The Paradox of Choice

Malcolm Gladwell says choice is the key to happiness.

Barry Schwartz says choice leads to paralysis.

Both are right. The ability to make our own choices is essential to feeling free and in control of our lives, and therefore a prerequisite for happiness. Too much choice and we become overwhelmed; the abundance of choice raises our expectations, lowers our satisfaction with the outcome of our choices, and we start over-thinking everything. That's where the Net comes in.

The great breakthrough of the Net is not the amount or information that is available or the fact that it allows people to connect with one another in so many ways regardless of where they live. The true value of the Net is in how it enables us effortlessly navigate vast amounts of information and manage choices on a scale previously unimaginable.

Think about it. You expect that you should be able to Google anything and you expect all the relevant information about that topic to be found and displayed for you in fractions of a second. It doesn't matter if Google returns 610,000,000 results, you know you that 19 times out of 20 you will find what you are looking for in the first few clicks. Tools like Facebook make it easy to connect and communicate with dozens or even hundreds of people. Zentact surfs the web alongside you, tells you when you come across something that would interest one of your contacts, then let's you easily share it with that person. And speaking of stumbling, StumbleUpon exposes you to all kinds of hidden gems on the Net by making all the choices for you. These things would have sounded like science fiction in the not too distant past, but the abundance of information on the Net would be useless if the Net wasn't so good at making us feel that we can consistently make good choices with minimal effort.

The Net is shifting the ground beneath our feet. People expect the irrelevant information to be filtered out by default; they expect everything they encounter on the Net to add value to their day; they expect it to be easy; they expect it to require a minimal time investment. So how do you think they feel when they find themselves in the middle of a 30 minute survey where most of the questions are irrelevant, long grids, or things they already told you in a previous survey? The Net has raised the bar and we blissfully ignore the new rules while we puzzle over rising panel attrition and declining response rates. If you want an idea of how a typical survey looks in the context of a typical Net session, just imagine Lucy & Desi appearing in the middle of your favorite TV show to tell you “you'll be glad tomorrow, if you smoke Philip Morris today.”