The art of choosing
And when we decide to choose
I’m moving this weekend. And at this point it’s become an annual tradition that makes me want to sell all my things besides my computer and become a nomad. Between the physical, mental and decision fatigue, it’s an overwhelming process to say the least. This year, an especially large piece of the overwhelming pie was the process of choosing an apartment.
I enjoy living in urban areas. I appreciate the walkability, closeness, and character of urban places, but over the last year have experienced some of the drawbacks of urban life such as pests, crime, and cost of living. So the decision to move to a new, urban area closer to my work as opposed to a suburban one was not trivial.
And when you open your apartment search to suburban, urban, and rural areas within driving distance to work (at least for me!) there are many more places to choose from. If this is sounding familiar and stressful it’s because it is. Without something to narrow down a search one becomes easily stressed with the sheer number of possibilities to rent a 1 bedroom.
And as it turns out, if that number is greater than about 7, it’s almost guaranteed to make you overwhelmed.
The 7 +/- 2 rule
You may have heard of this before, but generally humans can hold between 5 and 9 pieces of information in short term memory. With this in mind, (see what I did there??) it makes sense that verification codes are 6 digits, telephone numbers are 7, and bank routing numbers, which I’ve had to use a lot this week and you probably shouldn’t remember, are many more.
This rule was discovered by George Miller by varying 10 tones of pitch, which people are able to recall well up to 5-6 but declines afterwards.
And it applies to decision making as well.
Studies on choice
It was tested with kindergarteners, and if there were many toys to choose from the toddlers had more fun playing with a toy that was picked out for them ahead of time, but if offered the choice of coloring 1 of 6 animals using 1 of 6 colors they preferred to choose rather than have someone choose for them. It appears that if there are greater than 7 +/- 2 options to choose from, we feel stressed, overwhelmed, and may even choose to not make a decision.
Another study found that customers in a grocery store who choose between 20-30 jams are overall less satisfied with their decision and less likely to purchase overall than those who choose between 6 jams.
So it seems that we almost need to narrow down the choices before we can make a decision. And when we do have a limited choice set, we tend to be happier. Usually we tend to think that more choices are better, but maybe there is a limit!
Costs of choice
So this is what I had to do when searching for an apartment. And narrowing it down to a particular city helped to make the decision manageable. But there were costs associated with making this choice. And aside from opportunity cost, which in this scenario was uncertain and hard to predict! I’m talking about the search costs for information on each apartment, the mental capacity to imagine if I would like to live in this place and if it met all the things I was looking for, and the transportation and time it took to visit each option.
It was a lot of work before the move even started!
So sometimes, it may be better to avoid these costs by not choosing. That is, by trusting others who may have already acquired the knowledge necessary to help with your choice, like a real estate agent.
And of course we’re all searching for, and want agency over our lives. So it’s important to choose your battles wisely for where you’d like to spend your time and effort on what decisions. Maybe asking for a recommendation while out to eat can save some mental capacity but what about big, life changing decisions?
Another study was done on parents of children birthed with complications that required life sustaining support in the US and France. The American doctors explained the scenario, the possible treatments, and allowed American parents to choose whether their children would continue on a ventilator, with low probability of survival in a vegetative state, or to pull the cord. This was contrasted with French doctors who prescribed that the child would have their life support discontinued, taking the choice out of the parents hands.
When interviewed at varying times after the tragedy, generally it was the American families that issued more negative emotions such as:
"I keep thinking to myself, 'What if I had chosen differently?' I feel as though I've played a role in an execution."
Whereas the French parents expressed sentiments like: "Noah was here for so little time, but he gave us so much, a new perspective on life." And although American parents were generally less happy with having been given the choice, they still preferred to have it than for the doctor to decide.
If you’re having mixed feelings about choice at this point, don’t feel too bad, so am I. The point of this post was to share that choices are hard, and studying economics can help us with the process of assigning values, and optimizing our choices. And sometimes just being put into a place where you need to make a decision can be a losing proposition. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t, and the decision to trust others with our choices is a choice itself.
“Our lives are a sum total of the choices we have made.”
*Note: Much of the content in this post draw heavily from a book I recently finished on choice called The Art of Choosing by Dr. Sheena Iyengar of Colombia University.
Great work franky! I look forward to reading your next post.
P.S that sounds like a great book 😉
From my personal experience as an elder…this is all so true. It’s nice seeing young people that have such clarity.