Too Many Choices.

By Troy Parrish.

Much has been written in the last several years concerning children that seem to refuse to grow up.  These are adult children who continue to live like they are teenagers often failing to take on the appropriate level of adult responsibility and seem to be very comfortable doing so.  They often seem to be resisting even moving in the direction of growing up.  The issue of eternal children is fraught with implications for the child, his parents as well as our society at large.  Obviously much can be said about this topic and maybe it is a discussion for another day.

The reluctance that these individuals display is partially driven by a unique factor that is created by the prosperity of our cultures and the opportunities that is created by prosperity.  In a culture of affluence we are confronted with a multitude of options in just about every aspect of life.  We can choose from a number of styles of cars with endless combinations of features and colors.  We can select from an array of chocolate chip cookies, prebaked or readymade dough for us to use.  We can browse endlessly for videos to watch, either instantly or having it mailed to our front door.  Entire shopping malls dedicated largely to our apparel, what do you want to wear?  The multitude of options is not confined to simple matters.  There exists an endless list of majors you can choose from at college and an endless list of colleges offering a cornucopia of appealing options.  There are hundreds of types of employment in any number of fields.  The size and style of your house and where you elect to live is also considered an option.  We are literally offered tens of thousands of choices and options in small and large matters in our lives.

Is all this choice good for us, or does it create a problem.  Consider the following studies:

“Social psychologists Sheena Iyengar, PhD, a management professor at Columbia University Business School, and Mark Lepper, PhD, a psychology professor at Stanford University, were the first to empirically demonstrate the downside of excessive choice. In a 2000 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP, Vol. 79, No. 6), the team showed that when shoppers are given the option of choosing among smaller and larger assortments of jam, they show more interest in the larger assortment. But when it comes time to pick just one, they're 10 times more likely to make a purchase if they choose among six rather than among 24 flavors of jam.
Next, Iyengar sought to examine consumer choices with higher stakes to see if a greater investment in the outcome meant people would make different or better choices. In a study under review at JPSP, she and Wei Jiang, PhD, a finance professor at Columbia Business School, analyzed retirement-fund choices--ranging from packages of two to 59 choices--among some 800,000 employees at 647 companies.
"With 401(k)s, people are given enormous incentives to participate through tax shelters and employer matches," Iyengar comments. "So, essentially, if you choose not to participate, you're throwing away free money."
Instead of leading to more thoughtful choosing, however, more options led people to act like the jam buyers: When given two choices, 75 percent participated, but when given 59 choices, only 60 percent did. In addition, the greater the number of options, the more cautious people were with their investment strategies, the team found.
Relatedly, too much choice also can lead people to make simple, snap judgments just to avoid the hassle of wading through confusing options--which ironically can sabotage a company's marketing plan, finds social psychologist Alexander Chernev, PhD, of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. In a paper in press in the Journal of Consumer Research, Chernev found that when people were offered variants of the same brand of toothpaste--cavity-prevention, tartar-control and teeth-whitening types, for instance--they tended to switch to another brand that offered a single option.”1 

Sociologist Barry Swartz of Swathmore College has been talking about the paralysis of choice for a couple years now.  He notes that instead of choice making life better for us, it actually makes it worse when there is too much of it. 

“As various assessments of well-being tell us, increased choice, and increased affluence have been accompanied by decreased well-being (see Diener, 2000; Diener, Diener, and Diener, 1995; Diener and Suh, 2001; Diener, Suh, Lucas, and Smith, 1999,Inglehart, 1997; Lane, 2000, and Myers, 2000). And not only do fewer people judge themselves to be happy than in previous generations, but the incidence of clinical depression and of attempted suicide have increased dramatically in this same period (Eckersley, 2002; Eckersley and Dear 2002, Lane, 2000, Myers 2000, Rosenhan and Seligman, 1995).”2 

It appears that our natural desire for greater choice when left unchecked can actually lead to less satisfaction as well as a paralysis in regard to taking action to choose.

While this can be disturbing news to marketers (a lot of the literature on the problem of excessive choice concerns marketing), it is alarming to those who consider the impact this problem can have on future generations.  Consider the problem of getting a child to commit to future education and preparation for independent living.  No longer is a high school education sufficient.  The entry level degree seems to be college.  Enter the difficulty of excessive choice, with significant consequences attached to the choices being made.

There is growing pressure on children (and their parents) to begin the process of preparing for the future at ever younger ages.  Children in their freshman year of college are often confronted with the reality that what they do from now on academically counts towards their future.  And how does a child who is still working on figuring out who he is decide on what he wants to be when he finishes school?  Being presented with countless choices of educational institutions along with a vast array of possible majors and minors and an endless list of possible occupations is what is greeting many of our young men today.  And if the research is accurate, instead of motivating these young men, this overwhelming number of options can create a paralysis.  Particularly if you consider that we are asking them to commit to four or more years of preparation for a specific occupation that he will feel trapped in if he doesn’t like it.  That is the real dilemma of too many options, what if I don’t like the choice I made? 

A typical reaction to too many options is to not choose because no choice stands out as the best option.  Given the choice between chocolate, strawberry and vanilla most of us know what we like and would feel confident after our choice that we got the best one for us.  Given the possibility of 36 flavors, we have a tendency to wonder if some other flavor would have been a little better than what we selected.  With ice cream the decision isn’t so important and hence less paralysis.  Give us a lot of options with the next few decades of our lives resting on the decision, the stakes are high and we freeze up.  This is part of the problem with those kids that don’t want to grow up, not the only problem but one that is confronting a number of our young men.

Is the solution to minimize the choices available?  Sometimes the paralysis does this all on its own.  But to create a minimal selection situation on purpose would be difficult.  The better solution is to pay better attention to our boys and assess their likes and dislikes.  To see what talents and gifts they demonstrate.  To know their temperament and their strengths.  In other words, to know our boys well.  Then we need to talk to our boys, talk to them a lot.  Working to help them shape their decisions for the future based on their own choices combined with our observations and experience of them as well as life.  In doing so, we don’t leave them with the 400 page menu of life options to choose what they want the next 30 years to be invested in and let them muddle through the selection, believing that we are giving them the opportunity to do what would be most fulfilling to them.

In a world of excess, we must parent our boys even in helping them to make the choices for their future, knowing that there isn’t most likely one best choice for them and we must find this needle in a haystack.  Instead, like much of the parenting tasks it is about teaching, guiding, correcting and directing.

REFERENCES:

1. Too many choices? Today's abundance of consumer options can stall our decision-making and even wear away our well-being. But there are solutions.
BY TORI DeANGELIS
 http://www.apa.org/monitor/jun04/toomany.html

2. Doing Better but Feeling Worse: The Paradox of Choice
Barry Schwartz and Andrew Ward
Swarthmore College  http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/bschwar1/Choice%20Chapter.Revised.pdf