Life is hell when you have no choice. Life is hell when you have too much choice

Less is more. No, really, it is.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz, author of the book “The Paradox of Choice,” said that having fewer options when it comes to making a decision can actually make a person happier.

He said there are three main downsides to having a plethora of possibilities:

1. People become paralyzed instead of liberated.

For instance, instead of fighting over what restaurant to go to, a person may just sigh, grab the tuna can from the back of the pantry and eat that for dinner.

“It isn’t always bad,” Schwartz said, speaking with Bill Radke on KUOW’s The Record. “But if you don’t put money in your 401K because your benevolent employer has given you 100 mutual funds to choose from – that’s a bad thing.”

One way to counter this is to change the decision from an "opt in" – you have to choose a 401K plan – to an "opt out" – you can choose, but if you don’t, we’ll do it for you. Schwartz said that when companies took this tack, participation in 401K plans doubled.

In another example Schwartz cited, the number of organ donors in a study quadrupled when they were only given the choice to opt out.

2. People make worse decisions.

“If the decisions are complicated, and you have a lot of options, each with a lot of different features, you’re likelier to make mistakes,” Schwartz said.

3. Even when people make good decisions, they’re less satisfied with them.

This is the part that really draws Schwartz's focus. It all came from a shopping trip he took to buy a pair of jeans.

“When all you’ve got is Lees and Levis, you don’t expect them to fit you perfectly, unless you are a model," Schwartz said. "You settle for however they fit or you don’t wear jeans."

But: “When there are 5,000 different styles and manufacturers of jeans, well one of them, damn it, better be perfect," Schwartz said.

A simpler customer experience can actually produce a happier customer. That’s a hard nut to crack, Schwartz said.

“I’m not suggesting that the ideal is no options. I think when people have no choice, life is hell,” he said. “When you have infinite choice, life is also hell. And that’s the world we’ve created.”

There are times when having more choices is a good thing, Schwartz said. Like when people really know what they want. But rarely is that the case.

The solution? Work on our own expectations, Schwartz said. Which may mean taking that pair of jeans that isn’t completely, exactly, perfectly formed for our shape.

“The psychological work we can do is to train ourselves to understand that ‘good enough’ is virtually always good enough,” Schwartz said.

Produced for the web by Kara McDermott.