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More choice is not helpful to society

If David Cameron believes that shopping for public services will help us progress in
his 'big society', he should hear a story about jam

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Aditya Chakrabortty

The Guardian, Tuesday 20 July 2010

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/20/more-choice-not-helpful-
society

If you want to know why David Cameron's 'big society' is more trouble than it's worth,
why Andrew Lansley is on a hiding to nothing with his consultant-choice agenda, and
why Michael Gove's schemes to let a thousand city academies and free schools bloom
are plain wrong-headed, well, then you need to hear a story about jam.

Over the last couple of decades, the jam study has become one of the most talked-
about experiments in social science. Deservedly so, because it upends the beliefs
held by economists and policy-makers about how people deal with choice. It's also
beautifully simple: academics set up a tasting booth in a fancy deli in California. At
some points they put out six kinds of jam, at others 24.

When the booth had 24 types, it was mobbed with customers drawn by the colours
and the size of the display. But it was the sales that were remarkable: with six jams
on show, 30% of shoppers snapped up a jar – typically in less than a minute. When
24 were out, only 3% did, and that was usually after 10 minutes of agonising.
However attractive they found the larger range, up close, they became almost
paralysed with choice.

That research was masterminded by Sheena Iyengar; and the Columbia Business
School professor has plenty more examples of how being confronted with too many
options makes us do funny things.

Take dating, for example. Iyengar asked men and women to put down what they
were looking for in a soulmate – the usual criteria of being kind or sporty; possessor
of driving ambition or just GSOH. Given profiles of 10 potential partners, they chose
according to type: twinkly-eyed bookish types found someone to swap paperbacks
with, while sporty Neanderthals presumably landed their ideal tennis partners.

Presented with 20 profiles, however, people chose their partners on looks alone. All
those carefully thought out conditions about the person they wanted to spend the
rest of their lives with were gone, buried under the number of the options available.

Perhaps you are jaundiced enough to believe that romance is always just a
euphemism for earthier appetites. In which case, shame on you – but you might be
more worried by this finding, recounted by Iyengar in her book The Art of Choosing.
When Sweden privatised its social security programme in 2000, it encouraged
workers to choose how to invest their pension contributions, rather than leave it in a
default fund. Two-thirds did so and, overwhelmed by choice, they usually chose
disastrously. Workers put their retirement money in whatever stocks were fashionable
at the time, or their own employers' shares. Their choices underperformed the
default fund by 10% over three years, and 15% after seven. Such pronounced
divergences can mean the difference between a comfortable retirement and a
miserable old age.

All of which brings us back to the new government. Because what ministers have
promised time and again over the last couple of weeks is much greater choice in
some of the most important aspects of our lives: schools, hospitals, community
services. Whenever they describe the sunlit uplands of choice, David Cameron and
his men make two linked claims: first, that we are better off shopping around for
public services, and second, that the exercising of choice will force headteachers and
hospital managers to raise their game. Nor is that solely a Tory belief: Tony Blair
(remember him?) used to go on in much the same vein.

Yet the evidence from these studies, and many others, is that those two premises do
not stack up – because we're not that skilled at choosing. This doesn't mean that
policy-makers should slip into something a little more centrally-planned instead. But it
does suggest that ever-proliferating options aren't necessarily helpful or useful.

Most people already know that, which is why we take shopping lists to Sainsbury's to
keep us from gawping at the number of probiotic yoghurts like escaped Soviet
dissidents. Businesses know it too, which is why, no matter how many books Amazon
has on digital display, it still "suggests" titles similar to those you have bought before.

Only in Westminster is it the orthodoxy that more choices equal better choices. And
by thrusting this agenda at voters, politicians could stir up greater discontent. What
was notable at the last general election was that no major party denied that public
services were better off now than in 1997; yet Labour – choice-friendly Labour – had
frequently to defend its record on the NHS and schools.

That may be because there's something about the very act of selection that induces
regret. In her book Choice, the sociologist Renata Salecl describes choosing as
"anxiety-making". The more options you have, the greater your expectations of the
result; the keener the disappointment when you fall out of love with your new car (or
sofa or broadband provider); and the more nagging the questions about whether
you should have chosen differently.

And if Cameron doesn't buy any of the research above, perhaps the former student
of philosophy, politics and economics should revisit Alexis de Tocqueville's thoughts
170 years ago on America. "I have seen the freest . . . of men . . . in circumstances
the happiest to be found in the world," he wrote. Yet even so, there was something
wrong. "They seemed serious and almost sad in their pleasures . . . They clutch
everything but hold nothing fast, and so lose grip as they hurry after some new
delight."