The Paradox of Choice

As an Economics major, all of my instincts were going crazy during Friday’s class. I realized that Truth, Lies, and Literature is essentially based off of the principals of Economics. The most fundamental assumption of economics is that “people will behave rationally”. Applied to econ, this simply states that people will buy things they need, or that consumers will not overpay for goods. Truth, Lies, in Lit challenges this assumption. Even though we have been primed our whole lives to follow authority, Janelle challenges us to not take anything for face value. This is a new concept for a lot of us (definitely myself) and is perhaps a reason we have had such a hard time choosing our assignment that is due tomorrow.

That leads me to my next economic topic: choice. There is a theory in economic thought that states that the more choices we have, the happier we will be. After all, who wants to eat mac and cheese every night? However, psychologist Barry Schwartz provides another interpretation of choice. He states that over the course of history, the amount of choices we have been subject to has increased exponentially. Now we have thousands of different options to choose in everything we do from eating to watching television. He calls this theory the “paradox of choice”. Although we should be happier being able to choose what we want to do, we are actually overwhelmed by the stress of having to make a decision. Another point he made that I thought was interesting was that we can never be sure that we made the right choice. Take, for example, our recent offered choices for the upcoming assignment. I want to do topic 1, but topic 3 also seems interesting. If I choose to do topic 1, the whole time I would be thinking about what it would be like doing topic 3, or if it were easier. This leads us to feeling more dissatisfied with decision-making. Choice and manipulation are two powerful things. I find that when I step into class each day, I need to strip myself from my economic thought, and instead open myself to new possibilities, as this class is not structured like anything I have previously taken.

Here is a Ted Talk about the Paradox of Choice. It’s pretty short!

http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice?language=en