The Paradox of Choice Shops for a Birthday Card

July 31, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Is having a large variety of items to choose from helpful for making a decision? Or, as the paradox of choice would have it, do all those options keep us from deciding and then, when we do finally make up our mind, leave us less satisfied with our choice?

In the previous post, I speculated that it depends on how deeply our ego is sunk in the thing we’re choosing. The same object may have a vastly different meaning to different people. When it comes to shopping, those differences are often strongly rooted in gender roles.

I once heard a marketing expert explain that in a greeting card store, men and women follow much different stage directions. Women will look at nearly every card in the category trying to find the absolutely right one. Men look only until they find one that seems OK, and that’s the one they buy.  It’s the same now on the Internet. Scribbler, an online British card company found that men spent about six minutes online choosing a card. Women averaged 15 minutes.

Men would probably be happier with a small number of cards to choose from. But a woman who finds only a few cards to choose from might extend her search to another store or website in order to find the perfect card. Greeting cards are not a guy thing.* Or as Emily West puts it in an article in Feminist Media Studies (here), “For many women, greeting card communication is part of a feminized habitus that includes kinship work as well as routine provisioning for the household. For men, taking an interest in greeting cards can seem like discrediting behavior for heterosexual masculinity.”

In other words, regardless of what is actually printed on the greeting card, the real message is that the giver and receiver are connected socially and emotionally. For many women, competence in that sphere matters a lot for their sense of self. Men, not so much.**

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* Eighty percent of all greeting cards are bought by women.

** It always strikes me as ironic that although greeting cards signify this personal connection, we turn to an unknown and distant stranger, some Hallmark-hired Cyrano, to put these feelings into words (the “sentiment” as it’s known in the card biz).

Neckties, Self, and the Paradox of Choice

July 30, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

I was walking through Macy’s the other day – the original store, the one that occupies an entire city block at Herald Square.  On the ground floor of the men’s store (the half of the building on the Seventh Avenue side) is the departmentI called “men’s furnishings.” It was there, in men’s furnishings, that I thought of Barry Schwartz.

Schwartz is the social psychologist who in 2004 published The Paradox of Choice — Why More Is Less.

The basic idea is that while choice is good, if we have too many items to choose from, we freeze. We can’t decide. And when we finally do make a choice, we’re less likely to be satisfied with it.

It all began with jam. In 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper published a remarkable study. On one day, shoppers at an upscale food market saw a display table with 24 varieties of gourmet jam. Those who sampled the spreads received a coupon for $1 off any jam. On another day, shoppers saw a similar table, except that only six varieties of the jam were on display. The large display attracted more interest than the small one. But when the time came to purchase, people who saw the large display were one-tenth as likely to buy as people who saw the small display. [Barry Schwartz, “More Isn’t Always Better,” Harvard Business Review, June 2006]

It sounds reasonable. But the last time I was in a supermarket, they certainly seemed to have a lot of different jams. But what do I know? Maybe the displays are only half the size of what they were pre-Schwartz.

Back to Macy’s. What they have mostly in men’s furnishings is neckties. Table after table, each featuring a different designer or label, and each designer offering different patterns and different colors. I felt as though I were swimming in an ocean of neckties. There had to be well over a thousand different ties to choose from.

(Click to enlarge. A panoramic view of the whole floor would have shown still more tables on the left and right of this.)

Wine stores, same thing. Bottle of red, bottle of white? More like hundreds, thousands, of each. Narrow it down. Say you want a cabarnet sauvignon. You’ve still got at least a hundred to choose from.

Macy’s and my wine store have been in business for a long time. Surely they must know what they’re doing in giving the customer so many options. Call it the paradox of the paradox of choice. Or as Koen Smets (here ) says, “It’s complicated.” There are choices, and then there are choices.

People prefer fewer choices for utilitarian purchases and more choices for hedonic purchases. When we buy something only for its functional utility, we don’t want to spend much time comparing various options — whatever does the job is good enough. When we are looking for something that will give us pleasure, in contrast, our preferences are more specific and pronounced, and this makes us more demanding.

Pleasure as opposed to functional utility may be part of what makes us want more choices. But that can’t be all there is to it. Is my wine at dinner more pleasurable than my marmalade at breakfast? How much choice we want and how much time and effort we will devote to making that choice also depend on how meaningful the item is to us, how strongly it’s connected to our sense of who we are. That connection is also what makes the object pleasurable. If I think of a car as just transportation, a BMW isn’t going to give me more pleasure than does my ‘98 Honda.

I was having lunch once in Manhattan with a friend who had a business meeting that afternoon. As we were leaving the restaurant, I noticed that some of the lunch had wound up on his necktie. We weren’t far from Bloomingdale’s, whose necktie department (also on the ground floor) looks much like Macy’s only with higher prices. But on the streetcorner across from the restaurant, stood a guy selling ties from a small rack — a selection of at most a dozen. Most of them looked like all the other ties my friend owned, so he grabbed one, paid the $5, tossed his stained tie in a trash can, and put on the new one. Necktie connoisseurship was not a big component in his sense of self.

For choosing an item closely entwined with the self, more choice may mean more pleasure. What if one of the supermarket shoppers in the Iyengar*-Lepper study was really into jam. She looks at those 24 jars (What, only 24?) and imagines what each will taste like, how it will compare to others she’s had. She reads the ingredients on each label.  (Fifteen grams of sugar? Seems a bit much.). Finally, she narrows the choice and takes the quince-blueberry with a hint of thyme. On the other hand, the shoppers who just want something to smear on the kids’ PBJ sandwiches will grab the first one that looks like it’ll work. All those others just make things confusing.

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* Ms Iyengar made an appearance in this blog some years ago (here), also in connection with the idea of choice. The post was called “Iyengar Management.” I couldn’t resist. And it does have anger in it.

The Tristesse of No Bonjour

July 27, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Several years ago, I went to Paris with my family. When we got out of the airport, I couldn’t find the RER, the express train from DeGaulle to Paris. I went up to a man standing on the sidewalk and asked, in French of course.

 “Bonjour,” he said.

I repeated my question. “Bonjour,” he said again, this time as if cuing a dim-witted child. I got it. “Bonjour,” I said and again asked about the RER. This time he answered.

I had chalked it up to this guy just being a stickler for formalities. But now that I’ve started reading The Bonjour Effect by Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoît Nadeau, I realize how wrong I was. Bonjour is not just a greeting. It’s like eye contact – a necessary start to any interaction. It acknowledges that you are in the same situation with the other person. Without bonjour, communication cannot begin.

As I read this first chapter about bonjour, I recalled a much earlier visit to Paris. I needed some Velcro to make a small repair on something. A piece of clothing? A bag? I don’t recall. A friend told me that I could find Velcro in the mercerie section of a department store.  I went to La Samaritaine and found the mercerie. Two sales girls were standing talking to each other. I stood there, waiting to be waited on. Any clerk in an American store would have turned to me and asked if she could help. But the two girls continued their conversation, facing one another and ignoring me as if I weren’t there. I can’t remember how I managed to interrupt and finally get the Velcro.*

The rudeness of the French, I thought, or at least young French women. But now, decades later, I wonder what would have happened if I had said, “Bonjour.”

Of course, it’s not just a matter of words. The bonjour requirement is the visible tip of an underlying difference in the way we think about service workers and customers and the relation between them. The definition of those roles in France is not the same as it is in America. Barlow and Nadeau explain:

When you enter a French store ore a restaurant or even walk up to an information kiosk, the first thing you have to do in France is acknowledge that you are entering their turf. That’s because you are asking for something from an employee who may have something more important to do. Whether or not that employee actually does have something better to do is not the point. You are interrupting him to ask for something. He does not owe you anything in exchange for you giving him your bounces. The French just don’t think that way. When you address a merchant or a clerk or a hostess or even a waiter, bonjour is not a word. It’s not a greeting or even a form of courtesy. Bonjour is code for “please allow me to indulge in your services.”

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* The French word for Velcro, I discovered, is Velcro. It was invented by a francophone Swiss. According to Wikipedia, the word is a portmanteau of velour and crochet (hook).

Am I Blue? It Depends.

July 25, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking
But now, God knows,
Anything goes.
   — Cole Porter

“Defining Deviancy Down” is the title of a 1993 article by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Like Cole Porter, Moynihan was arguing that behavior looked on as shocking in earlier times nowadays gets a pass. But while Cole Porter was bemused, Moynihan was deeply worried.  The subtitle of the article was “How We've Become Accustomed to Alarming Levels Of Crime and Destructive Behavior.”

Moynihan begins with two related ideas from sociology. First, norms change. Second, whether a behavior is deviant depends on how much of it there is. Society seems to need a certain amount of deviance, and when behavior changes, the norms change so as to maintain that amount. Moynihan quotes from Wayward Puritans, Erik Erikson’s classic study of deviance in colonial New England. “the number of deviant offenders a community can afford to recognize is likely to remain stable over time.”

Erikson in turn was inspired by Durkheim’s well-known quote about the necessity of deviance.*

Imagine a society of saints, a perfect cloister of exemplary individuals. Crimes, properly so called, will there be unknown, but faults which appear venial to the layman will create there the same scandal that the ordinary offense does in ordinary consciousness. If, then, this society has the power to judge and punish, it will define these acts as criminal and will treat them as such. For the same reason, the perfect and upright man judges his smaller failings with a severity that the majority reserve for acts more truly in the nature of an offense. Formerly, acts of violence against persons were more frequent than they are today, because respect for individual dignity was less strong. As this has increased, these crimes have become more rare; and also, many acts violating this sentiment have been introduced into the penal law which were not included there in primitive times.

Both Durkheim and Erikson focused on societies that defined deviance up. Durkheim’s society of saints was hypothetical, but Erikson’s was real. Those 17th -century Puritans in Salem thought of themselves, or at least their leaders, as saints. Three hundred years later in the US, a dearth of sinners was no longer the problem, as Moynihan saw it. Just the opposite. But the general proposition is the same: the amount of a behavior affects our perception of how deviant it is.

As with deviance, so with color. How blue does a dot have to be for you to say that it’s blue and not purple? The answer, according to a recent series of experiments, is that it depends. It depends on the actual color of the dot, of course. That’s what the Graph A shows. The researchers (Levari, Gilbert, Wilson, Sievers, Amodio and Wheatley) asked subjects whether a dot was blue or purple. Subjects (I hope they were well paid) had to judge 400 dots. In the graphs below, the X-axis is the degree of blueness.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

The bluer the dot, the higher the percentage of subjects who labeled it as blue. In one version of the experiment (Graph A) the first 200 trials and the last 200 had the same proportion of blue dots. Consequently, color was everything, First 200 trials (blue line) or last 200 trials (yellow line) made no difference.
                                                                               
But in the other version of the experiment, in the final 200 trials, the experimenters reduced the number of really blue dots. As in the first experiment, color made a big difference. Bluer dots got a higher percent of subjects calling them blue. But the number of blue dots also affected perceptions. There was little effect for the dots that were at the ends of the spectrum — the very purple and the very blue.

But for the more ambiguous colors, the number of blue dots affect subject’s willingness to call a dot blue. I’ve added red boxes to show more clearly the difference for a single level of blueness. In the first 200 trials, less than half the subjects called those dots blue. But with fewer of those dots around, subjects were far more likely (more than 75%) to define that color as blue.

There’s something else interesting in Graph B — those five yellow data points indicating that when blue dots were scarce (the last 200 trials), even the very blue dots were not always labeled as blue. In some cases, only half the subjects saw them as blue. Apparently, when blueness (or deviance?) becomes rarer, there is less consensus on just what is and isn’t blue (or deviant).

Some of the experiments involved questions far more subjective than “Is this dot blue?” for example, “Is this research proposal ethical?” The results were similar. This tendency to define deviance up, the authors say, leads to an irony that the people involved often do not see: “well-meaning agents may sometimes fail to recognize the success of their own efforts.” Take “micro-aggressions” on campus, for example. You can see these as an important problem, one that requires constant vigilance and action. But you can also see their elevation to the status of “problem” as a sign that the more egregious bright-blue-dot forms of sexism and racism have grown scarcer.


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* Somehow, the writers of the TV show “Profiler” managed to have Debbie, their sociology grad student character, completely miss Durkheim’s basic idea. See this earlier post.