In 1970, Alvin Toffl er wrote a book entitled Future Shock, which became a seminal sociological masterpiece on what future is to come and how we can possibly learn to deal with it. The term ‘future shock’ refers to what happens when people are no longer able to cope with the profound and rapid changes and enormous amounts of information the super-industrial revolution brings with it. Written nearly forty years ago, the book is still current today, contrary to the logic that nothing ages faster than futuristic books. Although not all of Toffl er’s forecasts came true, many did: students today are the creators of their own mix-and-match degrees, marriages at eighteen ‘until the death parts us’ are long-gone fairytales of the past, and homosexual marriages with children are just another form of a family unit accepted in civilized societies.
One of the main threads running through the book is that of overchoice and freedom that might, in a somewhat counter-intuitive way, take our very freedom away. In the midst of anxiety about underchoice and increasing standardization of the early 1970s, Toffl er warns of an unparal-leled surfeit of choice, resulting from increases in affl uence and technolog-ical sophistication. The early indicators for such a prediction were already there. Between 1950 and 1963, the number of soaps and detergents sold by American supermarkets rose from 65 to 200. In the 1970s, a person buying a car would have needed to spend several days learning about various brands, models and options to make a decision. The industry was already in danger of producing more diversity than a buyer would need or want.
Toffl er painted a gloomy picture of a society in which ‘overchoice’
becomes the norm. Decisions become harder and require much more
work. We need time to collect and research all the relevant information about even the most trivial matters, such as choosing a washing machine (or a mobile phone, nowadays). Therefore, an increase in the number of choices leads to an increase in the amount of information that needs to be processed. Practice confi rms the experimental fi ndings, in which the more choices one has, the slower one reacts. More than that, the accel-erating tempo of life requires that we process information at a far more rapid pace than ever before. With the overload in the amount and speed of information, we experience cognitive overstimulation. We become paralysed, struggling to choose and decide. Decisions come at a high psychological cost, which can lead to depression, personality disorder, neurosis and psychological distress. In the end, the advantages of diver-sity and individualization become cancelled out by the complexity of the consumer’s decision-making process. Toffl er (1970: 257–258) writes:
Whether man is prepared to cope with the increased choice of mate-rial and cultural wares available to him is, however, a totally different question. For there comes a time when choice, rather than freeing the individual, becomes so complex, diffi cult and costly, that it turns into its opposite. There comes a time, in short, when choice turns into overchoice and freedom into un-freedom.
In 2000, a professor of psychology in Swarthmore College in the USA, Barry Schwartz, published an article entitled ‘Self-determination:
The tyranny of freedom’.1 In it, he speaks of the psychological problems of freedom and autonomy, arguing that more choice is not necessarily good, and, in fact, often makes our lives worse, rather than better.
Sounds familiar? Unfortunately, in the positive psychology tradition, he has omitted the good work and genius of Alvin Toffl er. Leaving aside the lack of such an acknowledgement, however, Schwartz’s (2000) argu-ment echoes and extends that of Toffl er.
Overchoice is no longer a fear but a reality (Schwartz & Ward, 2000).
In 2004, your local supermarket was likely to be storing approximately
Freedom of Choice 97
360 types of shampoo, conditioner, gel and mousse. We have to, will-ingly or unwillwill-ingly, exercise choice when we go shopping, take up a pension plan, choose a telephone provider, decide how to work (part-time, full-(part-time, fl exible hours, from home, while travelling, etc.), decide what type of relationship to enter, and so on. Even personal identity is a choice. For example, I can choose to identify myself as: Latvian, Russian, British, European, a citizen of the world, not to mention as a young woman, a mother or a scholar. Who am I? Any or all of the above!
In the Western world, freedom, autonomy and choice are considered to be the conditions of psychological health (see the self-determination model in Chapter 6). Yet what we see alongside is a phenomenal growth of depression and suicide, especially among the young (Popovic, 2002).
Freedom doesn’t come cheap. We have to pay for it by exercising responsibility. Choices are costly too, with the price for them measured in decisions.
The widespread availability of choice and freedom leads, according to Schwartz, to three major problems:
• Information problems – how can we access all information about all alternatives so as to make an informed choice?
• Error problems – with more complex options, we are more likely to make errors of judgement.
• Psychological problems – excess choice causes one to worry. It does not appear to lead to greater psychological well-being; in fact, quite the opposite – increased choice is accompanied by decreased well-being.
Several experiments have shown that, instead of being liberating, choice can be demotivating. In one such experiment, participants were invited into a gourmet supermarket to taste a variety of jams. One group of people tasted six different types of jam, another twenty-four, all of which were available for purchase. Thirty per cent of people from the fi rst group actually bought a jar, compared with just 3 per cent from the
second group (Jyengar & Lepper, 2000). In another study, two sets of students tasted and rated six or thirty different types of chocolates, respectively. Those tasting six were more satisfi ed with their tasting than those tasting thirty. These are completely counter-intuitive fi ndings.
Surely the more choice there is, the more chance you have to fi nd something you really like? Surely you are free to ignore the other options?
Unfortunately, thinking that you can ignore other options may be logically true, but it is not true psychologically. We get lost in the array of choices open to us. Schwartz rightly notes: ‘the fact that some choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better’ (Schwartz &
Ward, 2004: 87).
In fact, an overload of choice may even lead to a rapid reduction in choices made. Those who watched the UK Channel 4 TV series about the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver trying to introduce healthy (and tasty!) eating in schools, would have noticed how incredibly limited the diets of many children were.
Many of them had never tried strawberries, and could not recognize aspar-agus. And these children lived in the British world of nearly unlimited choice! How can this be the case? With such availability of choice, there is very little chance to make an informed decision, so many parents rely on advertisements to direct their purchasing, becoming slaves to commercials.
Neither Toffl er nor Schwartz seems to have noticed that the problems of excess choice and standardization can go hand in hand. Standardization (which is more viable economically for manufacturers) is one possible response to the problem of overchoice. Standardization as a response of buyers leads to further standardization of products, accompanied by diversifi -cation within these products. This is why one can fi nd at least 15–20 types of orange juice in UK supermarkets, but not a single type of pear or cherry juice.