Ah-ha! The Paradox of Choice, indeed. Just replace “salad dressing” with “men” (or, okay, “women”), and you’ll see why so many people complain about dating in New York.
(Also, finally an explanation for my rampant OBOing.)
“Paralysis is a consequence of having too many choices. You really want to get the choice right if it’s for all eternity. You don’t want to pick even the wrong salad dressing. The second is that even if we manage to overcome the paralysis and make a choice, we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be if we had fewer options to choose from.
There are several reasons for this.
One of them is that with a lot of different salad dressings to choose from, if you buy one and it’s not perfect - and, you know, what salad dressing is? - it’s easy to imagine that you could have made a different choice that would have been better. And what happens is this imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision you made and this regret subtracts from the satisfaction you get out of the decision you made, even if it was a good decision.
The more options there, the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option you chose.
Second, what economists call opportunity costs - how much the way in which we value things depends on what we compare them to - well, when there are lots of alternatives to consider, it is easy to imagine the attractive features of alternatives that you reject, that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you’ve chosen.
Third, escalation of expectations. All this choice makes it possible for [people] to [find better matches]. But [they] feel worse. Why? The reason is, with all of these options available, [one’s] expectations about how good [that choice] should be went up - I had no particular expectations when they only came in one flavor. When they came in a hundred flavors, dammit, one of them should’ve been perfect. What I got was good, but it wasn’t perfect. And so I compared what I got to what I expected, and what I got was disappointing in comparison.
Adding options to people’s lives can’t help but increase the expectations people have about how good those options will be and what that produces is less satisfaction with results even when they’re good results.”
When perfection is the expectation, the best you can ever hope for is disappointment.
“The Secret to Happiness,” concludes Mr. Schwartz, “is low expectations.”
HA! He’s definitely figured out dating, that’s for SURE. I know quite a few people, myself included, who would do well to spend some time thinking about this.
