The paradox of choice

Do you feel free? Do you think you can do everything you want whenever you want? Is freedom present in our lifes? Do you feel under stress when you are purchasing products or services? Of course we are free to do whatever we want, and as time goes by we are freer than we were because our current society is trying to break ancient behavioral rules and opening our frame of action, to let us act without restrictions.

How do people choice between different options? Which process do we follow before purchasing a product or service? People normally follow a standard when purchasing products or services. We all start by perceiving a need (recognizing a problem) we must satisfy. Once we have indentified this need, we start a research process seeking for value (we search for information whether internal or external to try to find out which products/services can satisfy our needs). At this point, the biggest problem arises. A person has a wide range of products or services and has to evaluate them and select which one is the best to buy. Here is where dissatisfaction appears, just after paying the product. In spite of having the product you desired, you had a lot of options (meaning also high expectations), so you’re not happy about the choice you took because it always could be better. As Barry Schwartz mentioned during his speech if there’s only one option, it world’s fault but if I have multiple options, then it’s my fault.

Barry Schwartz is trying to link multiple choice purchasing situations with what we call post purchasing dissatisfaction. The more options we have, the more likely we are to be dissatisfied, because there’s always a cost of opportunity when we decide to buy one product instead of another.

As far as I’m concerned, having the chance to buy everything you want with multiple options causes a feeling of guilty and regret due to cost of opportunity. Indeed, a consumer decision process is not as freer as it used to be. There are always some variables that are forcing the customer to take a quick decision. The first variable is TIME. People normally go to buy with their family, children or friends. When you are buying a product that implies a lot of money, usually you should need a minimum amount of time to take your decision, but time pressures and causes dissatisfaction because of being hasty.

What’s more, there’s always a salesmen assessing during your process that could disturb or slant your opinion. Normally, salesmen increase expectations about a product because they are trying to sell as much as they can, so the more they increase your expectations the more will be the gap between these expectations and the real performance (causing more dissatisfaction).

Human people is not only frustrated because of choosing one product from a wide range, is frustrated because we tend to create excessive expectations about products or services. A human need it’s not always satisfied 100%, so the gap between this 100% need and the product performance is what we call dissatisfaction.

One year ago I had a personal experience about the paradox of choice. I thought it was so frustrating but now I am happy that I was lucky about the choice I took. One year ago, I had to select which university to go as an exchange student. The process is so easy: we have a list of 100 universities and you should choose all the universities you want. Then you are selected depending on your grades. My first choice was Los Angeles (USC) and my second option was Austin (UT). It was so frustrating because I wanted LA and I did all my consumer decision process as perfectly as I could, but it was denied.

The positive side of this process was that my expectations about going to Austin were lower than the expectations I would have if going to LA. So, comparing my first expectations to now, I’m totally satisfied. I like Austin more than LA, because of UT, but also due to my friends and the city. Sometimes, happiness doesn’t depend only in your expectations; it also depends on the use of the product and the grade of implication. I have some friends studying there and they are unsatisfied because of the high expectations they created. To sum up, I would like to stress that any consumer decision process is not as easy as it would seem before starting the process. However, what is totally wrong is creating low expectations and removing most of the options to ensure happiness, because the pursuit of happiness is based on different aspects. In my opinion, we should have a positive vision of what we are doing, we know that the rules are imposed and that our world is full options thanks to information and globalization. The most logical option is understand this complex world and try to coexist by adjusting our expectations to real satisfaction.