February 2025
Service Design
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During my UX certification program at Georgia Tech, we were given a list of about five books to read at some point post-program. ‘The Paradox of Choice’ was one of those books. Additionally, it was a book that caught my eye one day while wandering around the library - perhaps because it looked familiar. Whatever the reason, I decided to give it a read and it quickly became one of my favorite books of 2022!
Time and time again, I’ve read that freedom without choice, isn’t freedom at all. Barry Schwartz states his version of this as:
“Choice is essential to autonomy, which is absolutely fundamental to well-being.”
But what happens when you have too much choice? In the digital product landscape, this has become somewhat of the norm; there are often countless options/competitors to do similar things.
Barry Schwartz states from the get-go that:
“Large choice sets pose a major problem - because the only way to know you have the best is by examining all the options.”
In order for this framework to make sense though, we have to establish a few types of people (I like to think of these as personas). Schwartz describes two main types as:
1. ‘Satisficers’ - people who want something that is good enough
2. ‘Maximizers’ - people who want the best of the best
From my understanding, the argument presented is this: there is such a thing as having too much choice and that is likely the age we live in today. It immediately made me think to other books I’ve read about habit-formation and specifically about how about 40% of the actions we complete each day are habit-driven/subconscious; without these, our brain would shut down from being so overwhelmed. In theory, having too much choice could be just as debilitating as having no choice at all.
Isaiah Berlin’s concept of negative and positive liberty also help to make sense of this; those being:
1. ‘negative liberty’ - freedom from ______
2. ‘positive liberty’ - freedom to ______
The first major part of the book covers situations in which we have the power to choose; Barry Schwartz gives a personal anecdote about the difficulty he has shopping for something as simple as jeans. While on the topic of consumer behavior, Schwartz states that:
“A large array of options may discourage consumers because it forces an increase in the effort that goes into making a decision.”
This is something I’ve seen when working with information architecture and designing menus - too many primary options overwhelms users into making a decision prematurely. However, from a more zoomed-out perspective, this same principle can be applied to far more than just IA:
“We now face a demand to make choices that is unparalleled in human history.”
Barry Schwartz is an economist and he uses terminology throughout the book that remind the reader of it - terms such as: “pareto efficiency” and so forth. In order to understand consumer behavior in the context of having to make so many choices on a day-to-day basis, we have to learn a few more economics-related terms:
1. Experienced utility - the way something makes you feel in the moment
2. Expected utility - the way you think something will make you feel
3. Remembered utility - the way you remember feeling doing something
The ‘peak-end’ rule in psychology states that what we remember from an experience is based on
1. how we felt at the peak AND
2. how we felt at the end
When combine the types of utility and the ‘peak-end’ rule, we learn that consumers often make decisions based on emotion/feelings rather than the actual utility of a product. This also explains why asking users questions about thoughts/feelings during usability testing can product so much valuable feedback!
Based on ‘prospect theory’ and the ‘law of diminishing marginal utility,’ we learn what is stated in this graph:
1. people are ‘risk averse’ when deciding among potential gains
2. people are ‘risk seeking’ when deciding among potential losses
In other words:
“Losses have more than 2x the psychological impact as equivalent gains”
Additionally:
“As options increase, the effort involved in making decisions increases, so mistakes hurt even more.”
As I stated above, people labeled as ‘maximizers’ are those who only want the best. What does this really mean though?
When personified deeper, Barry Schwartz claims that maximizers:
- experience more buyer’s remorse
- tend to experience lower satisfaction with life
- tend to be less happy
- tend to be less optimistic/more depressed
- savor positive events less
- don’t cope as well with negative events
- take longer to recover after something bad happens to them
In this third section of the book, Schwartz discusses regret, opportunity costs, and how generally speaking:
“Humans are remarkably bad at predicting how various experiences will make them feel,” (I got a laugh out of this one)
All in all, I felt that this section felt like a practical guide to help with the fact that we are not biologically prepared for the number of choices we face in the modern world. An important concept that stood out to be was ‘counterfactual thinking’ - thinking of the world as it might be/might have been. There are two types:
1. upward counterfactuals - people who image states that are BETTER than what actually happened (ex. a silver medalist winning gold)
2. downward counterfactuals - people who imagine states that are WORSE than what actually happened (ex. silver medalist imagining injury during a race and not finishing)
People who engage in a lot of counterfactual thinking sound a bit like the maximizer persona - someone who tends be harsh on themselves/their decisions and looking to ways/decisions that could make things better.
Another helpful concept from this section of the book was that of ‘regret.’ On the surface, this doesn’t seem as sophisticated or complex but it is. Generally:
“When confronted with decisions, we often choose the options that minimizes the chances that we will experience regret.”
Risk aversion also stems from the concept of regret; regret is an important cause of many decisions.
“We show greater willingness to take risks when we know we will find out how the unchosen alternative turned out, so that there is no way to protect ourselves from regret.”
People feel a personal responsibility for the result of a decision; this can both be helpful and debilitating with decision-making. Anticipating potential regret makes us take decisions more seriously but also ‘inaction inertia’ could occur where people don't act at all as a means of avoiding regret.
Schwartz outlines a basic framework of ways to classify failure (as a result of decision-making). Items are categorized in three areas as being either:
1. global OR specific
2. chronic OR transient
3. personal OR universal
Specific, transient, universal classifiers: tend to be optimists if they classify things as: specific, transient, universalGlobal, chronic, personal classifiers: tend to be pessimists and suffer from learned helplessness, loss in self-esteem and depression
“Helplessness induced by failure or lack of control leads to depression if a person’s causal explanations for that failure are global, chronic and personal.”
Schwartz provides statistics about how suicide rates in college students have doubled in the last few decades and other alarming mental health statistics. When applied to the professional world and specifically any field that mandates feedback (any creative field), this framework can help people to accept feedback more healthily.
I’ve often been asked for feedback or questions about how I accept feedback and it is likely because working in an industry where feedback is crucial to growth and success means being able to accept it and provide it without taking things too personally.
I’m usually not a fan of exhaustive lists but in order to show just how much I learned from this book, I felt it was necessary to provide a list of terms that I learned/familiarized with from this book:
1. Maximizers/satisficers
2. pareto efficiency
3. negative liberty/positive liberty (Isaiah Berlin)
4. nondurable goods
5. voluntary simplicity movement
6. commitment anxiety (FOMO - added to the Oxford English Dictionary)
7. experienced utility
8. expected utility
9. remembered utility
10. peak-end rule
11. availability heuristic
12. anchoring
13. prospect theory
14. risk aversion/risk seeking
15. endowment effect
16. sunk cost, sunk cost effects
17. expressive value
18. learned helplessness (Martin Seligman)
19. experience sampling method
20. second-order decisions (Cass Sunstein and Edna Ullmann-Margalit)
21. opportunity cost
22. anticipated regret, buyer’s remorse
23. omission bias
24. nearness effect
25. counterfactual thinking: upward, downward, contrast effects
26. inaction inertia
27. perceptual adaptation
28. hedonic adaptation
29. hedonic treadmill, satisfaction treadmill
30. hedonic charge
31. hedonic distress
32. positional goods
33. happiness quotient
34. individualism
35. hedonic lag (Robert Lane)
This was my favorite professional-oriented book I read in 2022. Not only did it provide a plethora of information that explains human behavior that could aid in UX/Product Research/Design but it also provided concepts that appeal on a more personal level. “Simple is best” is a principle designers hear all the time so it was nice to learn more of the science behind why that is encouraged rather than just visual descriptors that support ‘clean-looking’ design. I like how Barry Schwartz outlined the book - starting with very broad trends and getting more and more specific until he ended with a list of practical ways to navigate through the world of decision-making.
I read this book shortly after reading ‘The Power of Habit’ by Charles Duhigg which gave me an interesting viewpoint of cross referencing the two works; I would recommend that others do this same thing if planning on reading ‘The Paradox of Choice’ in the future. It’s important to understand habit formation/habits and how they differentiate from conscious decision-making.
Overall, this was my favorite read of 2022 and a book that I took copious notes on. As I already mentioned, designers are often told to ‘simplify’ systems and reduce ‘cognitive load’ on pages and reading this book really helped put all of those types of tasks into context. This wasn’t the lightest, easiest read - Schwartz spent the last section of the book substantiating his claim that we are becoming less happy as a society and are already seeing the effects of it. However, it was absolutely worth the read and I would without question recommend everyone read it as well.
10/10.
