The Paradox of Choice

Barry Schwartz, a psychology professor at Swarthmore College, is the author of ";The Paradox of Choice,"; an interesting book just released in paperback. In a recent interview with Mark Hurst (a business consultant focused on improving the online customer experience) the author comments the following:

Q - What is the ";paradox of choice";?

Everyone agrees that having choice is better than not having choice.
It seems evident that if choice is good, then more choice is better.
The paradox is that this ";obvious"; truth isn’t true. It turns out
that a point can be reached where, with more choice, people are
worse off.

People can’t ignore options - they have to pay attention to them. If
they make a choice, is there another choice would have been better?
There’s more effort put into making decisions, and less in enjoying
them. What’s nagging is the possibility that, if they had chosen
differently, they could have gotten something better.

Here’s a story from my own experience. While vacationing in this
little town on the Oregon coast, I went to buy wine for dinner. I
had to buy the wine from a store that had only five varieties, so I
picked one. It wasn’t great wine, but no one cared - what can you
expect when there are only five options? In Manhattan, there are
20,000 options, so it’s reasonable to expect that you’ll find
something close to perfect. But even if you find one that’s much
better than anything in that Oregon store, you end up disappointed -
because your expectations can only go up with all those choices.";

Sometimes I have the feeling that, yes, there are too many options in the world of wine. Have you the same feeling?