A central aim of public policy in a democratic society should be improving the welfare of citizens. Even when resources are plentiful, this is an extremely challenging task, because of the difficulty of defining ‘welfare’
Fifty years of research has confirmed the obvious: freedom and autonomy are essential to human well being. To be free and autonomous is to be able to make choices, meaning that no one compels you to do anything and that there are real options to choose among. Unless people can exert significant control over the events in their lives, they are diminished. At the level of entire societies, there is evidence that democratic political organization, including the protection of civil liberties, has a bigger effect on life satisfaction than does material affluence—at least among those whose material needs are being met.
A central aim of public policy in a democratic society should be improving the welfare of citizens. Even when resources are plentiful, this is an extremely challenging task, because of the difficulty of defining ‘welfare’. Beyond basic necessities, there is great individual variation in what people want from life. This is true with respect to material goods, and also with respect to what people want from their work, their health care, their educational opportunities, the arts and just about everything else. As a result, any specific commitment of public resources – from green spaces to medical facilities -- is likely to please some and displease others.
The way to solve this problem, we are often told, is to provide a wide range of opportunities and let people choose for themselves. Each individual, after all, is in the best position to judge his or her welfare. This idea has been the central dogma of neoclassical Economics from its inception. To improve welfare, one must increase freedom of choice, not only because increased choice is intrinsically good, but because it increases the chances that each individual will be able to find something that serves his or her interests.
Adding options is what economists call ‘Pareto efficient’: it makes no one worse off (because those who are satisfied with the options already available can ignore the new ones), and is bound to make someone who is not satisfied with existing options better off. Though this line of argument is normally applied to the world of material goods, it seems even more applicable to culture. For in addition to the fact that choice enables each individual to participate in cultural forms that suit his or her own preferences, a proliferation of cultural forms and objects will also have ‘positive externalities’: people who wouldn’t normally choose to listen to hip hop music nonetheless get to benefit from its immediacy on those occasions when they are exposed to it; and people who aren’t turned on by abstract expressionism can still have their conception of ‘what visual art can be’ expanded when they see it.
The proliferation of cultural forms enlivens the imagination of all members of a society. It may even empower people to be producers as well as consumers of culture—to find their own, unique mode of self expression. Those who are offended by abstract expressionism, or feel assaulted by hip hop, can always choose to stay away from them. So in culture, as in supermarkets, if some choice is good, then more choice is better.
If this statement is true, then all signs point to a culture that has never been in better health. A new work of fiction is published every 30 seconds, and we have literally hundreds of TV stations to choose from. New modes of distribution are making it easier and easier for us to gain access to all this cultural diversity. Amazon puts ‘the world’s largest bookstore’ in each of our homes. TIVO allows us to watch the TV shows we want, when we want. The Internet allows us to taste and then download all the music there is.
Each of these new forms of cultural distribution allows us to tailor what we are exposed to, to fit our own tastes and preferences, while developments like the omnipresent iPod allow us to edit out every moment of every cultural object or event that doesn’t suit us. Naysayers may complain that because of commercial pressure, there is actually less cultural diversity than meets the eye (“fifty-seven channels and nothing on,” as Bruce Springsteen sang.) But even if this is partly true, the Internet has so dramatically reduced ‘barriers to entry’ into the world of culture that the enterprising consumer can now step around the commercial behemoths and find productions that may not have enough mass market appeal to make them viable.
The logic behind the presumption that ‘if some choice is good, more is better’ seems compelling, but what might be called the ‘psycho-logic’ of choice tells us something different. In the last decade, evidence has accumulated that there can be too much of a good thing—at which point options paralyze rather than liberate.
When there are too many choices, two things can happen: satisfaction with whatever is chosen diminishes or people choose not to choose at all. The first demonstration of what I have called ‘the paradox of choice’ was a study by psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper in which shoppers at a gourmet food store were confronted with a display offering samples of a high-quality imported jam. On one day, six flavours were on display; on another, 24 flavours were on display. Shoppers who stopped by the display were given a coupon that saved them a dollar on any jam they bought. What the researchers found was that the large display attracted more customers than the small one, but when the time came to buy, those who had seen the large display were only one-tenth as likely to buy as shoppers who had seen the small display. And it isn’t just about jam. Subsequent studies have shown that:
• When owners of convenience stores were convinced to reduce the variety of soft drinks and snacks they had available, sales volume increased, as did customer satisfaction;
• Young adults made more matches in an evening of ‘speed dating’ in which they met eight potential partners than in an evening in which they met 20;
• When employees are offered a variety of different funds in which to put voluntary 401(k) retirement contributions, the more funds are available, the less likely they are to invest in any. For every ten funds offered, the rate of participation goes down by two per cent, and this occurs despite the fact that in many cases, employees are passing up significant sums of matching money from employers.
My colleagues and I have identified several reasons why increasing options can lead to decreased satisfaction with the chosen option:
The prominence of ‘filtering’, driven by extraordinary amounts of choice, tells us something important: our cultural experiences will only be as diverse as the filters we use to help us select them. With all that is available, unmediated browsing is impossible, and we are more reliant on filters now than ever before. Indeed, we couldn’t get through a day without them, and as a result, an honest appraisal of cultural variety requires an assessment of the filters people use.
[This article has been reprinted, with permission, from Rotman Management, the magazine of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management]