The Paradox of Choice

More is not better. It's not even as good.

Kaitlyn Tiffany, a smart young writer for the Atlantic with a name that sounds like the Onion made up byline for a smart young writer for the Atlantic, recently interviewed my second favorite anthropologist, Helen Fisher, in an article called The Woman Who Made Online Dating Into a “Science.” The quotes around “science” are theirs, not mine, and the paywall is also theirs, not mine, so I apologize in advance if you can’t access the full article.

My favorite anthologist is my late cousin, Dr. Paul Puritt. But he was all about traditional social structures in Tanzania and Zimbabwe, and she’s all about getting laid on Match.com… so…. But both very cool scientists.

Tiffany isn’t just interested in Helen’s Fisher original work with Chemistry.com or her five volumes about the science and history of romantic love. Fisher has famously studied love from every angle: historic, poetic, scientific - I quote her groundbreaking work extensively in my book about sex and love addiction. Fisher’s thesis is “Romantic love is deeply embedded in the architecture and chemistry of the human brain,” and she has the fMRI studies to prove it. But Tiffany wasn't interested in the theoretical. She was interested in the practical.

“I told Fisher about my own bad experience with dating apps, how clinical I had become, how mean I could be. I told her I got compulsive about swiping and did it all the time, for fear of missing out on the perfect profile. I swiped at work, at the gym, on the train; then I would go on dates and want to leave as soon as the person opened his mouth. I felt angry at my dates.

“‘I’m sure that happens,’” she told me. Those struggles are a result of “cognitive overload”: I was allowing myself too many options at one time. Online daters “binge,” as she put it. If I’d looked at only three Tinder profiles a day, she said, then I would have been “‘doing it the way our ancestors did, and that would be much better.’” But she acknowledged that it is nearly impossible to make yourself do that. That is not the way anybody uses a dating app.”

It’s what economists call the paradox of choice: Having more options doesn’t increase our satisfaction, it decreases it. As Barry Schwartz put it in his book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, “the fact that some choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better.” We are overloaded with options, and the anxiety that we will not choose the best one is paralyzing. Picture your local CVS sunscreen selection: UVA, UVB, SPF30, SPF31, SPF46, SPF50, SPF55… lotion, spray, sports stick, tinted, glimmer, self-tan, long-lasting, waterproof, moisturizing - I’m paralyzed for half an hour figuring out how best to not to burn my nose at the beach. How am I supposed to handle choosing a lover?

In Italy, demographers have become worried that singles now outnumber families, with 33.2% of the population being single compared to 31.2% being part of a family. A recent report found that over 60% of Italians feel conditioned by external factors when it comes to being single, including stress and job insecurity. One neurologist and psychotherapist, Maria Cristina Gori, describes the choice to be single as a “result of a spasmodic search for the ‘perfect partner’ which promptly results in nothing done, because it is impossible.”

So people are giving up. Only 30% of teens in 2021 reported ever having had sex, down from 50% in the 1990s and, I’m willing to bet, a fuck of a lot higher than that in the 1970s. (I was there. Trust me.) This, despite having a DTF locator in their pockets. They have so many options that they opt for None of the Above.

A data scientist once told me that if the Miss America judges had to make their decision one contestant at a time in alphabetical order, we’d never get a winner. “Thank you, Miss Alabama, but I haven’t seen Miss Arkansas yet.” “You’re a delight, Miss Colorado. But maybe Miss Delaware is even more delightful?” “That was great Miss New Jersey, but I have high hopes for Miss New York.” “That’s it? Miss Wyoming is the last one? No, wait! Let me see the Carolinas again! Please!”

Also, he said, the judges would shoot themselves.

When Springsteen moaned that there were “57 Channels and Nothing On,” streaming was still 15 years in the future and there was already too much TV. Ghosting someone, or being ghosted, is a reaction to choice overload not unlike being so overwhelmed by the Netflix home screen that you just watch a rerun of Friends. As terrified we are of being alone (anuptaphobia, some social psychologists are calling it), we’re even more terrified of choosing the wrong partner. How can I settle down with with Mr. Missouri when I haven’t kissed Mr. Nevada yet?

“Learning to choose is hard,” says Schwartz. “Learning to choose well is harder. And learning to choose well in a world of unlimited possibilities is harder still, perhaps too hard.”

ADDENDUM (and this is why I should not post a column at 11pm, because I will certainly be awakened in the morning by the vital thought I forgot to add…): Everything in this column applies to just about all the perfectly normal people in the world. It applies double to love addicts. Because decision-making is a function of dopamine, and we addicts have very wonky dopamine systems. Every choice is a question of “which of these will give me more pleasure, which will make me happier?” and anticipation of pleasure is what produces a spike of dopamine. Not the pleasure itself so much, but the anticipation of pleasure. And addicts of all stripes have inefficient dopamine receptors. We need a bigger jolt to feel the same pleasure.

So every Italian population study, every book about the paradox of choice… they should have an asterisk that warns: “This may not apply to the 6% or so of the population that are addicts. Or it may apply even more. We still have to decide on that…. and apparently deciding is hard.”