Chapter 16: The Paralysis of Too Many Choices

Felix needed a new laptop, and by the third week of looking, he had forty-seven tabs open.

His old one was still running, but slowly, and with the grim wheeze of a machine that had earned its retirement. He had a budget of about nine hundred dollars and a straightforward list of requirements. And yet he had read the reviews of eleven models, watched six comparison videos, and built a spreadsheet with columns for weight, battery life, screen quality, keyboard feel, and “resale value after two years.” He had a thread of messages with a friend who knew about computers, who had stopped replying in full sentences.

Every time he narrowed it to two finalists, a new doubt appeared. What if there’s something better that I haven’t seen? What if the cheaper one fails in a year? What if I buy this one and a newer model comes out next month?

Eventually, with a kind of exhausted desperation, he bought one. Within a day he was reading reviews of the one he had not chosen. Within three days he had returned the first laptop and bought the other. Within a week he was wondering whether he should have gone with the first one after all.

Felix was aware that this was absurd. It was a laptop. But the same pattern had been following him around for years, and the stakes of the other choices were not absurd at all: whether to take a job in another city, whether to move in with his partner, whether to go back to school. The laptop was just the version small enough for him to see clearly.

When more options mean less peace

It seems obvious that more choice is better. More options mean a better chance of finding the perfect fit. But the psychologist Barry Schwartz, in his book The Paradox of Choice, argued that beyond a certain point, abundance of choice can make us less satisfied, more anxious, and more prone to regret.

A famous study by Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper, published in 2000, seemed to illustrate this. Shoppers were offered a tasting table with either a large or a small selection of jams. The larger display drew more interest, but the smaller display led to far more purchases. I should add a note of honesty here: later research has found that this effect is not always reproduced, and a review by Benjamin Scheibehenne and his colleagues concluded that the average effect of having too many options across many studies is close to zero. What seems clear is that the effect depends on circumstances. Choice overload appears most likely when options are many and hard to compare, when we are unsure of our preferences, and when we feel pressure to get it right.

That description fits Felix precisely. He didn’t actually know what mattered most to him in a laptop, and so each additional option brought more to weigh and more to regret.

There is also the problem of the road not taken. Every time we choose something, we give up the alternatives. And the more attractive the alternatives, the more the unchosen options haunt us, like ghosts of what might have been. Economists call this opportunity cost. Overthinkers feel it as a sort of pre-grief, mourning the things they have not yet given up.

Maximizers and satisficers

The economist and psychologist Herbert Simon coined the term satisficing to describe a different strategy from searching for the best possible option. A satisficer sets a threshold of what is good enough, and chooses the first option that meets it. A maximizer wants the best, and so must examine everything.

In a series of studies, Barry Schwartz and his colleagues found that people who scored higher as maximizers tended to report lower satisfaction with life, less optimism, and more regret. In a study of new graduates, the psychologist Sheena Iyengar and colleagues found something even more striking: maximizers tended to land jobs with higher starting salaries, but they were less happy with them. In the title of the paper, they were “doing better but feeling worse.”

This isn’t to say that striving is bad, or that care is wasted. It suggests that the search for the perfect option has a cost, and that the cost is often higher than the improvement it buys.

Matching effort to stakes

One of the best tools for escaping paralysis is simply to ask whether a decision can be undone. The entrepreneur Jeff Bezos described a distinction, in Amazon’s 2015 letter to shareholders, between decisions that are like one-way doors, consequential and nearly irreversible, and decisions that are like two-way doors, which can be reversed if they turn out badly. The two kinds of decisions deserve different amounts of deliberation.

The trouble with an overthinking mind is that it treats everything like a one-way door. A laptop, a restaurant, an email, a haircut: all are weighed with the gravity usually reserved for a marriage. A useful correction is to ask: Can I change this later? What would it cost to be wrong? If the answer is not much, decide quickly. Save your deliberation for the choices that truly deserve it.

The regret we imagine

A great deal of decision paralysis is driven by the fear of future regret. What if I choose wrong and wish I hadn’t? But as we saw in Chapter 5, we are not good at forecasting our own emotions. We overestimate how bad we will feel, and we underestimate our ability to adapt. Most people who choose a “second-best” option find that they come to like it, because they make it their own. We are, in a sense, great at making choices good after we have made them.

None of this means we shouldn’t think carefully. It means that the quality of a decision depends less on finding the single best option than on choosing a good one, and committing.

Try this: Set criteria and a deadline

For a decision that you have been circling, work through the following steps. Keep it short. The whole exercise should take no more than twenty minutes.

1. Name the decision, and its type. Is it a one-way or a two-way door? How costly would it be to reverse?

1. Choose your criteria. Write down up to three must-haves, the things that, if absent, would make an option unacceptable. Add up to two nice-to-haves. Resist the urge to produce a list of twelve.

1. Set a time and effort budget. Make it proportional to the stakes. A laptop deserves an afternoon. A job offer deserves a week or two. Some commitments, such as choosing a life partner, cannot be settled by a budget at all. They deserve time, honest conversation, shared values, and the context of a real relationship, and even then they are rarely made with perfect certainty.

1. Define “good enough.” Decide in advance that you will choose the first option that meets all of your must-haves, or, for bigger choices, that you will choose between the top two or three.

1. Add a tie-breaker. If two options are equal, flip a coin and notice, while it is in the air, which side you find yourself hoping for. That feeling is information.

1. Commit and write it down. I chose X because Y. Set a review date if the decision is reversible, and until then, no more shopping.

Felix did this for his next decision, an apartment. He wrote his three must-haves: close to his work, under a certain rent, and a quiet street. He allowed himself two weekends. He found the third place he saw that met all three, signed the lease, and wrote on a sticky note: chose this one for the quiet. He did not browse listings again. The apartment was not perfect. It had a kitchen the size of a closet. But it was his, and it was a relief to be living in a choice rather than weighing it.

What it will and will not do. This method will not guarantee the best choice. It improves your odds of a good-enough one, and it ends the search. If the urge to reopen the decision returns after you have committed, recognize it as the same loop and reread your note. For major choices, widen the time budget, but keep a deadline.

A THOUGHT TO CARRY

A good decision is not one you never doubt. It is one you make well enough, and then make good.