Is having too many choices intrinsically good? Andrew Tai Year 12, Churchill House
A few weeks ago, I was in a clothing store looking for a nice shirt with cool graphics, as my old clothes were getting worn out. I found a selection of shirts I liked and narrowed it down to two. One was in my favourite colour— orange, but the other one had a cooler print. I went home that day with only one shirt; if only in some alternate reality, there could have existed a shirt, one perfect for me, that fitted exactly how I wanted. Before you dismiss my problems as exclusively first-world ones, please hear me out. In sociology, one of the unspoken rules to increase morale is giving people the freedom of choice, freedom being something humans intrinsically crave. It doesn’t matter if it’s your meal of choice on a given day, the book you want to spend the weekend reading, or even where you want to be in five years: the more choices you have, the broader your horizons are. Surely that’s a good thing, right?
Image from Unsplash When presented with a choice, one would instinctively weigh the pros and cons of each choice, and there is bound to be something missed out, something sacrificed, for the sake of making a choice. This is the economic concept of opportunity cost, the cost of forgoing the next best alternative. People will undeniably doubt whether they made 11
As it turns out, having a choice doesn’t always make you happy. Barry Schwartz, Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore University, gave a famous TED talk and wrote a book on this very topic named “The Paradox of Choice”. In it, he quotes a study made by David Myers from Hope U and Robert E Lee from Yale. They observed that although the GDP per capita of America had doubled over a 30 year period, the percentage of the population who described themselves as “ very happy” had decreased by 5 percent. This fact may not seem significant, but this means that despite having more choices than ever before, 14 million Americans felt less happy than their peers from 30 years back. the right decision, leading to uncertainty and anxiety. But when presented without a choice, people are oblivious to both pros and cons, for they simply wouldn’t think to compare an object with a theoretical, non-existent one. In these scenarios, many would proclaim that “ignorance is bliss”. Say, if on that day, I missed one of the shirts and only saw either the orange
