December 2023
Barry Schwartz taught psychology at Swarthmore College and at Berkeley Haas for 50 years. He works on the interaction between economics, psychology, and morality. His books include the national bestseller The Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More. Schwartz's TED talks have been viewed by more than 25 million people. He is teaching “How We Decide” with us this winter.
Let’s start with a softball. What’s the secret to happiness?
[laughs] What I say in my book and when I give talks is that the secret to happiness is low expectations. Admittedly, an overstatement. But what I mean is that the secret to happiness is modest and realistic expectations. We're living in a world — by “we”, I mean people who live in rich, democratic countries — where it's almost impossible to keep expectations from escalating. And the result is that whatever you get, no matter how good it is, is not as good as you expect it to be. Keeping expectations low is a very, very useful skill.
So good enough is good enough?
Yes. One of the things we found is that this obsession with “the best” seems to decrease as people get older. You become less of a maximizer. I believe that's because experience teaches people that good enough is good enough. It's very hard to convince young people of that, though. When you say “good enough,” what young people hear is “settling”. And “settling” is not a neutral description. “Settling” is a criticism. And, you know, why would a 20-year-old settle?
There’s such an abundance of choices these days it can all feel overwhelming and paralyzing. What are some tips and tricks to making decisions?
Until you develop a new habit of making decisions, it’ll probably feel very uncomfortable. But there are lots of ways to approach it.
For one, you can decide when to decide. Set a deadline. By choosing when to choose, you can remind yourself that good enough is good enough. The reason I say “remind yourself” is that none of us is looking for the best in every decision. For example, when you go to the post office for stamps, you’re not going to ask to see every stamp they have, right? We know how to make decisions fast. The trick is to take a strategy that we already use and apply it in other parts of our life. That's going to be very uncomfortable for people, because there's always lurking in your mind the possibility that if you just spend five more minutes looking, you'll find something better.
Two, you can farm out decisions to other people. Say you need a new cell phone and your friend recently got one. Call your friend – “You like your cell phone? Okay, I'll get that one, too”. Is it the best one for you? Who knows. But you’ll end up with at least a good-enough phone, and you can go on with your life.
Three, try to limit the options. That’s key to managing regret and expectations. Part of what triggers regret is that you think of all the things you’ve said “no” to. If you limit the number of things you consider, you’ll automatically be less inclined to regret your choice … and there are just so, so many choices out there.
For example, these days most websites have a “Show All” button. You'll get a screen of options, and there's a button on the bottom that says “Show All”. What I tell people is to never, under any circumstances, click that button. Because that is the recipe for misery.
But what if you make a bad decision?
We all make bad decisions, so sometimes regret is appropriate. And I think regret is a very important emotion, because it kind of underlines when we’ve done something wrong, so that we don’t do it again. You want the sting of regret so that you'll bend over backwards when a similar situation arises. So, I am not an advocate of a regret-free life.
Older adults are often weighing huge life decisions about where to live, if/when to make a move, how not to be a burden to loved ones. You’d prefer not to regret such monumental decisions, right?
Absolutely. Eight years ago, my wife and I made the decision to move west to be close to our kids and our grandkids. That was a monumental decision. We spent five years coming here for a couple of months in the summer, exploring different neighborhoods, testing what it felt like to be away from home and our lifetime of associations back east.
When we pulled the trigger, we joined a synagogue immediately, because my wife was so concerned that she would feel socially isolated and wanted a community. We knew a fair number of people here, but nothing like the lifetime of living somewhere does, so she wanted that. She wanted to just slide gracefully into a welcoming community and get to know people and get actively involved in projects that she cares about. We're not particularly religious people, so it was really about social interactions more than anything else.
But now, friends of ours are starting to move into graduated care places. So that's looming for us — knock on wood, we're healthy, we're ambulatory, we can manage — but you know, things happen. So being completely unprepared for a possible life change seems foolish.
On the other hand, it's incredibly unpleasant to contemplate. I think a lot of people in my age group think that the decision-making part of life is over, and then they get confronted with all of these monumental decisions, and they don't know how to make them.
My siblings, parents and I talked about it all the time, and never made a decision until we were forced to make a decision.
That's exactly what happened with both my wife and myself with respect to our parents. Circumstances pushed us. We would have been twiddling our thumbs and agonizing endlessly if it still seemed there were still choices to be made. It was a nightmare. I want to spare our children from making that decision.
So this harkens back to your tip about deciding when to decide.
Pull the trigger. Just go for it.
What got you interested in decision-making in the first place?
I spent almost my entire career criticizing the assumptions that economists make about what people care about and how they go through life. I think the free market has its virtues, but for the most part, it's devastatingly cruel to people. My focus has been that if we really knew what people cared about and what was important, we would not organize societies around market competition. Gains are small and the costs are enormous.
An argument that people always gave me was “the market caters to freedom of choice, and freedom of choice is the most important thing.” And then my mouth would open and no words would come out, because, I mean, that's true.
Then this study done at Stanford appeared showing that when you give people a lot of freedom of choice, it paralyzes them, not liberates them. And the light bulb went on. Suddenly I got interested in how people make decisions and what the optimal arrangement is for decision-making. But the real motive force for this predates my interest in decision-making by many years. If I were to define my career, it would be “the psychology of anti-capitalism”. It’s a weird field to be in.
A small group?
I don't think it's grown much. You’ll find a lot of people who criticize market capitalism but it doesn't seem to have much of an impact on the kind of work they do.
What would you like OLLI members to take away from your course?
They’ll understand that the issue isn’t just having too many options but that the choices themselves are more complicated. They’ll learn that every decision you make is a prediction. There are no certainties and most people are really bad at negotiating uncertainty. And they’ll learn strategies to help with decision-making.
Sounds like taking your course would be a good decision.
I’d like to think so.