THE PARADOX OF CHOICE
Wednesday, September 8, 2010 at 12:00PM 
Image by: PeterAnthony Photography
Psychologist Barry Schwartz, in his 2004 book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, explores a simple yet overwhelming problem that many consumers are faced with today. Is too much choice a bad thing?
Freedom of choice is great…up to a certain point. Like anything in excess, freedom of choice overloads us, and begins to stress us. According to Schwartz, too many choices bring diminishing returns to the point of incapacitating us. “Choice no longer liberates, it debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize,” says Schwartz. His argument may sound counterintuitive to some, but he clearly illustrates that "more is not better".
With the increased affluence in consumer driven industrialized countries, we have an increased bounty of choice before us. The abundance of deliberated and demanding choices that a middle-class consumer is asked to make, on a daily basis, often leads to depression because expectations grow that can never be satisfied. Choices overwhelm us to the point where we may feel a loss of control. The consumer’s focus is clouded when the number of choices and features becomes excessive. This has sometimes been referred to as “analysis paralysis”. All of this leads to anxiety, because the amount of effort required in the consumer’s decision making outweighs the pleasure or benefit of the resulting purchase.
So how does one go about liberating oneself from the oppression of choice? The antidotes offered by Schwartz are quite elementary. Be grateful, manage your expectations, make your decisions non-reversible, regret less, and learn to live with and accept constraints. Enjoy life as it is, rather than constantly searching around for more.
I’ve repeatedly witnessed this phenomenon that Schwartz presents, when I speak with photographers in search of gear. Their decision making process is stifling because there are so many consumer options to choose from. Their mental landscape is bombarded with decisions like: zooms or primes, third party lenses or not, new models versus numerous variations of old lenses. This becomes especially difficult for those new to photography.
Compounding this problem for the consumer are the marketing strategies of manufacturers and the varying opinions that are provided on photography forums. The advice is often solid, but everyone has their own advice. With so much consumer choice, there is a shifting of the burden of decision making to others, and that may in fact have something to do with why many forums have increased in popularity in the last number of years. If you start doing the math, the choices and the opinions start to exponentially amplify the complexity of the decision making process.
Recognize that you do not need to over think every single decision. If only we put as much thought into actually composing our images...what a result that would be!
Reader Comments (2)
My introvert traits have doubled. Thanks.
Well, the idea that "choice" is the issue is attractive to our human egos but.... it often seems that the poor old consumer-producer victim is not so much choosing as being led by the nose from one consumer/producer climax to another, courtesty of the advertisement industry with its iron grip on the media and hence on the culture at large, including those cultural excrescences, our minds. Automatons don't really make choices, do they? Rather they follow their installed program - installed in their wetware by advertmen, in the case of fashion victims, fanboys, brand loyalists and the various other clans of Consumerland.
For a prescient albeit poetic description of the state we're in now, read J G Ballard's "The Subliminal Man". It was written in 1962, as I remember - long before the ultra-consumer society we have today. Perhaps Mr Ballard saw it's beginings in 1950s America and extrapolated the trend to today's rabid world-wide consumerism from that? The story describes the total capitulaltion of the population to mind-controlled consumerism with a fashion cycle of 2-3 months. The participants are driven by the media which, in its ever-accelerating need to increase the frequency of the buying cycle, resorts to huge roadside towers pumping subliminal directives to "buybuybuy". The other media has already become the overt means for creating product-lust and fashion-frenzy via game and celebrity shows all geared towards the creation of product-envy. People work 12 X 7 to afford the new items whilst the landscape is composed of roads, factories and scrap heaps...........
We're nearly there.