Quotes from Paradox of Choice
by Barry Schwartz
People mistook the pervasiveness of newspaper stories about homicides, accidents, or fires--vivid, salient, and easily available to memory--as a sign of the frequency of the events these stories profiled. This distortion causes us to miscalculate dramatically the various risks we face in life, and thus contributes to some very bad choices.
What often saves us from our faulty decision-making process is that different people experience different vivid or salient events, and thus have different events available to memory. . .
But while diversity of individual experience can limit our propensity to choose in error, how much can we count on diversity of experience? As the number of choices we face continues to escalate and the amount of information we need escalates with it, we may find ourselves increasingly relying on secondhand information rather than on personal experience. Moreover, as telecommunications becomes ever more global, each of us, no matter where we are, may end up relying on the same secondhand information. . .Those friends and neighbors will have the same biased understanding, derived from the same source. When you hear the same story everywhere you look and listen, you assume it must be true. And the more people believe it's true, the more likely they are to repeat it, and thus the more likely you are to hear it. this is how inaccurate information can create a bandwagon effect, leading quickly to a broad, but mistake, consensus.
- p 60-61
In the 1960's, psychologist martin Seligman and his collaborators performed an experiment that involved teaching three different groups of animals to jump over a little hudle from one side of a box to the other to excape or avoid an electric shock. One of the groups was given the task with no prior exposure to such experiments. A second group had already learned to make a different response, in a different setting, to escape from shock. Seligman and his coworkers expected, and found, that this second group would learn a bit more quickly than the first, reasoning that some o f what they had learned in the first experiment might transfer to the second. The third group of animals, also in a different setting, had been given a series of shocks that oculd not be escaped by any response.
Remarkably, this third group failed to learn at all. Indeed, many of them essentially had no chance to learn because they didn't even try to escape from the shocks. These animals became quite passive, lying down and taking the shocks until the researchers mercifully ended the experiment.
Seligman and his colleagues suggested that the animals in this third group had learned from being exposed to inescapable shocks that nothing they did made a difference; that they were essentially helpless when it came to controlling their fate. Like the second group, they had also transfered to the hurdle-jumping situation lessons they had learned before--in this case, learned helplessness.
And when we do learn this, the consequences can be dire. . . it is not an exaggeration to say that our most fundamental sense of well-being crucially depends on our having the ability to exert control over our environment and recognizing that we do.
- p 102-103
Participants ... showed the pattern of reluctance to make trade-offs whether the stakes were high or low. Confronting any trade-off, it seems, is incredibly unsettling. And as the available alternatives increase, the extent to which choices will require trade-offs will increase as well.
- p 126
... the modern emphasis on individual autonomy and control may be neutralizing a crucial vaccine against depression: deep commitment and belonging to social groups and institutions--families, civic associations, faith communities, and the like. There is an inherent tension between being your own person, or determining your own "self," and meaningful involvement in social groups. Significant social involvement requires subordinating the self. So the more we focus on ourselves, the more our connections to others weakens. . . By elevating everyone's expectations about autonomy and control, mainstream American society has made deep community involvement much more costly than it would be otherwise.
- p 212
Our evaluation of our choices is profoundly affected by what we compare them with, including comparison with alternatives that exist only in our imaginations. The same experience can have both delightful and disappointing aspects. Which of these we focus on may determine whether we judge the experience to be satisfactory or not.
- p 230
Notes From Windward - Index - Vol. 68
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