Americans embrace choices and live by the promise choices are expected to deliver: happiness, freedom and success. Advertising slogans such as “Have it Your Way” or “Happiness in Your Choices” attract customers and improve bottom line. Americans are trained to make choices at such a young age that they believe it’s an inborn ability that everyone shares.
Sheena Iyengar looks deeply at choosing and has discovered many surprising things about it. She concludes that the following three assumptions about choices are problematic and don’t always hold true:
1. Make your own choices.
If a choice affects you, you should be the only one to make it. In the mind of the Americans, the primary locus of choice is the individual.
Iyengar and Mark Lepper conducted an interesting experiment in Japantown, San Francisco. They brought 7 to 9-year-old Anglo- and Asian Americans to the laboratory and divided them into three groups. The first group was instructed by Ms. Smith that they could choose what anagram puzzles they wanted to work on from six piles and what markers to use. The second group got to work with what Ms. Smith chose for them. The third group was told that their mothers had made the choices on their behalf.
Anglo-American children performed the best when they were given the freedom to choose. In fact they finished two and a half times more puzzles than if the choices were made for them. Asian Americans on the contrary did the best when the decisions were dictated by their mothers, and second best when they could choose for themselves.
Parents of the first generation immigrants typically have strong influence on their children. The children view themselves and the key figures in their lives as the collective self and therefore would do things to please those important others. If pressured to make individual choices, their performance actually suffers. So this assumption only holds true when the self is clearly divided from others. Only people grow up in the paradigm of individualism find choosing for themselves motivating.
2. More options lead to better choices.
If this were true, we shouldn’t encounter the choice overload problem. People may like the 100 different flavors of ice cream or 300 different kinds of jam at the supermarket. Iyengar’s experiment demonstrated that even though more people would stop for a taste from a display of 24 flavors of jam instead of 6, of the people who stopped, 30% bought from the selection of 6 vs. 3% from the 24.
Too many choices cause procrastination, worse decisions and lower satisfaction even when people do objectively better. Participation rate of retirement savings drops with the increase of plan choices, and furthermore participants are more likely to put their money in pure money market and avoid the stock and equity funds. Researches confirm that when people have to make a decision with 10 or more options, they usually make poor choices.
3. Never say ‘no’ to choice.
Iynegar interviewed parents whose newborns had to be put on life support and eventually died when a decision was reached to remove the ventilator. French parents would say something like, “Baby Rose was with us for such a short time but she taught us so much!’ American parents were more likely to say, “We can’t believe they led us to make such a decision. It felt like we played a role in the execution of our baby.” The difference is in France doctors make the decision as to whether or not to unplug life support and when, and in America the decision is the responsibility of the parents. When the American parents were asked whether they’d prefer to hand that decision to the doctor, the response was an astounding “No!” Even though the unthinkable decision made them feel trapped, angry, guilty and in some cases depressed, Americans couldn’t imagine giving up the right of choice to someone else, especially on such personal and important matter.
Coming from a culture in which individuality was suppressed, I can appreciate the collective self and the individual self. My self wasn’t clearly divided until I embarked on a self-discovery journey 5 years ago. Today I feel comfortable and guilty-free making choices to please myself when the consequence of the choice mostly affects me. At the same time, I never take my eyes off the interests of my family because our lives are intertwined. I am also aware that our children are more American than Asian, and they have every right to make decisions for themselves. I am hoping that they’ll continue to keep their parents’ wishes and values in mind when making the important choices of their lives. Flexibility and awareness of the different forms of selves lead to wise and satisfying choices.
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*Image Credit: http://www.ignant.de/2012/03/26/choices/