Successes like Whitaker’s are unsurprising to Barry Schwartz, Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College. Schwartz has spent years arguing that limiting our options consistently leads to better outcomes. He thinks too much choice overwhelms us and makes us unhappy—a phenomenon he calls the paradox of choice. Endless choices, Schwartz says, are more stultifying than gratifying. In one canonical experiment dubbed “the jam study,” grocery-store shoppers scanning 24 different gourmet jams were less likely to make a purchase than shoppers who looked at only six jams. The shoppers choosing from a wider selection were also unhappier with the jam they’d bought.
The problem, Schwartz explains, is that when you have more options, you tend to put more pressure on yourself to make the perfect choice—and you feel more let down when it doesn’t turn out to be perfect, after all. “Even when you choose well, you end up disappointed,” Schwartz says. “You’re convinced that even though you did well, you should have done better.” Based on work by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who have shown bad feelings about losses are stronger than good feelings we have about gains, Schwartz argues that as you’re presented with countless choices, your pleasure at the prospect of more options is canceled out by the anticipated loss of making a wrong choice. [...]
Plus, navigating difficult choices may make you want to pop a Xanax. In a Harvard study where people were presented with a series of similar options, brain areas responsible for anxiety lit up on their functional MRI scans as they struggled to make a decision. Since the Internet, social media, and crafty marketers present us with so many more similar choices now than we had even 20 years ago, our brains are likely churning out this anxious response on a regular basis. Over time, such constant indecision can darken your mood and outlook. The dopamine system, involving brain chemicals and neural actions involved in reward and punishment, is working overtime. “Under continued stress, the dopamine system tends to get depleted, and you might fall into feelings of continual despair,” says biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, author of The Anatomy of Love, revised and updated this year. “This sort of thing could happen to the brain when you get too many choices.” [...]
If you do persist in choosing someone from a large array, not only will you come away less satisfied—you’ll probably make a worse choice. When online daters had more search options in a University of Taiwan study, they spent less time considering each possibility and found it harder to sort the good prospects from the bad ones. Stretching your cognitive capacity too thinly, the researchers explain, tends to hamstring you on irrelevant details and distract you from the criteria you consider most important. That suggests that in order to assess the qualities that matter—which, for most people, are things like a partner’s honesty, his dependability, her sense of humor—you need to go deeper in your search, not wider. [...]
Even if limiting your dating choices brings practical and emotional benefits, it’s worth asking whether those benefits justify giving up a certain amount of individual agency. Signing up for a choice-limiting site involves trusting a computer algorithm to make key calls for you—like deciding which handful of people, out of a potential pool of thousands, you’ll be able to get to know more deeply. The algorithm is a black box, the contents of which remain in flux as programmers tweak this or that line of code or re-weight one personality variable against another. Even outside the online-dating realm, some might argue that any option-limiting shortcut is a copout—that you need to take the full measure of a choice like who your life partner should be, even when choosing is tedious or uncomfortable.
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