Analysis of Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice - Book Report/Review Example

Choice Your name: Course name: Professors’ name: According to Barry Schwartz, in his book ‘The Paradox of Choice” in which he says as the choices of products expand exponentially, dissatisfaction among customers will grow. According to common notion, people expect that more choices would make people happier, but have not been the case in the present environment. Paradoxically, the more choices customers have the more difficult their live becomes. This is because greater choice customers have comes at a price, demands on customer’s cognitive abilities, potentially more time, confusion and paralysis resulting from indecision (Diener, 2000). In most countries today, customers live in a time and place in which autonomy and freedom are valued above all else. Choice is good among customers, and more choices are better. This paper argues that choice, and with it autonomy, freedom and self-determination, can become excessive, and that when that happens, choices can be experienced as a kind of misery-inducing domination. Unconstrained freedom among customers leads to paralysis (Diener, Emmons, Larson, & Griffin, 1985). There is no denying that choice among customer improves the quality of their lives. It enables them to control their destinies, and come close to getting exactly what customers want in any situation (Brenner, Rottenstreich, & Sood, 1999). Customer choices are an essential to autonomy, which is important to wellbeing of people. Healthy consumers need and want to direct their own lives. Whereas many needs are universal- shelter, food, medical care, education, and social support. Much of what customers need to live is highly individualized. Choices are what make customers to pursue precisely those activities and objectives that best satisfy the customer preferences within the limit of the customer resources. When choices do not exist, individual life will become unbearable, but when the number of choices increases, as it has in our consumer autonomy, culture, and liberation. There are some choices which consumers make have positive impact in their lives, but it does not mean that more choices are better. As the number of choices increases, individual face will grow, and negative aspects of having option for and individual will start to appear, the negatives soar until the choice no longer liberates, but debilitate (Schwartz, 1994). Due to modernity, it has created choices in two different ways. First, in an individual life there are many choices and the number of options available to people has increased dramatically. Secondly, in areas of an individual life in which there are little choices, choices have now appeared. For example, a typical American supermarket has more than 30,000 items. That many product for a customer to choose from and more than 20,000 new products is being displayed in America supermarkets shelves every year. Few years ago, telephone service in America was a monopoly, and there were no choices to be made. Nowadays, customers have an option that has grown over time into a dizzying array. Another illustration is retirement pensions. Different pension plans exist in America today. What began as a choice among a few alternative investment instruments has turned into a choice among many organizations in America. For example, an insurance company having ten different pension options that can be combined in any way a company wanted. Last year, the insurance company found these options were inadequate, so they developed other retirement plans that have 155 options. While, the option number 155 is that companies which does not like the other 154 can design their own pension plan (Cottle, 2002). According to a common notion, when individuals have more choices, it presumably they will have more freedom, self-determination and autonomy, than ever before. It seems a simple matter that increases choices and improves well-beings of people using the products. However, empirically, many studies of well being tell us. Increase in choices among consumers have been accompanied by decreased well being, and only few customers will judge themselves as being happy than in the past. In other studies as highlighted by Diener, Suh, Lucas, and Smith (1999) and Inglehart (1997), incidence of clinical depression and of attempted suicide have increased dramatically in this same period due to choices consumers have. The case study that increased individual options will lead to decreased well-being is highly inferential. According to Iyengar and Lepper (2000), individual do not always find expanded choices to be attractive. One study was set in a supermarket in which a display featuring a line of high-quality exotic jams. The finding of that research was that, the large array of jams attracted more customers than small array of jams. However, when it come to buying, 30 per cent of customers exposed to small array bought the jams, and only 3 per cent of people exposed to the large array of jam bought the product (Cross, 2000). According to Schwartz, customers want to have choices that are easy. It is due to complexity forces that makes them want to trade off, and that what make them want to put off deciding. According to various studies, conflict in many customers reduces mental well-being and so reduces decisiveness among the customers. In another interesting finding, Schwartz illustrates that, customers will forgo an uncertain large gain in favor of small gain and on the contrary customers will don’t want to risk a complete disaster that’s not certain to avoid a small reverse that will certainly happen. One other factor that’s customers will not go for large array of products is that, customers will avoid post purchase regret. According to Schwartz, these type of people he refers them to “maximizers”. This crop of customers will take time and spend a lot of time to make sure that the product which they are buying is the best in the market. Therefore, if a company wants to target maximizers, it will need to make the product to appear the obvious, safe and logical choice (Clark, 1999). American society nowadays is awash in material abundance. The society nowadays has achieved what people in the past could. According to Schwartz, people in the society live their lives unconstrained by economic, material, or cultural limitations. For example, in America, gross domestic product in the last 30 years has more than doubled, but the proportion of people describing itself as “being happy” had declined by 5 per cent. As society become rich and consumers are free to purchase and do whatever they want with their money, society is getting less happy. The measure of this unhappiness in the society is the prevalence of clinical depression recorded in 2000; it has been noted to be 10 times as prevalent as in the year 1900. In the past, unlimited choices available in the society have produced genuine suffering. In a study comparing rates of suicide in 1990 to rates in the 80s and 90s, UNICEF found that the rate of suicide tripled in France, and more than doubled in Norway and Australia, and increased by 50 per cent or more in England, Canada, and the United States. In another study conducted in Japan, individual who value control and personal freedom tend to have the highest suicide rates. Teenagers nowadays are faced with choices early in their lives without maturity or enough skills to be able to make sound decision-making processes successfully. They are less constrained by family customs and traditions than our grandparents or parents; young people nowadays have more freedom, and more choices to choose from (Brenner, Rottenstreich, & Sood, 1999). In situations where there are many products in the market. A free market economy will be created that is driven by individual innovation (Diener, 2000). In any market, all businesses exist to make profits. Therefore, in a free market, competition will be created, in which a successful product into the market makes a consistent profit in a field of other related or similar products. The concept of competition is important to the free market system. As a result of competition in the marketplace, customers are able to get best products at the best price. When a new product comes into the market, it usually has a high price, and once the product has stayed into the market for a period of time, and other companies begin to copy it, the price goes down as new, similar or related products appear. In some situations, poor versions of the new product coming into the market, or overpriced products will be rejected by customers. The free market that is created by many goods in the market determines the winners and losers, and this will be based on the demands of the customers, business customers, whether industrial, or customers who buy for personal use (Diener, Diener & Diener, 1995). A market economy created by many products in the market has many characteristics: customers will be able to buy what they want, only if they can afford the products (Beck & Beck, 1972); secondly, people are forced to do anything and to sell anything in order to get money; thirdly, companies will try to maximize profit rather than satisfying social needs of customers; fourth, discipline over those who produce the wealth of society is no longer exercised by other people; lastly, rationing of scarce goods takes place through money. Market competition as results of many products is beneficial to consumers and the economy as a whole. Market competition will help consumers get a good deal from different products. In addition, it encourages companies producing products to be innovative by reducing slack (Angst, 1995). In conclusion, far as subjective experience in an individual life goes, in the long run, the difference between being happy and not being happy in an individual life due to as a result of choices in his/her life is much smaller than you would expect, and much smaller than it appears to be at the moment at which these life-changing events occur. Social comparison in an individual life does nothing to improve one’s satisfaction with the choices and individual makes in his/her life. At the end of his book, Barry Schwartz says that a key solution for the problems of having too much choice and its resulting unhappiness is … gratitude. Therefore, any individual in the society can vastly improve his/her subjective experience by striving to be happy more often about an experience or a choice in his/her life, and try to be disappointed less by what is bad about the choices or experience they had to make in every person’s life. The average of all these studies that have been conducted about “paradox of choices” suggest that offering many choices seems to make no important difference either way in an individual life. In most case, choices have been found to be counterproductive. Therefore, consumer having many choices is not as paradoxical as some psychologists have come to believe. One way or another, consumers are able to cope with different choices in their lives. Barry Schwartz tried to highlight in his book that when consumer has too many things to choose from often leads to the consumer feeling confused when facing the choices he has to make, and the consumer will be less satisfied after making the decision. In other worlds, consumers will buy less when faced with too many choices in their lives. Every person in a society should aim to be satisficers rather than maximizers, and that by having standards to live by, rather, than, say, tightly enforced rules from some higher authority, an individual can eliminate some choice in his/her life that isn’t really needed. References Angst, J. (1995). The epidemiology of depressive disorders.! European Neuropsychopharmacology, 5 , 95-98. Beck, A. T., & Beck, R. W. (1972). Screening depressed patients in a family practice: A rapid technique. Postgraduate Medicine, 52, 81-85. Brenner, L., Rottenstreich,, Y., & Sood, S. (1999). Comparison, grouping, and preference. Psychological Science, 10, 225-229. Clark, K. (1999). Why it pays to quit. U.S. News and World Report, November 1, 74- 79. Cross, G. (2000). An all-consuming century: Why commercialism won in modern America. New York: Columbia University Press. Cottle, M. (2002). Bodywork. The New Republic, March 25, 16-19. Diener, E., Emmons, R. A., Larson, R. J., & Griffin, S. (1985). The Satisfaction With Life Scale. Journal of Personality Assessment, 49, 71-75. Diener, E. (2000). Subjective well-being: The science of happiness and a proposal for a national index. American Psychologist,55, 34-43. Diener, E., Diener, M., & Diener, C. (1995). Factors predicting the subjective wellbeing of nations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 851-864. Schwartz, B. (1994). The costs of living: How market freedom erodes the best things in life. New York: W.W. Norton. Read More