In 2004, Barry Schwartz released a book titled "The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less." If you haven't heard about it, the general theory of it goes like this: People like having choices, and like having more choices available to them, but when they are actually tasked with choosing between those things, they have a harder time choosing, they take longer doing it, they evaluate it on completely irrelevant data (rather than things that matter), and they are less-satisfied with their choice later (source 1, source 2). In a recent follow-up to address some discrepancies in the theory (the paradox is not always true, it just really depends on the specific scenario, and no one knows why), Schwartz offers an examples:
a large retailer of office supplies reduced the number of options offered in its print catalog in many product categories. It did this not because of the research on too much choice, but to save money on production and postage. It assumed that the change would lead to reduced sales, but hoped that production and distribution savings would outpace sales losses. What the company found was that in virtually every category in which options had been reduced, sales increased. (source)You can visit that link to read more about it.
The Illusion of Choice, by contrast, is this concept that you have a choice when you really don't. There's a famous "intellectual" joke that features this:
Jean-Paul Sartre is sitting at a French cafe, revising his draft of Being and Nothingness. He says to the waitress, "I’d like a cup of coffee, please, with no cream." The waitress replies, "I’m sorry, Monsieur, but we’re out of cream. How about with no milk?"Part of this joke has to do with the illusion of choice - that is, when the waitress is out of cream, Sartre can't meaningfully make the choice between cream and no cream; therefore, she offers him the drink without milk, so that he can make the choice (interestingly, since Sartre believes nothing is something, the decision is really between the inability to choose and the ability to choose, which is itself a choice... ok my brain is hurting now).
For another example, let's say you know that the vending machine regularly carries bottles of water, and you would like one. You hit the button for water after paying money in, but nothing drops, and the screen on the machine says that it's out of stock. You seemingly had a choice between paying for water or drinking from a fountain; then, you had the choice between water and anything else, but that choice was just an illusion.
The Illusion of Choice is also present when two things seem different but are arguably not. Let's go back to the vending machine example: let's say that it's also impossible to get a refund, so now you're left with a choice between sodas. All of them are loaded with sugar or artificial sweeteners, so your choice of which drink to get is merely between different types of junk. The drinks are all arguably the same, and are certainly the same from a health perspective. The choice between them is a false one - which one you select doesn't matter.
Definitions out of the way? Good. Let's move on...
Several years ago, I noticed that there were some issues regarding Paradox and Illusion with regard to online dating, and wrote a lengthy blog post on OKCupid which has since been deleted. In essence, it went like this:
In online dating, you have the ability to select very discreet feature about your potential partner: a range of heights, sometimes a range of weights or self-selected body types, eye color, hair color, smoking habits, drinking habits, religion, political alliance, kids, location, marital status, sexual orientation, and so on. It feels like you're building a person at a car dealership, selecting the options you'd like to add on. Each one of these things is a choice, and although you can certainly choose "all" for many of them, by offering the option to choose, and by further returning results for those options, it feels like the choices are meaningful (the choices are real and not illusionary) and rational. It leads to a feeling of self-importance, since you have the power to make such choices, and to a feeling that if you relax any of those choices, you're "settling."
And then, once you have all of these choices defined and you do a search, if your settings are too relaxed, you get a ton of matches. All of these matches represent a choice you have to make - whether or not to reach out to a person, whether or not to respond if they message you, and whether or not to block them entirely, removing them from your list so you never have to see them again.
And here is where the Paradox of Choice comes into play - because we have all of these potential matches, but we have perhaps too many. It can lead us to backing away from the choice rather than making it, and when we do make it, in making it based on entirely irrelevant criteria.
Case in point: when my wife first messaged me on a dating site, before we started dating of course, I had to evaluate her profile and her message to me to see if I would be interested, and it was certainly possible that evaluation would've led me to turn her down, because her grammar was not perfect (and in the past I had demanded grammatical perfection) and she was divorced (I had wanted to meet someone who had never married).
Thankfully, because I had realized the effect that the Paradox of Choice had made on my dating life, I had decided it was necessary to relax my ideas about what I need to find in a partner. It took a long time (I had written that article more than a year before we met), but by the time she sent that message, I had at least gotten to the point where I could say "well, this isn't really that important." And those things aren't. I clearly have thrown grammar out the window now, as you can certainly tell from my willingness to begin a sentence with a conjunction, and I also realized that someone's marital status wasn't always an injunction on that person's ability to make good decisions or that person's ability to follow-through on promises, and rather that it varied from person to person.
I decided to write her back, and a few days later we got together for a First Friday down at the Guthrie Green, and though the date should've been the worst date ever based on how much we both disliked the art we encountered, we both had a blast. I knew before the night was out that I wanted to spend a lot more time with this woman, and it's a decision I'm happy I made. Fortunately for me, she made the same choice.
So yes, this is a call to throw away those illusionary choices for what they are, and try to meet random people. You never know what will click. The same is true for clothes - try them all on, because even though yellow might not normally be your color (it's not anyone's color), maybe this particular shirt or dress or whatever will look amazing.
Try on everything.
That said...
The Paradox of Choice also comes into play in a lot of other areas of our lives. One of the great benefits (to corporations) of the ways in which we shut down when presented with many options is that once we make a choice, we tend to stick with it forever. That is, if we choose to eat at McDonald's, we'll choose to eat there all the time. Evaluate your own eating habits, and I bet when you eat out you eat at a fairly narrow range of restaurants. You may have your special date night restaurants (places you've never been before possibly, but maybe expensive favorites. Mine is Ti Amo.), but you probably also have places you frequent, such as Starbucks, Panera, Arby's, and so on.
Thus, you're presented with both a Paradox of Choice (too many choices preventing you from making a choice at all) and an Illusion of Choice (because when you finally go there, you'll look at the menu meaningfully and choose from a much smaller subset of dishes you normally go with anyway).
It also comes into play with politics...
You knew I'd get here eventually...
The Republican presidential field suffers both from the Illusion of Choice and the Paradox of Choice - that is, there are so many candidates that you can't possibly learn everything about every one of them, and attempting to do so can prevent you from making a meaningful decision, but it's also an Illusion of Choice because the candidates are all functionally the same.
To illustrate this, I used data from http://presidential-candidates.insidegov.com/ to put together a chart of how well the candidates toe the party line. The site simply gives the candidates a "Supports," "Opposes," or "Neutral/No Opinion" position as a distillation of their views, which may or may not be accurate (any simplification is always an error, as a person's views are complex), but which may be helpful to illustrate the point.
Across 18 different categories, candidates toed the party line 76% of the time. The two "questionable" categories were "Women and Minority Rights" (which really shouldn't get wrapped up into one column) and "campaign finance reform." Both of these are highly subjective, in that someone can say they support women's rights and yet vote against women's rights in every case, and can say they're in favor of campaign finance reform yet side with the Citizens United decision (case in point: Rand Paul, who has said "I agree with Citizens United").
Another questionable category is "Immigration Reform." A person can be in favor of reform in that he or she could be wanting to make immigration harder. Yet the site only gives a "supports" or "opposes," so it's hard to say what that really means.
Even with these problems, the chart is frighteningly red. The biggest exception is Chris Christie, a man who single-handedly skews the chart 2 percentage points toward the left. He's tallied as "supports" for same sex rights, despite vetoing a New Jersey bill that would have legalized it. He's tallied as "supports" for "Peace and Diplomacy," yet does not support the current Iran nuclear deal.
In the end, what we're left with is that in a large number of cases, Republican candidates are either completely right or just leaning right, and even when they lean left on an issue, it's only just.
What does this mean? That any choice between Republican candidates is, for the most part, a choice between personalities alone, rather than on beliefs.
This is largely why Donald Trump is currently in the lead by a large margin - because in a field of similar voices, his is the only one able to rise above the tide by pure virtue of his personality.
This lead will one day end. The way of primaries is to narrow the field. He might win the first few by a large margin, but those first few primaries will serve to push out those people who have no chance of winning the election. As the field narrows to five or six people, suddenly the din of voices will diminish, and people will be able to engage with the personalities of other candidates. At some point in the process, someone will rise above the crush and appear to be sane by Trump's insanity, and the result is that Republican votes will flock to him. This is likely to be Jeb Bush or Scott Walker - two people who represent the farthest right the party can go.
And here's where this whole thing comes to a head. Eventually, we'll have the simple choice between a Republican candidate and a Democratic candidate. Though this is likely to be Bush vs Clinton, it's entirely possible it could be Walker vs. Bernie Sanders. But the paralysis that comes thanks to the Paradox of Choice present on the right could prevent less-engaged voters from participating, and less-engaged voters are often younger voters who lean heavily left.
Which will result in a landslide Republican victory, even when polls will indicate that the Democrat is ahead by several digits.
The answer, fortunately, is not to fight fire with fire (running 20 Democrats), but rather the huge cult of popularity that's forming around Bernie Sanders. If he can keep up his momentum, his voice rising easily above the voices of the right, he might just have a shot at winning. He has the ability to fire up young voters in ways that other candidates haven't been able to, and that's exactly what it will take.
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