The Paradox of Choice - Why More is Less

In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz explains that though more choice gives us more options and potentially greater satisfaction, an over-abundance of choice can be detrimental. I see two main thrusts in the book: one, a socialogical commentary on how modern life has brought with it greater self-determination and opportunity to choose to the individual, which has improved the quality of life as a whole, but paradoxically reduced overall happiness; two, how such a deluge of choice affects our lives on a personal level, and how we can cope with it.
Some points

• We are flooded by choices in everyday life - from the supermarket, to choosing courses in college, to choosing what tv program to watch, to what career we want, to who we want to marry, to who we want to be. All thanks to this value we call freedom of choice.
• Choosing well is difficult
• We rarely know what we want - our expected, experienced and remembered utility rarely align, and our predictions for how we feel after an experience rarely reflects how we actually feel.
• Gathering and analyzing the overwhelming amount of information that we face today is impossible. The quality of the information is often skewed by marketing and advertising too.
• People have a tendency to give undue weight to certain types of information - the availability heuristic - e.g. we tend to value opinions from friends more than reports as they are more salient and vivid in our minds.
• Psychological effects profoundly affect the way we decide - anchoring, framing, prospect theory, loss aversion, endowment effect, sensitivity to sunk costs.
• With the growth of options, decisions thus require more effort, mistakes become more likely and the psychological effects of mistakes become more severe

• Maximizers vs Satisficers
• Maximizers seek and accept only the best.
• Satisficers settle for something that's good enough and doesn't worry about the possibility that there might be something better.
• Maximizers tend to be less happy and more susceptible to regret.
• What matters more in the quality of a decision - objective results or subjective experience?
• Why maximize? Status and inherent scarcity of certain resources.

• Choice is testament to our autonomy, self-expresssion and self-determination, but yet we still feel helpless in modern society, perhaps due to our raised expectations of what kind of choice and control we should have, and our feeling overwhelmed by opportunities that we no longer have the feeling of control.
• Certain relationships and social institutions restrict our autonomy, but this curtailed freedom actually contributes to happiness.
• We may want freedom but may not actually enjoy it.
• Why we suffer?
• Missed opportunities - more choice means more opportunity costs to consider and rue over. People would rather avoid decisions than make trade-offs. When you have too many options, you are responsible for what happens to you.
  
• Reasoning and self-justification doesn't always improve the quality of our choice
• Reversible decisions often reduce satisfaction after making a choice.
• Regret is triggered by our failure to act, near misses and responsibility for results, and is worsened by counterfactual thinking. Regret aversion is a powerful force and makes us susceptible to sunk costs.
• Adaptation reduces our enthusiasm about positive experiences, and causes us to mispredict satisfaction.
• Comparison profoundly affects our evaluation of an experience, especially social comparison.
• Increased options result in higher expectations.

• Finally, what to do about choice

1. Choose when to choose
2. Be a chooser, not a picker
3. Satisfice more, maximize less
4. Think about the opportunity costs of opportunity costs
5. Make decisions non-reversible
6. Practice an "attitude of gratitude"
7. Regret less
8. Anticipate Adaptation
9. Control expectations
10. Curtail social comparison
11. Learn to love constraints
    

What I find especially interesting is the contrast between objective and subjective utility. Schwartz argues that we have to be more aware of the costs of making decisions, and how the agony of trying to maximize our utility when making those decisions and the corresponding post-decision feelings of regret and adaptation actually subtract from the actual utility gained from the result of our choice. I guess to sum things up, all his suggestions point towards changing the way we think about making decisions so that our subjective and objective utilities are aligned.

I guess in a more CSish sort of way, we should be happy with local maxima when we're doing local search :).