One of the areas affected is dating. Relationships are being treated like any other product — online we can browse and compare prospective sexual partners.
One of those problems was noted by the comedian Aziz Ansari in his book Modern Romance. In it, a woman recounts meeting a man on the dating app Tinder, then spending the journey to their first date swiping through the service to see if anyone better was available.
Failure to commit to a date or a relationship can itself be a choice — indeed, the sociology professor who helped Ansari with his book, Eric Klinenberg , wrote Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone to account for those who have stepped off the treadmill of dating, the nightmare of having more choice but less reason to choose. Psychologist Philip Zimbardo fears that, thanks to how online pornography is offering more choices for masturbatory satisfactions, becoming more interactive and immersive, choosing real-life romantic relationships will become even less appealing.
The ostensibly good news is that BT Sport is competing with Sky for football rights. But if you are already a Sky Sports subscriber or, perhaps more pertiniently, watched the free-to-air games on ITV , it means the opposite. If Barney wants to watch the same amount of football as last year, he will now have to pay more.
That sort of phenomenon repeats itself across TV more generally. But who can afford that kind of outlay? A decade ago everything you could ever wish to watch was on Sky if you were prepared, admittedly, to pay a monthly subscription to Murdoch. A decade before that, all good TV was on terrestrial, so once you had paid for the telly and the licence you were set.
Anger at this state of affairs is comprehensible to anyone who lives in an advanced western society in and has to choose between mobile phone plans, schools, and water, gas and electricity suppliers — not to mention minimally distinguishable prospective dates.
We feel that it is our fault we are paying too much and we are anxious that a better deal is just around the corner. For those with intellectual disabilities, being free to choose from a wide variety of activities has been shown to develop self-empowerment and social interaction. In a pioneering experiment with supermarket shoppers , psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper found consumers confronted with a larger choice range were more likely to make a sub-optimal choice, or make no choice at all.
As noted by another researcher, psychologist Barry Schwartz :. Consistent with the evidence that choice is not an unmixed blessing, results have begun to appear in the literature on human decision making to indicate that adding options for people can make the choice situation less rather than more attractive — that indeed, sometimes people prefer it if others make the choices for them. Read more: Inducing choice paralysis: how retailers bury customers in an avalanche of options.
But at what point does more become less? The experiments by Iyengar and Lepper offered participants an array of six, 24 or 30 choices.
Might some participants have been just as decisive with 12 choices as six? But the subjective outcome may be that shoppers will feel overwhelmed and dissatisfied. This dissociation between objective and subjective results creates a significant challenge for retailers and marketers that look to choice as a way to enhance the perceived value of their goods and services.
Choice can no longer be used to justify a marketing strategy in and of itself. Discovering how much assortment is warranted is a considerable empirical challenge. But companies that get the balance right will be amply rewarded. You have 1 free article s left this month. You are reading your last free article for this month.
Subscribe for unlimited access. Create an account to read 2 more. Decision making and problem solving. Skip to main content. February 7, Freedom of choice is an American virtue As Americans we are proud of the fact that we get to choose our government leaders. We make thousands of choices every day Researchers at Cornell University estimate we make The strategies we use to decide or not decide There are certain decision making styles and strategies that guide the process: Impulsiveness — Leverage the first option you are gives and be done.
Compliance — Choosing with the most pleasing, comfortable and popular option as it pertains to those impacted. Delegating — Not making the decision yourself, but pushing it off to trusted others.
Balancing — Weighing the factors involved, studying them and then using the information to render the best decision in the moment.
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