On The Paradox of Choice -- Related To Happiness

I've become hopelessly addicted to watching TED videos lately. Two of them have been of particular interest:

The Paradox of Choice -http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html

Why Are We Happy -http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html

The first one about the paradox of choice was of particular interest. It pretty much encapsulates a lot of ideas that I've had recently about happiness. This is where my inner "socialist" comes out. How can I explain this?

We all act in our own self interest. Today we don't have to make all of our own food, make our own clothes, build our own houses, etc. We have decided to divide our labor and specialize into different fields of interest. I am a technology consultant. You might be a doctor or a flight attendant or a customer service rep. We each try to do the job to the best of our ability and we benefit from everyone else who specializes and we exchange the money from our jobs for goods and services from others. This is how our economy works.

Although this format may try to maximize efficiency in our economy, does it really make us all happier? I'm convinced that everything we do is to increase our happiness. Every action we take is an attempt to increase our happiness.

In the labor market, we all act in our own self interest. We pick the jobs and/or careers that we think are best and will maximize our earnings and wages relative to our interest in the job. We we specialize into different fields more or less independent of what others think we should do (obviously we would want to pick jobs that have a decent demand for their goods and/or services).

When we're in each of our respective professions, we are generally trying to maximize our earnings. Our companies are doing the same thing. So when we offer products and/or services to our customers, we're trying to get the most money we can get out of them. We are NOT trying to maximize their happiness. Curiously, the more choices we offer them, the more confused they turn out to be.

Example:

You go to the grocery store looking for some salad dressing (as the video stated). You get arrive to the arrive, and OH CRAP, there are a ton of dressings here. Which one should I get? I wonder which ones tastes the best? If I choose this one, will it be good? Will I regret buying this salad dressing if it's not good?

I'm convinced we each ask ourselves variations of the same questions for each purchase we make. There's not just one option. There's tons of options! How to pick?

This is the source of our unhappiness. Not necessarily being unhappy, but just less happy relative to the situation if we didn't have so many options. Excessive options confuse people and lead them to question their decisions. This is not to say that SOME choice is good, but I'm just saying that if we had fewer choices, then we would be MORE happy.

Again, I'm trying to say that since we are all acting in our own self-interest within the professions that we work in, we're trying to maximize our earnings and not thehappiness of customers. This leads to an aggregate decrease in happiness due to all the options people have.

In the video, Barry Schwartz says that is there were more "income redistribution", then we would take some of the excess choices from the rich people and give them to the poor people, who would actually benefit from more choice. I think this idea is problematic, but very interesting. It's problematic in its implementation, because who wants Uncle Sam coming for more of their money? But if Uncle Sam did, maybe they (richer people) would actually be happier...

This ties into the second video question why we are happy. It very nicely reinforces my point that people who have more options question themselves more and have more an internal struggle in their daily lives.

Example from the video. You have a class of photography students who get to choose 2 pictures from their collection of 10 to be blown up and framed. For half of them, you tell them that they should choose one of the two pictures and they will have 3 days to change their mind about the choice. For the other half, they must make one final decision on the picture that they will choose. Who do you think is happier, the people with our without the choice? Turns out the people who are stuck with their initial choice are happier. Whoa. Doesn't work out like you think.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

I hope these videos spark some thoughts in your mind. They sure did for me. I think that if we all step back and accept that people in our industrialized nation are somewhat paralyzed by all the choices that we have and think about all the good we could do by giving those in other countries more choices, we would ALL be better off. It's amazing. Life wants to be simple.

Update: On Virtues

So, just as I make my post, I find perfect article for what I'm talking about.

"Prof Marc Bekoff, an ecologist at University of Colorado, Boulder, believes that morals are "hard-wired" into the brains of all mammals and provide the "social glue" that allow often aggressive and competitive animals to live together in groups."

According to this controversial study, it's not just humans who know what right and wrong is. It's animals. Which isn't surprising considering we are animals. We're not the supreme being that rules the world.

So when you think about morality, maybe there are some absolute truths. Those truths being ones that are necessary for not only humans to have societies, but also animals around the world. It's obvious that humans and other animals such as wolves, coyotes, etc that are mentioned in the article will have some differences on what is right and wrong, but is it possible that at the most basic level, our different species can agree that some things (like random murder) are just wrong.

I think that if it was just you...you were the only person in the world, then nothing could really be right and wrong. It's up to you, you're the only person who can decide. But once you start introducing other people into the mix, then it becomes important to decide on a few basic rules that will govern society. That's not to say that everyone will follow them, but everyone NOT following them will lead to the destruction of the society. Therefore, from an evolution standpoint, there is basic sense of morality that is in everyone of us. Our ancestors decided to form groups and have basic societies. So maybe it ends up that the little voice in the back of your head that tells you that you are doing the wrong thing is really your DNA telling you that you're doing something against the fabric of society. People aren't always going to follow the rules, but I think that everyone of us knows what the right thing to do is, whether or not we choose to do it.

On Virtues

Where do virtues come from? How do you know what is really right and wrong in this world? How could you truly know if an action was "correct" or "incorrect"?

I was having a discussion with one of my colleagues the other day about this. He didn't really end up telling me where he thinks our virtues as humans come from (he would probably say God -- which I deny). Before the church, and the Internet, and books, and newspapers, how did we come to settle on a group of ideals that people are supposed to have to be a "good" person.

As I was talking with him, it all became clear to me. It has to be related to our DNA and our evolutionary history. Because if humans our ancestors engaged in mass cannibalism, deceit, theft, etc. then a human society could not form. If you have an excess amount of people that do things to the detriment of others without even thinking about it, you won't have a functioning society. You'll have anarchy. So maybe in our evolutionary history, certain traits (we call them virtues) have been selected for and as a result, most of us inherently understand these virtues, because accepting these them has helped form our society. I think that most people know what the "right" thing to do is, but acting on it is different.

So then what becomes "right" and "wrong"? Something that is "right" would have to be related to the virtues that lead to the formation of our society (ex: honesty) and something that is "wrong" would undermine those virtues.

I'll have to think about it this more.