“The more options we have -> the more information and effort we have to go into evaluating them -> the more likely we are to be dissatisfied with the outcome. Why?
1) Most people hate making trade-offs and will often avoid making choices until they absolutely have to, so having an abundance of choices reminds us of this dilemma: that life is about making choices, yet we must make them within the vacuum of uncertainty and an unknown future.
2) Most people are bad at dealing with uncertainty, estimating odds and often don’t calculate probabilities properly because we have incomplete information. So trump this up to certain cognitive flaws in our human decision-making apparatus.
3) Our expectations get raised after spending time weighting the tradeoffs and understanding the choices, so we get disappointed when the outcome is not as perfect as we expect. The irony is that the outcome is almost always better, i.e. a better fitting pair of jeans, but our perceptions don’t see this rationally or objectively. As we know from countless studies, not to mention certain wisdoms found in traditions like Buddhism, our satisfaction is often function of when expectations match our perceived reality. In economist language, dissatisfaction occurs when the transaction costs of making the decision exceed the actual benefit. ” – Fuzzy Signal’s review of Barry Schwartz’s ‘Paradox of Choice’
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