The problem of choice

Back in the Middle Ages, life was certainly not driven by choice: in most cases your destiny was sealed by the job of your father, the menu was the same day in and day out, the crops to grow were limited to just a bunch with proven results in your neighborhood. With the Renaissance and the development of cities the amount of options grew a bit, particularly for the rich and the powerful, but the real breakthrough came with the industrial revolution and the beginning of mass production. Industrial workers could be employed, for the first time in history, all year round, which meant not only regular production, but also regular consumption, and markets started to cater to their needs.

In the beginning there was not much difference among the preferences of the consumers. Most of them had a similar upbringing and were not educated in the art of choosing: no one had ever offered them a lot of options, so they never had been force to choose. But then came the Romanticism hailing the virtues of individual direct experience and suddenly having different objects than anyone else became valuable. And the trend has only progressed further: wealthy people have always been know to collect unique specimens found in nature, but now they can have one-time pieces fabricated for them.

Photo: PIXNIO

The advent of digital production has also brought significant advantages for everyone: when I was in high school getting a custom T-shirt printed was rather expensive unless you had a run of 100 or more, but these days you can create one for your five poker friends at a very affordable price. And the same applies to mugs, ball point pens, baseball caps, etc. All the time choices become more and more frequent and the number of options never stops to grow.

Is it true that having more options is always better? An artificial intelligence can clearly answer with a "Yes": in several board games keeping the biggest number of open moves is a decent strategy, which might not get you wins all the time, but it is relatively cheap and performs well. However, when we get down to human, the situation is different: there is such a thing as too much choice.

We have discussed in the past how our mental resources are in limited supply, and the deeper the thought the more limited it is. Indeed, a few week ago I successfully performed on Jason this experiment suggested by Kahneman: we were walking side by side at a brisk pace and I asked him if I could do an experiment on him; when he agreed, I asked him to multiply 23 by 13 and he instantly stopped walking and began to do the math in his head. When questioned about why he had stopped he absentmindedly replied "sorry, I was calculating". Kahneman's explanation is that the brisk walking pace is effortful, and so is the calculation, so the moment the mind is engaged in the math it removes the resources from the motion and the body stops moving or keeps walking at a slower speed.

This limitation of mental resources results in the fact that most of our choices do not imply a conscious analysis of the options, but we use heuristics instead. For instance, you can easily tell apart regulars from first-time visitors in joints like Starbucks or Subway: the latter crawl through the selection process one painful step at a time, whereas the former nonchalantly ask for "a venti latte frappuccino with two shots of espresso and whipped cream" (the same beverage that they have had a hundred times already and that they know they like). The alternative, in most cases, is falling into the so-called choice overload: when the options are too many, the difference among similar options become too small and the effort required to make a meaningful selection grows beyond the manageable. This is a frequent problem when choosing the color to paint a room: I always let her choose.

COVID-19 has severely curtailed the choices for our everyday life, but hopefully this new year will eventually bring a relief in the pressure and we will find ourselves making choices again: where to go out for dinner, which concert to attend, shall I get a new winter jacket. In the meantime, trying to stay safe is probably the best option: it is certainly the one giving you the highest number of possible choices in the future. Happy New Year and enjoy the weekend.