Paradox of options

If you go to your local supermarket, you will find too many shelves with too many options. I am almost sure that you have never seen all the products they have in their collection. If you start looking for all the options you have, it is almost impossible to make the optimal choice. Then you will either choose the brand you are familiar with or the product you have always chosen. The odds are in favor of the latter option. During the day, you will have tens of these kinds of decisions to make.

Some freedom is a good thing

Most people think that increasing the number of options is mostly a good thing. The world has changed from life with limited options to unlimited options. This change has a cost. You have limited bandwidth in use in your brains. You will get problems with too many options faster than you think. Your decisions will have three different bad outcomes if you have too many options. They reduce the number of decisions you make, they lower the quality of decisions, and the satisfaction you get from them.

Complexity increases all when you increase the number of options. Some complexity is good, but too many different options bring you analysis paralysis. Each added option multiplies the amount of work and time you use for making a decision. You cannot make any decision after a certain amount of options. What happens is that you use lots of time to make a decision that never materializes. And this time is away from other tasks or decisions. Sometimes not making a decision is a good thing. There are decisions you should not make. If the outcome of not doing the decision is better than the cost of lost time, your outcome becomes better and indecision is a blessing.

Too many options create another unwanted consequence. The quality of your decision becomes lower. Too many options can create a situation where you make a decision that is based on less important parameters. Mating is one of these situations. You might encounter many approachable possible partners in a nightclub. The odds of a decision based on outer appearance grow higher. And the outcome will have less quality. If you are trying to find a partner, you can probably increase your odds by going to a party with a smaller amount of possible partners and make a better decision.

Too many options bring less satisfaction. This is maybe the weirdest negative outcome. Why doesn´t it bring you more satisfaction because you have put more effort into making a decision? One reason for this is that you can imagine that many of your options could have been better than the option you chose. You are more interested in what you could have lost than what you did gain from your decisions. The attractive parameters of other options are more represented in your brains than the attractive parameters of your choice. You will start regretting immediately after the choice you made. These are some of the reasons why fewer options after a certain point mean higher satisfaction.

Sweet spot

Any decision you make has its sweet spot in which there is an optimal amount of options available. In this spot, the number of decisions, quality of them, and the satisfaction you get from being optimal. When you have a single option, you feel disregard for the decision. After you have added enough options, you will arrive at your sweet spot of options. If you will add more options after your sweet spot, each of them is bad for the quality of your decision. You can add options forever, but the result is that the odds of having a good outcome becomes smaller.

Sweet spots differ from decision to decision and from person to person. This makes them hard to find. The process of trial and error will help you find them. This requires situations that repeat each other. The problem with this process is that it consumes time. And your time is limited. You have to make decisions about considering your options. These decisions can be more important than your last choice.

More information about the topic you can find from Barry Schwartz´s book Paradox of choice or his interviews on Youtube.

Until next time,

-TT

Conscious and Unconscious actions

Consciousness is not a simple thing. If you say it is, you probably don´t understand it well. I will not go into detail about consciousness. Before you start reading this text, think about consciousness yourself. Do you think you are always conscious of what you do? Have you ever noticed that you did something without acknowledging it at the moment you did it? Think about more questions about consciousness yourself. Conscious and unconscious actions can be separated into five groups:

1. Always conscious actions
2. Actions that can be done either way
3. Skills that are practiced with conscious actions and become unconscious
4. Actions that can be made conscious but are normally unconscious
5. Actions that are always unconscious

The first group means that you cannot function without conscious thinking. For example, you have forgotten something and you know it. Then you have to put a conscious effort to remember what you have forgotten. This is the most uncommon group of these actions, but people think it is the most common one. Belief in human rationality lies in this misunderstanding.

The second group of actions is skills that can be done either way after once they are well learned. This group of actions does not usually require precise timing or fast execution. Driving is one of these skills. For example, you can take a similar journey from home to work every day without thinking about it consciously during the journey. Sometimes you have to consciously change your journey because of a traffic jam or to stop buying some groceries either in a way back home or to work.

The third group of actions is skilled and initially learned with conscious effort. Usually, this means lots of conscious repetitions. These actions move gradually from conscious to unconscious. The harder these actions get, the more conscious effort you need. Finally, this group of actions becomes automated. After the automatization of the action, conscious actions can fail. For example, if you had watched sports, you might have encountered professional athletes failing in easy situations where they had too much time to perform an easy action. Conscious actions are not as effective in those situations than unconscious actions.

The fourth group of actions is normally unconscious. These actions change into consciousness by getting some feedback about their effects. This feedback is usually biological and aims for controlling bodily functions. For example, you can have a sports clock that measures your heartbeats and you can consciously aim for getting your heartbeat higher or lower depending on your needs. You might acknowledge the changes in your bodily functions, but details of how you do it remains unconscious.

The fifth group consists of actions that are always unconscious and mostly spinal reflexes. You cannot intentionally grow your hair or change your blood sugar level. The latter happens at least when you are not consciously eating or you are sleeping. These actions are unconscious. And some survival reflexes are unconscious, too. For example, avoiding a surprising flying object that comes toward you. These actions keep you alive. Therefore, they are necessary. Without these spinal reflexes, mankind wouldn´t exist.

Some actions are performed better with your unconscious mind and some of them are performed better when you put conscious effort. Speed is one variable that separates the need for the unconscious mind and the use of consciousness. As you have noticed, most skilled actions do not require consciousness. When you look at the experts performing their skilled actions, they seem effortless. This is the result of thousands of repetitions done with conscious thought. Expertise is not the most usual way of performing unconscious actions. Habits are the most usual unconscious actions. The quality of your habits is the most useful indicator to see if you will be successful. What this means is that the outcomes of your good habits must be better than the outcomes of your bad habits.

You cannot only perform unconscious actions in life. Big decisions with lots of variables require conscious thought. They require more time. Therefore, if you have no time, you have to rely on your unconscious mind. It is more prone to errors. Separating the unconscious and conscious mind and decisions is not a perfect model. Without the unconscious mind, you wouldn´t make any decisions. You would think about irrelevant things for hours without making any conclusions without it. Therefore, both are very much needed in every decision.

TT