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Jan 29, 2006

"The world I am trying to understand is one in which men think they want one thing and then upon getting it, find out to their dismay that they don’t want it nearly as much as they thought or don’t want it at all and that something else, of which they were hardly aware, is what they really want." --Albert Hirschman

Paradox of Choice

A radio producer in Washington, D.C., got a promotion a few years ago on the grounds that he was a "good decision-maker." Self-deprecating to a fault, he reminded his bosses that many of the decisions he'd made since joining the station hadn't exactly worked out. They didn’t care. "Being a good decision-maker means you’re good at making decisions," one executive cheerily told him. "It doesn’t mean you make good decisions." In his book 'Paradox of Choice', Barry Schwartz cites a few decades of research to show that most people are terrible choosers -- they don't know what they want, and the prospect of deciding often causes not just jitters but anguish. He concludes that "unlimited choice" can "produce genuine suffering."