I sat watching as person after person encountered the new soda machine at a fast food restaurant. This machine offers dozens of soda choices to begin with, along with tea, sports drinks, and flavored waters. On top of all of that, there are a bunch of flavorings that you can add to each drink. Each item you choose leads to a submenu of more choices. Because of where I sat, I could see the people and their faces at they dealt with the multitude of options. Throughout my lunch it was interesting to note that almost everyone who used the machine would just stand their completely befuddled for a few seconds up to a minute or two, ranging through the choices.
At first it was just amusing, but then, I began to take interest and spent my lunch watching this phenomenon. I even adjusted my seat so I could observe their choices. Time and time again, after a lengthy time of confusion, the participants in my unofficial experiment chose just plain Coke, just plain Pepsi, or just plain tea. The line sometimes got quite long as each person had to face the cacophony of choices.
I would observe that the more choices we are given, the less choice we end up having. For example: if Fastburger puts in a Coca-cola machine and all options are Coke products, then your average Pepsi drinker will have a Coke when they go there. But, if Tacos-R-Us across the street offers both options, then your Pepsi drinker will generally choose Pepsi products. If the Pepsi is runs out, then he might just try Coke, Mountain Dew, or even have some water. Now, Chicken Delight opens up with their multi-choice machine and in most cases, Pepsi man is just going to revert to Pepsi. He is unlikely to try something new and is likely to bypass all the extra choices for that which is comfortable.
I watched this happen recently in my own family. We were looking to paint a few accent walls in the new place, so the wife and kids and I all piled in the car and went to the local Home Depot paint section and grabbed all of the decorating samples and pamphlets in the paint section. I told my wife to pick the accent colors and I’d paint. A week went by, then two. I saw her looking through the stack of samples time and again. I finally asked her what colors she wanted and she told me she just couldn’t decide. So, I took the samples and narrowed the choice down to three sets that I liked and gave them to her. She then quickly made her mind up in a matter of minutes. Too many choices were overwhelming, but narrowed down to a few, she could quickly judge between them.
“Who cares about soda choices or the paint on the wall?” you may ask. It certainly doesn’t matter in the bigger scheme of things, but human behavior can be observed in these little microcosms of life.
Consider the amount of advertising, media, and marketing we face on a daily basis. There is no way we can take it all in, so we begin to tune much of it out. We have thousands of choices that we face each day. Offer a person a few choices and they will tend towards their comfort zone but may occasionally step out and try something new. However, offer this same person hundreds of choices and they will always revert to the simplest and most comfortable option.
There is almost a paralysis in overwhelming choice that leads to an irony.
More choices = less options = less trying of new things
Fewer choices = greater options = more experimentation
This whole idea plays out in the political arena too and is, in fact, becoming a dangerous threat to our political system. In order to gain control of the issue of choices, systems like Facebook and Google cater to our existing comfort. The results that show on a given Google search or the advertisements that Facebook shows you are based on previous choices, comments, notes, and searches that you have done. This begins to limit your access to important information from other points of view. This is rapidly distilling our points-of-view and making us more and more partisan. The threat of propaganda and lies become that much more real because we no longer receive the broader range of information, and often, our minds become more and more closed to what little we see from the other side.
I watch this happen, almost on a daily basis, on Facebook. I have friends who are Republican and friends who are Democrat. Their posts are always very partisan and they see major events through a polarized lens. When something happens in the world, I can usually predict what each of them will post. This used to be an amusing game: ‘Guess what So-and-So will post about the president’s speech?’ It is no longer funny, because it occurs to me that we are polarizing ourselves into two nations within a nation.
I’m not sure what the answer is here, but it will be interesting to watch this play out over a generation. My children will be exposed to more information and choices than I ever have known in my lifetime. They will be bombarded with data. They are already aggressively marketed to, by an industry that no longer waits until they are teens to target them.
Will they develop ways to use this information and grow from it, or will they become overwhelmed by the deluge and retreat to the comfort of a single point of view that pits one group of people against another?
We are richer when we reach out to others who believe differently from us. We are stronger when we test new ideas and logically accept or reject them based on fact and not emotion. We are better people when we associate with those who look different. We grow by rubbing off on each other and being challenged on what we think we know.
Will our choices control us or will we control our choices?
