Barry Schwartz

Who they are

This page records the public professional record only. Nothing adverse is recorded and no motive is attributed.

The book gives his title as the Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action, emeritus, at Swarthmore College. It records that the work began with an American Psychologist article on self-determination that Martin Seligman solicited, and that his programme on maximising was supported in part by the Positive Psychology Network and Swarthmore College. His wider career was not surveyed for this page.

Key papers

Schwartz, B. (2016), The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, Revised Edition, New York: Ecco, ISBN 9780062449924. The vault holds a full read-through of the revised edition from page photographs.

The maximising work with co-authors, including the 2006 job-search study in Psychological Science, is described in the book. The papers themselves were not opened for this page.

Key ideas

The book's target is a syllogism: more freedom means more well-being, more choice means more freedom, so more choice means more well-being. Schwartz accepts the first two steps and disputes the third. He grants that when people have no choice life is almost unbearable, and argues that as options keep multiplying, choice stops liberating and starts to debilitate.

One of the book's central distinctions is between maximisers, who seek only the best, and satisficers, who accept what is good enough. He reports that maximisers in a job-search study landed jobs with starting salaries 20 per cent higher than satisficers did, and also felt worse about them. He argues that the subjective experience is what counts.

The revised edition engages the evidence that followed. An endnote cites the 2010 meta-analysis by Benjamin Scheibehenne, Rainer Greifeneder and Peter Todd, which found the average effect of choice set size tiny, and reads it as masking large effects in both directions. It then cites the 2015 meta-analysis by Alexander Chernev and colleagues as identifying factors that decide when large choice sets help and when they hurt. In the body text it adds the concession on preference articulation, keyed to Chernev's 2003 work, and an optimum of eight to ten options from Shah and Wolford's pen study (p. 109). The preface says that even with much more evidence in hand the arguments of 2005 stand (p. xiii).

Readers weigh those together differently. One reading is that the book states a general effect and carries a footnote. Another is that the book already contains the qualification the later literature settled on. The record on this site notes both. See choice overload.

The concession and the thesis

The 2016 revised edition holds two statements that a reader can set side by side. The thesis is that more choice has stopped liberating and started to debilitate. The concession, added to the body text and keyed to Chernev's 2003 paper, is that when people know exactly what they want there is no such thing as too much choice (p. 109). The edition also states that the arguments of 2005 stand (p. xiii), so the concession sits beside the thesis and does not replace it.

For a shop owner the two statements together are more useful than either one. The thesis is a warning about browsers and about decisions where no option is clearly best. The concession says that regulars who know the product are not the problem. See ideal point.

What the book does not supply

It does not supply retail field data. The grocery studies of Broniarczyk, Boatwright, Nunes and Borle, which tested what happens when a real range is cut, are not cited in the book as far as the vault's read-through shows. That is why this site sets them against the book and not inside it.

The eight to ten figure for the pen study is given in the book at second hand and comes from a stall, not a shop. A reader who quotes it should say so.

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