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Doing Better but Feeling Worse: The Paradox of Choice

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Doing Better but Feeling Worse: The Paradox of Choice
Doing Better but Feeling Worse
The Paradox of Choice

Barry Schwartz (Barry Schwartz) is a social psychology and social behavior professor, he is the author of several books, he wrote, "the plight of choice: Why more is less”
Barry Schwartz mentioned that more choice does not make us be happy in his TED speech. For example, he said: A few decades ago there only got few options of Levi's jeans, and it is very easy to make a choice. We only need to take fifteen minutes to buy a pair of jeans. Nowadays, there are thousands of jeans and we often try on the results of two hours by come out nothing.
In industrialized societies, people typically there is a dogmatic bias, that people's choices, the more ‘choice’ we have, the greater degree of freedom and people's well-being will also increases. However, this is not true.

Diversity of choice doesn’t bring people freedom, but paralyzed.
Once the option increase, we will find that making choice is a very difficult task, as Barry Schwartz mentioned that he had a co-worker's exposure to mutual funds investment records, he found that when the number of options increase, the number of participants are reduced. It is because employees do not know which is better inside fifty program. And they continue to delay the date to make their decision. At the end, people could get less than they would get .
Even thought, we overcome the paralysis of choice, and made the right choice, the results of our satisfaction with the choice is still lower than before. For example, we buy some salad dressing. We select our one in dozens of styles. However, we suspect that there is not a better choice, and then regret their original choice.

The number of options increase, let their expectations become higher than before
There is also the opportunity cost. People measure the value of something by comparing the things they got. Once the style increase, people willing to find a "perfect choices” within those choices, it makes their

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