In a Guardian column titled “Since when was giving people a choice a good idea?” Catherine Bennett argues against the individual right to choose, not just in matters relating to health care and education but in a more general sense as well. To back up her anti-choice argument Bennett cites two studies, one by a University of Bristol sociologist named Harriet Bradley (“The last thing people want is having more choices thrust on them. They don’t want to be perpetually having to make decisions…I believe most people want the state to make these big decisions for them”) and one by US academic Sheena Lyengar, who found that “consumers were more than six times more likely to buy a pot (of jam) if they had to choose from six varieties rather than 24.”
British blogger Mr. Eugenides:
“It would perhaps be understandable if Catherine Bennett herself finds so much choice bewildering – as the former wife of Lord Sackville, whose stately home in Kent apparently boasts 365 rooms, it must have been hell deciding which wing of the mansion to have the butler serve her afternoon tea and scones in, let alone what type of jam to put on them…”
Incidentally, the press release – “A confused nation crippled by choice” – for the Harriet Bradley study notes that her findings “will inform a new website confused nation.co.uk aimed at providing real-life problem solving advice.” The psychologist who is providing the at-site advice, Dr. Peter Collett, states:
“Confusion is so severe that psychologists have recently upgraded confusion to a fully-fledged emotion. 80% of the UK suffers from confusion at some point…”
The site’s main page has a “Confusion map” (“not confused/slightly confused/very confused”) and provides links to the latest articles: “The Indeciders” (“We’re a country close to breaking point, with the UK admitting that too much choice is leaving them incapable of making decisions”), “What should I do?” (“All of us at some point will face difficult decisions. Whether you are facing life’s big choices such as a change in your career or the feeling a change of location is what your family needs….more and more of us are suffering indecision and confusion”) and – my favourite – Confusing regional accents:
“The Geordie accent came top with 82% saying they found it hard to comprehend. Following close behind this was the Scouse accent, which perplexes 81% of us, and then the Scottish accent which baffles three quarters of us…”
Life can be so cruel.
(h/t*)
The epitome of “educated idiots”.
It’s no surprise these wannabe Ivory Tower lords want a return of feudalism.
Soviet apologists and officials made an almost identical argument when dealing with embarrassing questions from visiting “foreign friends” going back to at least the late 1940’s plus they were more than a little put out at the thought of producers having to advertise in order to entice people to buy stuff. The USSR had more of a binary market in those days for the ordinary chumps with no access to “special” communist party member stores: when the shelves were empty in the workers stores because product had been diverted elsewhere, there was no reason to be away from work, when the shelves were filled with poorly made garbage from a given factory, you had the chance to buy or not.
Samizdata had a snarky post about this as well: http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2010/08/shut_up_about_t.html
This pair may be a couple of elitist trolls, but they are absolutely correct. The government already does make all the decisions for us; the fact that 90% of them are wrong doesn’t obscure the fact that they make them. The public long ago ceded all control over their lives to the nanny state but so long as they are told they are free they are satisfied. Just look at the old mantra about how state run medicine is free. Riiiiight!
I would suggest that those that want to let the state take care of them should be able to do so and those of us who don’t should be able to take our tax money and do with it as we please.
We will then see weather the people that fund all this really want the government to look after them or if it is just a bunch of people that think they can get something that someone else pays for.
The ones I feel sorry for are those noble, selfless bureaucrats and (unelected) politicians who will be making all those terrifying choices for the rest of us once we’ve been rescued from the burden of freedom.
Their heroism is beyond words.
black mamba – exactly. Can you imagine the courage, the selfless heroism of Those Who Must Make Choices (THMMC) – while the rest of us are absolved of that onerous and indeed terrifying task.
How does one get selected to become a courageous member of THMMC? Is there a term limit, due to the exhaustion and trauma – after which one returns to being unable to make choices?
Ah well. The whole rhetoric sounds so 18th c elitist, so replete with the snobbery of the elite who reject that the hoi polloi have the wit, the capacity, the intelligence to do anything for themselves.
I would suggest that Britain is a nation so far into decline that it hardly matters what the loons left in charge think, want or do.
Ripe for the picking … and they will be picked over.
Stupid people easily get confused and can’t make valid choices.
Yeah, so what? This is hardly ‘news’.
Independent of the sagacity of Bennett or the lack thereof, it actually turns out that folks like Herbert Simon, Dan Gilbert, Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, et al have over the last half-century found a number of interesting results regarding the manners in which the human mind processes choice, as a result of which it certainly does appear to be true that at least for many and possibly most people, a superabundance of choice produces a negative experience. A reasonably good overview of the issues and scope involved in this matter, for those who may be interested in better understanding how the human mind actually works in practice (rather than just anecdotally) can be found via this page on Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice and in his TED Talk.
All it takes is a little discrimination (read: education) to deal with ‘bewildering’ amounts of choice. But when you live in a society that values above all a lack of discrimination this kind of nonsense is predictable.
Catherine Bennett’s ideal consists of a population of drooling morons who shouldn’t do anything for themselves. And then there’s Doctor Zero of Hot Air’s Green Room:
“We don’t invest our hopes in the government. It is beneath the dignity of free men and women to spend their days hoping a politician decides to provide for our needs. We face the future, not with passive and helpless “hope”, but with active and dynamic faith in ourselves, and our fellow Americans. We are opposed to a political class that tries to cultivate our hopes by showering us with fear. We don’t trust politicians with our fortunes, much less with our lives. In fact, we don’t trust politicians much at all… but we absolutely require them to trust us.”
http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2009/08/05/who-we-are/
I suspect that if you move an individual out of the realm of making choices, the individual moves into a regressive psychological mode. That is, they regress to the passive dependent state of an infant. That happens to people who have been isolated from contact with others.
If there are too many options and there is little to differentiate them, then chance moves in to effect the choice.
But for a state to remove the requirement for evaluation, judgment and analysis from a population means that it denies the right to think for all its population. According to these elitst view, only a few members are allowed to think. Ahh, shades of Plato and his Republic.
It’s big of Britain to house those islamists that will take care of the anglo’s inability to decide. Even better once the islamists start to be elected en mass, and Prince Charles fulfills his destiny as imam of all the Britons.
Then, life will be easy for them, their choices will be so much more easy.
its clearly a liberal attitude of “me is greater than thee”.
Ive been perplexed for a number of years why socialists always try to go against the greater wisdom ,albiet absolute average intelligence, of 6 billion people (aka the market)
So many of those sniveling comments at the Guardian are along the lines of: Oh, it’s all very well for the rich, but us poor people need rights, we can’t afford choices! As if
a) making money is impossible and
b) the State wants to buy you something nice, Mr. Self-declared Nobody
These will be the same people who want to abolish the Monarchy ’cause they like thinking of themselves as “Citizens, not Subjects”.
And what ET said @6:27, esp. the first paragraph. (Since she agreed with me I think it’s only fair that I agree with her.)
As Shaidle once said in some other context, doesn’t it just make you want to beat them to death with your hard-cover copy of The Fountainhead?
I choose not to listen to progressive leftoid idiot academics.
Does that include “the woman’s right to choose”?
Bah! I have to make many choices and decisions every day. I have managed pretty well so far and so has everyone I know.
Sometimes when I find my self getting it all done too easily, I twist out a doob and life becomes a bit more of a challenge … you know … all those decisions make me confused when I am in an altered state.
Now smoking a doob once in awhile is way better than taking the opium of the masses wouldn’t you say? Lefties appear to already be living in an altered state where the state is the altar.
Ah yes, the government and the bureaucrats know what is best for each of us. This is happening here also a little at a time. A little law here, a new regulation there, for the good of the people of course.
Sgt Lejaune has it right @ 5:43.
The “state” need not necessarily enter into it, ET. Rather, it can be argued that there are contexts in which self-applied techniques for option pruning can be effective: for example, I always purchase the same brand & style of peanut butter, ergo independent of the number of options available on the supermarket shelf, I make no first-order choice in practice. As is noted in the “Why We Suffer” section of the The Paradox of Choice article I mentioned above:
Surely it is not being argued that we should do away with all
cultural standards in the name of maximal freedom. Murder?
It is indeed unfortunate that some peoples hatred of the state
(independent of the degree of their justification) blinds them
to learning & understanding more about themselves and how
their species works.
With regard to the peanut butter, vitruvius, at one time you evaluated and made a choice. Since then, you have merely supported your original choice as a continual, satisfactory, habit.
I don’t think that anyone is arguing for total ongoing randomness and the continual absence of normative habits. The human mind with its requirement for logic and order, requires a normative infrastructure. It requires continuity.
What is being argued is the freedom to have an opportunity of using both an original (first-order) choice and even, the changing of those normative habits of the use of second order selections. A statist, Platonic government, rejects that first opportunity for the whole population and insists that such actions be confined to only a small, select set of the population, the Rulers.
It’s that middle class freedom of thought that is being discussed, not the cognitive nature of the human mind.
Why doesn’t she convert to Islam, it doesn’t give you a choice the Koran tells you how to live every aspect of your life and how to wipe your arse to boot or not wipe as Islam demands.
Anything can indeed be argued, Vitruvius, but the matter of the “state” necessarily enters into my post, inasmuch as it was about – and linked to – particular nanny-statists who wish to remove individuals’ right to choose what sort of education their children receive, and what sort of medical options people might choose for themselves. In light of the actual content of my post, and the links therein, the other commenters in this thread are the ones addressing the matter at hand.
“Surely it is not being argued that we should do away with all cultural standards in the name of maximal freedom.”
Precisely. Inasmuch as not one commenter even began to vaguely allude to having considered even conceivably skirting the edges of that unmentioned, extemporaneous and highly particular thought of yours, you are entirely correct, sir, that it is surely not being argued.
Glenn Beck, correctly dubs Cass Sunstein the most dangerous man in America. I couldn’t agree more. This madman doesn’t want to help us make choices – he wants to make them for us.
Sure an abundance of options can cause anxiety but we don’t want Madman Cass Sunstein and his ilk including Marxist president Obama, exploiting this elementary and painfully obvious truism to “nudge” us into centrally planned behaviour, do we?
I’ve seen and shunned lots of garbage like this in my time, including “studies” that prove that the free market doesn’t work very well, and so …
Although, I DO draw the line at the toothpaste aisle. Clearly, the government needs to step in here!
AND I generally order Butter Pecan, tho I had a pretty tough time of it recently in Winthrop WA when I was presented with TWO boards of ice-cream choices — one of which was homemade.
I got the Butter Pecan — one scoop of regular, one homemade.
Vitruvius, Adams peanut butter?
I just love it: The elitists are all for “choice” when it’s THEIR choices that count.
When it’s choices that might be made by the plebs, fawgettaboutit: Let us make them for you, dear; we know so much better than you what’s important.
(Psst: Does this remind you just a smidgen of the Lib$/Dip$/Blockhead$’ agendas?)
“Why doesn’t she convert to Islam, it doesn’t give you a choice the Koran tells you how to live every aspect of your life and how to wipe your arse to boot or not wipe as Islam demands.”
Hmmm, Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies is being rendered obsolete. From now on, we should call it Godwin’s Law of Islamist Analogies. Beware of Reductio al Islamum.
On the other hand, the limitated number of viable choices (either Nazis or Islam) undoubtedly made it easier for ‘rose’ to make a decision and post.
The rest of the discussion is enjoyable, as always.
Agreed, ET. Consider the statement by Harriet Bradley which EBD quoted supra: “The last thing people want is having more choices thrust on them […] I believe most people want the state to make these big decisions for them”. The first part of that statement is, I think, true: with few exceptions people don’t like being thrust upon. They would rather choose whether or not to choose more choices.
The second part of that statement is more complex. Most people may want the state to make some big decisions for them, or perhaps more appropriately the example of “taking the doctor’s advice” in Barry Schwartz’s TED Talk, yet they still want to choose whether or not to choose that. The problems start to arise when people aren’t allowed to choose not to choose, when people aren’t allowed to second their choice to third-party recommendations such as, say, Consumers Report, or in Texas Canuck’s case, letting other people choose for him who the “progressive leftoid idiot academics” are (since he himself cannot choose who they are given that he chooses not to listen to them).
As to the matter of who Glenn Beck considers to be “the most dangerous man in America”, Me No Dhimmi: that is irrelevant to the question of rule-based second order decisions, as EBD agrees pursuant to the matter of my extemporaneous (by which I presume he means the denotational sense of skilled at unrehearsed speech or performance) rule-making in his 7:59. There are times when one may be advised to play the ball, not the man.
My point then is that while I agree that I don’t want the state to be able to thrust their choice upon people (other than perhaps in the case of certain classical cultural standards such as murder and 150 dBc exhaust pipes), it is in my opinion an unnecessary mistake to let that blind one to understanding more about the limitations of the human nature of choice, which in my opinion unfortunately too often happens in contexts like this, where some are fixated upon a particular interpretation of their cognitive biases.
Vitruvius, it’s just lovely to see you back in the saddle.
But, my God, you’re wordy.
As Laura Nyro so succinctly put it, time and love, my dear, time and love.
Pascal said: “If I had enough time, I could
write less”. But let’s not get off topic 😉
As far as TED winners go, I actually know one of them. ‘Hitchhiked with him many years ago and got to know him pretty well. You know what that’s like — people you meet on the road?
The basic guy is fantastic and, despite his fame, the guy I knew is not particularly enhanced by being a TED winner.
Hey, Vit: 😉 Really.
Please tell me this article was meant to be sarcastic!!
One of the hallmarks of being an adult is making choices – sometimes we make good choices, sometimes we make bad choices, sometimes we make choices we regret – but as adults that is your job. I have no problems choosing – if these idiots have problems then they probably do need someone to take control of their lives, but don’t push your non-choices onto me!
And what about the state and small decisions? Many may well agree that our nation’s department of national defense should be a state matter (per the minarchist “night- watchman” model), but do you want to be free to choose all their decisions? Do you want to be consulted on every pencil requisition? Of course not; delegation is just another aspect of choosing how to choose.
EBD may attempt to argue that the other commenters in this thread are the ones addressing the matter at hand, but that is inadequate. One of the aspects of the matter at hand is the degree to which others should be permitted to force one per their bidding. As Ayn Rand said: “No man or group of men has the right to initiate the use of force against any other man or group of men”. Yet & nevertheless it remains the case that another aspect of the matter at hand is that it may too be less than optimal to throw out the bathwater with the baby: the first & second derivatives of value, as choice goes to infinity, are negative.
Let’s not let ourselves be blinded to the possibility of an intermediate optimum just because some nitwits we disagree with continue making silly noises about what the state should do. Always have been, always will, yet we’re doin’ better than ever.
I think the point is, that we acknowledge that the state, i.e., the collective, must have a certain measure of authority. This means that there must be societal norms. Red lights mean stop; murder is, ahh, not legal. And so on. These obviously reduce the number and style of choices an individual can make in their daily lives.
The key point is, who gets to set up these normative standards? Some Set of Higher Authorities such as an elite group? Lords? Dictators? The Bureaucracy?
Or…the people. Surely it has to be the people who, whether directly or indirectly, select these normative standards by electing representatives to make these decisions/choices. And unelecting them if these choices are not acceptable to the mass of the population.
The UK suggestion, by the Lady Bennett, is that the people are too whatever to make those choices and it must all be left up to Some Higher Authority. I believe that the Magna Carta and the US Declaration of Independence rejected this notion.
The great thing about having lots of choices is that you can reduce the choices yourself, aka rational ignorance. Your choices are not always optimal across the entire choice set, but they can be optimal or near optimal when you take information costs into account.
More choices is NEVER a bad thing. People with few choices have usually placed constraints on their own choice sets through bad prior choices.
I love the retort by the blogger. That is priceless.
Dining at the banquet of one’s own consequences seems far too onerous for these authors.
I wonder who directed them to do the research?
Vitruvius said: “a superabundance of choice produces a negative experience.”
Only when you can’t sort the choices intelligently.
Faced with 40 shampoos I chose the one I bought last time, because I have no way of knowing which is best.
Faced with the vast choice of vehicles to buy, I know exactly what I want because the specifications and prices are accessible and I know what parameters I’m trying to satisfy.
Or as Larry Niven once said, given sufficient intelligence, there is no choice. The best solution is obvious.
As for what the state should do? Defend the realm, enforce contracts, and otherwise stay the hell out of the way as much as possible. It should most certainly not be reducing my shampoo or vehicle to reduce my “anxiety”.
I think that your statement, POW, to the effect that “more choices is never a bad thing” is wrong, and I think that The Phantom’s statement to the effect that “given sufficient intelligence, there is no choice” is wrong. I appreciate that it may appear counter- intuitive, indeed, I used to agree with you. However, we now have good empirical data, per some of the links I’ve provided above, to the effect that at some point more choices becomes a bad thing ~ because that’s the way the human brain works. We don’t see it unless we do the experiments, because as Daniel Dennett explained, consciousness is a bag of tricks.
We the people, ET, can only effect our normative standards by delegating them (in the case of the commons) to a methodological system schema. This must then, I would argue, end up being based on some sort of trust- relationship, at which point Baroness Onora O’Niell’s arguments kick in. No matter how one slices it, I think that a balanced decision must consider it to be a matter of degree, not a matter of knee-jerk partisanship. The question then becomes a matter of who, other than yourself, to trust (since you can’t make all decisions yourself), not one of whether or not any such trust should be extended at all.
ET
“The UK suggestion, by the Lady Bennett, is that the people are too whatever to make those choices and it must all be left up to Some Higher Authority. I believe that the Magna Carta and the US Declaration of Independence rejected this notion.”
The scary part is if you read the comments in the Guardian. Most readers seem to agree with Lady Bennett and even suggest this is a reason they pay taxes, so they don’t have to make choices.
Vitruvius: leaving aside – just for a moment, of course – considerations of “normative standards” and “methodological system schema,” would you be happier/better off if your peanut butter options were reduced to two brands, neither of which is your favourite?
It’s not a rhetorical question.
Yes it is.
No, it’s not; I didn’t ask in order to produce an effect or make a statement, I asked in order to elicit information – the information, in this case, being your answer to the actual question.
This is a complex issue that IMHO exists, but the application of the phenomena may be abused…
In my opinion a recommended choice is at best a starting point… once people become comfortable & expect a wide range of choice the phenomena disappears. If may be just the fear of the unknown…
Folks, relax. Clearly Ms. Bennett, in some pharmaceutically induced fog, as seems common in Britain’s former higher classes these days, caught a rerun of Moscow on the Hudson, and fixated on this:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-260444726518487860#
I worked setting up a new Shoppers Drug Mart earlier this year. 24 types of jam? We had 68 varieties of toothpaste, and over 600 SKU’s in the shampoo section. (Pantyhose fascinated me – I had no idea there were four shades of “nude”.) Never saw a customer who was fazed by any of this.
That requires, EBD, that you are implying that it is possible
that I would be happier/better off if my peanut butter options
were reduced to two brands, neither of which is my favourite,
which is disingenuous.
vitruvius – yes, I fully agree that one can’t make all decisions oneself. [But I can’t stand Dennett. My choice.]
And I agree that there is such a thing as ‘too many choices’ for selection then becomes out of necessity, as in the example of the shampoo, random or, an impossible action to carry out (dithering). Admittedly, even among this huge offering of goods on the shelf, their nature and style is reducible to a few types.
That is why our cognitive and emotional natures move us into a requirement for normative habits of behaviour – and belief. It would be too stressful to be having to choose all the time. And we, as a species, don’t have the time. Imagine if a lion had to debate, each and every time, whether or not to attack that limping zebra. Imagine if we, driving along, had to debate each and every time, what road to take. But that’s not really the point of this thread.
Yes, we do and must move into a state of ‘trust’ where we trust that those who choose the type of medicines used to treat X disease, have chosen wisely.
However, as far as the laws go, I think we must retain the right to rule ourselves. Yes, we delegate the development of our laws to an elected body but we, the people, must retain the right to reject or approve these rules. Therefore, we reject the authority of the state to move itself more and more into making decisions in our lives that we ought to retain – such as parenting, such as health care, such as even our right to hang our washing on our outside lines (forbidden in parts of Toronto!!!).
Firstly – I’m sorry, but Surely her former title was Baroness Sackville (as in Sackville-West, so that’s yer Seven Degrees of Virginia Woolf out of the way). I’m pedantic about certain pointless things; that’s my choice.
More importantly, hasn’t this just become another “I’m a Libertarian, not an Anarchist; I definitely don’t like Totalitarianism” sort of discussion? As well as another confirmation that they’re nuts over at The Guardian?
Anyway, jam is not a significant choice; schools and hospitals are. We should be free in all those choices, but it’s lazy and frivolous for Bennett to elide them.
What we’re talking about here is choices that involve an ability to DISCERN between alternatives.
We’re talking about wisdom.
Wisdom, an allusive attribute, involves spiritual maturity, even if it’s just toothpaste or cereal we’re considering.
Throw out spirituality and its central importance to our lives and we’re deprived of our ability to make wise choices, we’re deprived of our ability to discern.
Isn’t that just what Big Brother, a la Catherine (I almost typed Carolyn) Bennett, wants?