Salad Dressing
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I'll give you some examples of what modern progress has made possible for us. This is my supermarket. Not such a big one. I want to say just a word about salad dressing. A hundred seventy-five salad dressings in my supermarket. If you don't count the 10 extra-virgin olive oils and 12 balsamic vinegars you could buy to make a very large number of your own salad dressings, in the off-chance that none of the 175 the store has on offer suit you. So this is what the supermarket is like.
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| Paradox Of Choice |
Aku akan memberikan contoh untukmu. Misal aku mempunyai Supermarket, meskipun tidak terlalu besar. Akan aku tunjukkan salah satu etalasenya pada Salad Dressing (Bumbu dari Salad). 175 Bumbu dari salad itu ada di Supermarket ku. Jika kau menghitungnya misal
10 minyak zaitun perasan pertama, dan 12 cuka balsam yang engkau bisa membelinya di dalam jumlah besar di campuran saus salad mu. Dan itu menjadikan jenisnya akan sampai pada 175jenis yang kutawarkan padamu. Kalian bisa melihatnya di gambar.
And then you go to the consumer electronics store to set up a stereo system
- speakers,
- CD player,
- tape player,
- tuner,
- amplifier.
And in this one single consumer electronics store, there are that many stereo systems. We can construct six and a half million different stereo systems out of the components that are on offer in one store. You've got to admit that's a lot of choice.
Dan kemudian Kau mungkin pergi ke toko elektronik konsumen untuk memasang sistem stereo
- pembicara,
- Pemutar CD,
- pemutar kaset,
- penyetel,
- penguat.
Dan di satu toko elektronik konsumen ini, terdapat banyak sistem stereo. Kami dapat membuat enam setengah juta sistem stereo berbeda dari komponen yang ditawarkan di satu toko. Kau harus mengakui bahwa itu banyak pilihan.
In other domains, the world of communications. There was a time, when I was a boy, when you could get any kind of telephone service you wanted, as long as it came from Ma Bell. You rented your phone, you didn't buy it. One consequence of that, by the way, is that the phone never broke. And those days are gone. We now have an almost unlimited variety of phones, especially in the world of cell phones. These are cell phones of the future.
Di domain lain, dunia komunikasi. Ada suatu masa, ketika kau masih kecil, bisa mendapatkan layanan telepon, apa pun yang kau inginkan, asalkan beli dari Ma-Bell. Kau menyewa telepon, tidak membelinya. Salah satu konsekuensinya adalah ponsel tidak pernah rusak. Dan hari-hari itu telah berlalu.
Kita sekarang memiliki jenis telepon yang hampir tidak terbatas, terutama di dunia telepon seluler. Ini adalah ponsel masa depan.
My favorite is the middle one,
- the MP3 player,
- nose hair trimmer,
- and crème brûlée torch.
And if some chance you haven't seen that in your store yet, you can rest assured that one day soon, you will. And what this does is it leads people to walk into their stores, asking this question. And do you know what the answer to this question now is? The answer is "no."
Favoritku adalah yang tengah,
- bisa untuk memutar MP3,
- pemangkas bulu hidung,
- dan ada penerangnya.
Dan jika kau belum melihatnya di tokomu, yakinlah bahwa suatu hari nanti, kau akan melihatnya. Dan hal ini membuat orang masuk ke tokonya. Dan menanyakan pertanyaan ini.
Dan tahukah Anda apa jawaban atas pertanyaan ini sekarang? Jawabannya adalah tidak."
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It is not possible to buy a cell phone that doesn't do too much.
Tidak mungkin membeli ponsel yang tidak memberikan banyak manfaat.
The second effect is that, even if we manage to overcome the paralysis and make a choice. We end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be if we had fewer options to choose from. And there are several reasons for this.
One of them is, with a lot of different salad dressings to choose from, if you buy one and it's not perfect -- and what salad dressing is? -- it's easy to imagine that you could've made a different choice that would've been better.
And what happens is, this imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision you made, and this regret subtracts from the satisfaction you get out of the decision you made, even if it was a good decision. The more options there are, the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option that you chose.
Dampak kedua adalah, meskipun kita berhasil mengatasi kelumpuhan dan menentukan pilihan. Kita akhirnya menjadi kurang puas dengan hasil dari pilihan tersebut dibandingkan jika kita memiliki lebih sedikit pilihan untuk dipilih. Dan ada beberapa alasan untuk ini.
Salah satunya adalah, dengan banyaknya pilihan saus salad, jika Anda membelinya dan tidak sempurna -- dan saus salad itu apa? -- mudah untuk membayangkan bahwa Anda bisa membuat pilihan lain yang mungkin lebih baik. Dan yang terjadi adalah, alternatif yang dibayangkan ini membuat Anda menyesali keputusan yang Anda buat, dan penyesalan ini mengurangi kepuasan yang Anda peroleh dari keputusan yang Anda buat, meskipun itu adalah keputusan yang baik. Semakin banyak pilihan yang ada, semakin mudah Anda menyesali apa pun yang mengecewakan mengenai pilihan yang Anda pilih.
Second, what economists call "opportunity costs." Dan Gilbert made a big point this morning of talking about how much the way in which we value things depends on what we compare them to. Well, when there are lots of alternatives to consider, it's easy to imagine the attractive features of alternatives that you reject that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you've chosen. Here's an example.
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| I can't stop thinking about those other available parking spaces on West 85th Street |
If you're not a New Yorker, I apologize. Here's what you're supposed to be thinking. Here's this couple on the Hamptons. Very expensive real estate. Gorgeous beach. Beautiful day. They have it all to themselves.
And he spends two weeks nagged by the idea that he is missing the opportunity, day after day, to have a great parking space.
Opportunity costs subtract from the satisfaction that we get out of what we choose, even when what we choose is terrific. And the more options there are to consider, the more attractive features of these options are going to be reflected by us as opportunity costs. Here's another example.
Now, this cartoon makes a lot of points. It makes points about living in the moment as well, and probably about doing things slowly. But one point it makes is that whenever you're choosing one thing, you're choosing not to do other things, and those other things may have lots of attractive features. And it's going to make what you're doing less attractive.
Third: escalation of expectations. This hit me when I went to replace my jeans. I wear jeans almost all the time. There was a time when jeans came in one flavor, and you bought them, and they fit like crap.
They were incredibly uncomfortable, and if you wore them long enough and washed them enough times, they started to feel OK. I went to replace my jeans after years of wearing these old ones.
I said, "I want a pair of jeans. Here's my size." And the shopkeeper said, "Do you want slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit? You want button fly or zipper fly? You want stonewashed or acid-washed? Do you want them distressed? Do you want boot cut, tapered?" Blah, blah, blah on and on he went.
My jaw dropped. And after I recovered,
I said, "I want the kind that used to be the only kind."
He had no idea what that was. So I spent an hour trying on all these damn jeans, and I walked out of the store -- truth -- with the best-fitting jeans I had ever had. I did better. All this choice made it possible for me to do better. But -- I felt worse. Why? I wrote a whole book to try to explain this to myself.
The reason is -- The reason I felt worse is that with all of these options available, my expectations about how good a pair of jeans should be went up. I had very low, no particular expectations when they only came in one flavor. When they came in 100 flavors, damn it, one of them should've been perfect. And what I got was good, but it wasn't perfect. And so I compared what I got to what I expected, and what I got was disappointing in comparison to what I expected. Adding options to people's lives can't help but increase the expectations people have about how good those options will be. And what that's going to produce is less satisfaction with results, even when they're good results.
Nobody in the world of marketing knows this. Because if they did, you wouldn't all know what this was about. The truth is more like this.
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| Everything was better back when everything was worse |
The reason that everything was better back when everything was worse is that when everything was worse, it was actually possible for people to have experiences that were a pleasant surprise. Nowadays, the world we live in -- we affluent, industrialized citizens, with perfection the expectation -- the best you can ever hope for is that stuff is as good as you expect it to be. You will never be pleasantly surprised, because your expectations, my expectations, have gone through the roof. The secret to happiness -- this is what you all came for -- the secret to happiness is: low expectations.
[You'll do]
I want to say -- just a little autobiographical moment -- that I actually am married to a wife, and she's really quite wonderful. I couldn't have done better. I didn't settle. But settling isn't always such a bad thing. Finally, one consequence of buying a bad-fitting pair of jeans when there is only one kind to buy is that when you are dissatisfied and you ask why, who's responsible, the answer is clear: the world is responsible. What could you do? When there are hundreds of different styles of jeans available and you buy one that is disappointing and you ask why, who's responsible, it is equally clear that the answer to the question is "you." You could have done better. With a hundred different kinds of jeans on display, there is no excuse for failure. And so when people make decisions, and even though the results of the decisions are good, they feel disappointed about them; they blame themselves. Clinical depression has exploded in the industrial world in the last generation. I believe a significant -- not the only, but a significant -- contributorn to this explosion of depression and also suicide, is that people have experiences that are disappointing because their standards are so high, and then when they have to explain these experiences to themselves, they think they're at fault.
So the net result is that we do better in general, objectively, and we feel worse. So let me remind you: this is the official dogma, the one that we all take to be true, and it's all false. It is not true. There's no question that some choice is better than none. But it doesn't follow from that that more choice is better than some choice There's some magical amount. I don't know what it is. I'm pretty confident that we have long since passed the point where options improve our welfare. Now, as a policy matter -- I'm almost done as a policy matter, the thing to think about is this: what enables all of this choice in industrial societies is material affluence. There are lots of places in the world, and we have heard about several of them, where their problem is not that they have too much choice. Their problem is they have too little. So the stuff I'm talking about is the peculiar problem of modern, affluent, Western societies. And what is so frustrating and infuriating is this: Steve Levitt talked to you yesterday about how these expensive and difficult-to-install child seats don't help.
It's a waste of money. What I'm telling you is that these expensive, complicated choices -- it's not simply that they don't help. They actually hurt. They actually make us worse off. If some of what enables people in our societies to make all of the choices we make were shifted to societies in which people have too few options,not only would those people's lives be improved, but ours would be improved also. This is what economists call a "Pareto-improving move." Income redistribution will make everyone better off, not just poor people, because of how all this excess choice plagues us. So to conclude. [You can be anything you want to be -- no limits.]
You're supposed to read this cartoon and, being a sophisticated person, say, "Ah! What does this fish know? Nothing is possible in this fishbowl." Impoverished imagination, a myopic view of the world -- that's the way I read it at first. The more I thought about it, however, the more I came to the view that this fish knows something. Because the truth of the matter is, if you shatter the fishbowl so that everything is possible, you don't have freedom. You have paralysis. If you shatter this fishbowl so that everything is possible, you decrease satisfaction. You increase paralysis, and you decrease satisfaction. Everybody needs a fishbowl. This one is almost certainly too limited perhaps even for the fish, certainly for us But the absence of some metaphorical fishbowl is a recipe for misery and, I suspect, disaster Thank you very much
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