense of achievement.
• people easily produce upward counterfactuals when negative emotions triggered.
  
• Downward counterfactuals:
  
• imagined states that are worse.
• will engender not only a sense of satisfaction, but a sense of gratitude that things didn’t turn out worse.
• people rarely produce downward counterfactuals unless asked specifically to do so.
  

He also identifies several other psychological processes that explain why added options do not make people better off: adaptation, missed opportunities, raised expectations, and comparison with others. In the end, he gives some recommendations, which I think a bit repetitive, but it can be viewed as a summary of his points.

Among all his arguments, what I mostly agree with him is: The choice of when to be a chooser may be the most important choice we have to make.