The Paradox of Choice

1ea5d1ec9e524d8d87242330a7dcd41e The Paradox of ChoiceFreakonomics has published an article about the psychologist Barry Schwartz’s book “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less The Paradox of Choice“. The book makes the argument that (apart from economists) most people would find too much choice a bad thing and would rather having less choice than more.

I referred in an earlier post (“Rational decision making process? Not really!“) to a publication by CSIRO that dispels some ‘conventional wisdom’ perceptions. One of the findings of that study was that when faced with too much complexity people will tend to prefer making no decision at all.

I know that one cannot simply infer from the above arguments to situations encountered in a highly professional environment, as it could be argued that decision making processes at executive levels will most likely be carried out by individuals trained in the art of making decisions, in which case it could be expected that they will be less prone to fall into the traps outlined above. Having said that, as project managers we need to be aware of these basic human tendencies and realize that in most cases, too much information is bad information and that if we want to minimize the load on decision makers’ time we’d better present to them a small and concise set of choices from which they could possible choose.

pixel The Paradox of Choice

No related posts.

16 Comments

  1. Shim Marom says:

    New blog entry: The Paradox of Choice | quantmleap – http://shar.es/aI1NF #pmot

  2. Shim Marom says:

    quantmleap: The Paradox of Choice http://is.gd/e0gcj #pmot #ftpm #pm

  3. Shim Marom says:

    quantmleap: The Paradox of Choice http://is.gd/g0ZDk #pmot #ftpm #pmp

  4. Shim Marom says:

    quantmleap: The Paradox of Choice http://is.gd/VJ6WGy #pmot #ftpm #pmp

  5. Shim Marom says:

    quantmleap: The Paradox of Choice http://is.gd/VJ6WGy #pmot #ftpm #pmp

  6. Shim Marom says:

    quantmleap: The Paradox of Choice http://is.gd/VJ6WGy #pmot #ftpm #pmp

  7. Shim Marom says:

    quantmleap: The Paradox of Choice http://is.gd/VJ6WGy #pmot #ftpm #pmp

  8. Shim Marom says:

    quantmleap: The Paradox of Choice http://is.gd/VJ6WGy #pmot #ftpm #pmp

  9. Shim Marom says:

    quantmleap: The Paradox of Choice http://is.gd/VJ6WGy #pmot #ftpm #pmp

  10. Shim Marom says:

    quantmleap: The Paradox of Choice http://is.gd/VJ6WGy #pmot #ftpm #pmp

  11. Shim Marom says:

    quantmleap: The Paradox of Choice http://is.gd/VJ6WGy #pmot #ftpm #pmp

  12. Shim Marom says:

    quantmleap: The Paradox of Choice http://is.gd/VJ6WGy #pmot #ftpm #pmp

  13. Shim Marom says:

    quantmleap: The Paradox of Choice http://is.gd/VJ6WGy #pmot #ftpm #pmp

  14. Shim Marom says:

    quantmleap: The Paradox of Choice http://is.gd/VJ6WGy #pmot #ftpm #pmp

  15. Shim Marom says:

    quantmleap: The Paradox of Choice http://is.gd/VJ6WGy #pmot #ftpm #pmp

  16. Shim Marom says:

    quantmleap: The Paradox of Choice http://is.gd/tGtGyP #pmot #ftpm #pmp

Leave a Reply


5 + two =

CommentLuv badge