[PT] Grant McCracken & Barry Schwartz
Grant McCracken argues against the idea that consumers are given “empty choices.” The title of his talk is “More is More.”
1. Many choices that look empty, he says, are in fact structural: they represent actual differences in taste and preference. I.e., “Material culture makes culture material.” Example: “Feminism” has led to so many ways of talking about femaleness that the term no longer has meaning. The profusion of choices in the market reflects the profusion of social and cultural distinctions. The market reflects how furiously inventive we’ve become.
2. Some of these empty choices are exploratory, he says. The market keeps giving things a try.
3. Some choice is not empty but “formative.”
He goes through the Kaufmann Continuum to show that innovation starts out risk, then gets adopted by the mainstream and gets sorta boring. At least, that’s what I’m getting from this. He concludes: Empty choice” is a source of innovation. Empty choicess are adaptive.
[I was never sure what he was arguing against.]
Barry Schwartz‘s topic is “More is Less.” (He wrote the Tyranny of Freedom.)
No, we can’t have it all, he says. The choices we face aren’t empty. That’s why they “torture” us. In his local supermarket he found 285 brands of cookies, 75 iced teas, 175 salad dressings, 40 toothpastes. We are given choices for just about everything, from retirement plans to college curricula. “And I don’t think this is good.”
Americans have more freedom of choice than ever before, we’re richer than anyone ever, yet Americans are sadder than anyone ever before. (Clinical depression is 2x what it was a generation ago.) He says studies show that if you offer fewer choices, people buy more and are happier with their choices.
Too many choices make us unhappy because we regret lost opportunities. our expectations get escalated, and then we blame ourselves.
What really make people happy are close relations with other people. Close relations restrain, not liberate: To be close means to not be free to make choices for yourself. Your choice is limited by the fact that you care about others.
Going from no choice to some choice dramatically increases our well-being. But there’s a point where having more choice decreases our well-being, he says. Being anything you want to be is only possible in world with limits. [Yeah, I hate it when school principles say “You can be anything you want to be.”]
[He makes a great point, and he’s a terrific presenter. But it bothers me that he equates choices about which of 275 cookies to buy with choices about careers and religion. Also, I think he overemphasizes choice and obscures the inescapability of the historic-cultural-linguistic situation into which we are born.]
Q&A
Bob Metcalfe: So, does wealth make us unhappy?
Schwartz: That follows from my argument. It’s another reason to support income redistribution.
Bob: So my drive to have everything is socially responsible, since I’m keeping choices from other people.
[The discussion gets to what I think is the heart: If fewer choices make us unhappy, why don’t we shop in smaller stores? And if we’re not smart enough to recognize that too much choice makes us unhappy, who is going to decide on the constraints of choice for us?]
Categories: Uncategorized dw
I have seen people from abroad react to the plethora of choices in an American shopping mall with everything from extreme annoyance to physical sickness (“All those shoes…!” was the only thing a sister-in-law could say, as she was recovering on the sidewalk outside). And I have heard Americans from rural areas mention a restricted choice of places to shop as being one of the attractions of their home town.
Too Many Choices
At the Poptech Conference this week, Barry Schwartz had an interesting presentation about the enormous number of choices we’re faced with even on a simple trip to the supermarket. Did you know you’re burning your brain out choosing between 40…
Shopping in smaller stores doesn’t help, because smaller stores often don’t offer the choices we need. I only buy a certain brand of bread (thereby limiting my choices), but small stores don’t carry it.
My solution is to consciously ignore choices. When I go to a grocery store, I don’t even think about choosing a brand of bread; I immediately zero in on my regular brand. I get it and leave and the other choices don’t really affect me.
SatisMaximus
Barry Schwartz presented his well-reasoned ideas at Pop!Tech on Saturday. His thesis: we’re drowning in a sea of choices that challenge our ability to psychologically stay afloat. But, oddly, he omitted one of the key points of his book from
I’m a big fan of Schwartz’s thinking but was surprised by his choice of what to present and what to omit in his Pop!Tech talk. For more, see.
Can you please provide a more detailed description of the “Kaufmann Continuum” or a citation or URL?
Sorry, Sean, I can’t find a thing about it. I’d say I’m crazy, but the phrase does show up in the graphical notes AlphaChimp took that day:
I fully agree with Brent. To me 99.5% of all choices in a supermarket are superfluous. I do my usual routine from which I seldome deviate. As I don’t own a TV, don’t read newspapers and ignore radio ads, that part is pretty much wasted on me, too.
I do, BTW, not agree with the notion that “Americans have more freedom of choice than ever before, we’re richer than anyone ever”. The freedom of choice is largely an illusion, because what you call choice isn’t by and large worth choosing. The richness is mostly limited to money, hiding the fact that it isn’t equal to wealth. The spiritual poverty of most Americans shows in the political and entertainment business, as well as in their health and education records, which are both anything but worth a praise.