The Paradox of Choice
Too Many Career Options Is a Problem for Many
by Thad Peterson
Monster Staff Writer
When Barry Schwartz, a Swarthmore College psychology professor, decided to buy new jeans about seven years ago, he left the mall that day not only with the jeans, but also with an experience that would result in years of study and eventually a book that may be helpful for job seekers beset by seemingly endless choices.
Before that day, shopping for jeans was straightforward: "You told them your waist and your length, and either they fit you well or they didn't, but that was it," says Schwartz.
But shopping at The Gap that day was anything but straightforward. "I told them my size, and they asked if I wanted relaxed fit, easy fit, slim fit, boot cut, button-fly, zipper-fly, acidwashed or stonewashed," he recalls. "And I said, ‘I want the kind that used to be the only kind,' and the person in the store had no idea what that was."
Eventually, Schwartz managed to sort through all the options and get his jeans. "Now there are a million different kinds of cuts and God-knows-how-many manufacturers," he explains. "So even though I never much cared about how my jeans fit before, when I went to buy them a couple years ago, I started to care. If there were all these different versions out there, damn it, one of them ought to be perfect! I ended up getting a pair of jeans that fit me better than any other pair of jeans I'd ever had, and I was less satisfied than I'd ever been before."
Excess Choices, Excess Stress
In his trip to the mall that day, Schwartz stumbled across what he now calls "the paradox of choice." This paradox applies to far more than buying jeans. In fact, it can have a profound impact on people's lives. For many, the excess of choices causes enormous stress when it comes to making decisions -- from which one of the 150 cereals in the supermarket to buy to which college to attend to what career path to choose.
In his book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, Schwartz describes two personality types: satisficers and maximizers. Satisficers can make choices without too much agonizing and without being plagued by regret after the fact. Maximizers, though, are obsessed with making the perfect decision. As a result, they're tortured by the abundance of choices. And once they do choose, they feel they failed to make the best choice. These people "are borderline clinically depressed, so it's not just sort of a mild dissatisfaction," says Schwartz. "It really does seem to be close to pathological."
Given the overwhelming number of professional pursuits available, these feelings can become even more pronounced when choosing a career path or a job. When Schwartz and his colleagues studied 600 graduating college students conducting job searches, they found that "maximizers get better jobs, more interviews, higher starting salaries, and they feel, by every measure we could come up with, worse than satisficers."
"In a world where choices are limited, you could find the best," says Schwartz of job hunting. "If Monster had 10 jobs listed, you could probably find the best job. You might not get it, but you could find it. But when there are thousands of jobs listed, it's just out of the question."
Maximizers inevitably end up asking, "Did I look in the right places? Should I have spent one more day looking?" Schwartz says the maximizers may "do better than satisficers objectively, but there is no doubt that they feel worse, because they regret more."
"It seems reasonable to imagine that if some choice is good, then more choice is better, but psychologically, that's not true," he explains. "Analysis paralysis sets in. There's a kind of regret when you make a choice."
Schwartz advises those who feel they've got the traits of an extreme maximizer to "have appropriately modest expectations and be satisfied with ‘good enough,' then figure out what good enough means instead of torturing themselves looking for the best possible job."