W Power 2024

Can There Ever Be Too Many Flowers Blooming?

A central aim of public policy in a democratic society should be improving the welfare of citizens. Even when resources are plentiful, this is an extremely challenging task, because of the difficulty of defining ‘welfare’

Published: Jul 30, 2010 12:05:24 AM IST
Updated: Jul 29, 2010 02:40:48 PM IST
Can There Ever Be Too Many Flowers Blooming?

Fifty years of research has confirmed the obvious: freedom and autonomy are essential to human well being. To be free and autonomous is to be able to make choices, meaning that no one compels you to do anything and that there are real options to choose among. Unless people can exert significant control over the events in their lives, they are diminished. At the level of entire societies, there is evidence that democratic political organization, including the protection of civil liberties, has a bigger effect on life satisfaction than does material affluence—at least among those whose material needs are being met.

A central aim of public policy in a democratic society should be improving the welfare of citizens. Even when resources are plentiful, this is an extremely challenging task, because of the difficulty of defining ‘welfare’. Beyond basic necessities, there is great individual variation in what people want from life. This is true with respect to material goods, and also with respect to what people want from their work, their health care, their educational opportunities, the arts and just about everything else. As a result, any specific commitment of public resources – from green spaces to medical facilities -- is likely to please some and displease others.

The way to solve this problem, we are often told, is to provide a wide range of opportunities and let people choose for themselves. Each individual, after all, is in the best position to judge his or her welfare. This idea has been the central dogma of neoclassical Economics from its inception. To improve welfare, one must increase freedom of choice, not only because increased choice is intrinsically good, but because it increases the chances that each individual will be able to find something that serves his or her interests.

Adding options is what economists call ‘Pareto efficient’: it makes no one worse off (because those who are satisfied with the options already available can ignore the new ones), and is bound to make someone who is not satisfied with existing options better off. Though this line of argument is normally applied to the world of material goods, it seems even more applicable to culture. For in addition to the fact that choice enables each individual to participate in cultural forms that suit his or her own preferences, a proliferation of cultural forms and objects will also have ‘positive externalities’: people who wouldn’t normally choose to listen to hip hop music nonetheless get to benefit from its immediacy on those occasions when they are exposed to it; and people who aren’t turned on by abstract expressionism can still have their conception of ‘what visual art can be’ expanded when they see it.

The proliferation of cultural forms enlivens the imagination of all members of a society. It may even empower people to be producers as well as consumers of culture—to find their own, unique mode of self expression. Those who are offended by abstract expressionism, or feel assaulted by hip hop, can always choose to stay away from them. So in culture, as in supermarkets, if some choice is good, then more choice is better.

If this statement is true, then all signs point to a culture that has never been in better health. A new work of fiction is published every 30 seconds, and we have literally hundreds of TV stations to choose from. New modes of distribution are making it easier and easier for us to gain access to all this cultural diversity. Amazon puts ‘the world’s largest bookstore’ in each of our homes. TIVO allows us to watch the TV shows we want, when we want. The Internet allows us to taste and then download all the music there is.

Each of these new forms of cultural distribution allows us to tailor what we are exposed to, to fit our own tastes and preferences, while developments like the omnipresent iPod allow us to edit out every moment of every cultural object or event that doesn’t suit us. Naysayers may complain that because of commercial pressure, there is actually less cultural diversity than meets the eye (“fifty-seven channels and nothing on,” as Bruce Springsteen sang.) But even if this is partly true, the Internet has so dramatically reduced ‘barriers to entry’ into the world of culture that the enterprising consumer can now step around the commercial behemoths and find productions that may not have enough mass market appeal to make them viable.

The logic behind the presumption that ‘if some choice is good, more is better’ seems compelling, but what might be called the ‘psycho-logic’ of choice tells us something different. In the last decade, evidence has accumulated that there can be too much of a good thing—at which point options paralyze rather than liberate.

When there are too many choices, two things can happen: satisfaction with whatever is chosen diminishes or people choose not to choose at all. The first demonstration of what I have called ‘the paradox of choice’ was a study by psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper in which shoppers at a gourmet food store were confronted with a display offering samples of a high-quality imported jam. On one day, six flavours were on display; on another, 24 flavours were on display. Shoppers who stopped by the display were given a coupon that saved them a dollar on any jam they bought. What the researchers found was that the large display attracted more customers than the small one, but when the time came to buy, those who had seen the large display were only one-tenth as likely to buy as shoppers who had seen the small display. And it isn’t just about jam. Subsequent studies have shown that:

•    When owners of convenience stores were convinced to reduce the variety of soft drinks and snacks they had available, sales volume increased, as did customer satisfaction;

•    Young adults made more matches in an evening of ‘speed dating’ in which they met eight potential partners than in an evening in which they met 20;

•    When employees are offered a variety of different funds in which to put voluntary 401(k) retirement contributions, the more funds are available, the less likely they are to invest in any. For every ten funds offered, the rate of participation goes down by two per cent, and this occurs despite the fact that in many cases, employees are passing up significant sums of matching money from employers.

My colleagues and I have identified several reasons why increasing options can lead to decreased satisfaction with the chosen option:

•    Regret. To the extent that the chosen option is less than perfect (as all chosen
options inevitably are), it is easier to regret a choice if the alternatives were
plentiful than if they were scarce, especially if the alternatives were so plentiful that not all of them could be investigated. Then, one can only imagine how good some neglected alternatives must have been; and this regret will subtract from satisfaction with the decision.

•    Missed opportunities. Even if the chosen option is wonderful, it is extremely
likely that many rejected options will also have had at least some wonderful features that the chooser had to pass up. As more options are considered,
perceived missed opportunities will add up, and cumulatively diminish satisfaction with the chosen alternative.

•    The curse of high expectations. With many options to choose from, it is hard to resist the expectation that what one finally chooses will be perfect, or at least, extraordinary. We know from a great deal of research that the satisfaction people get from their experiences has more to do with whether the experiences meet or exceed expectations than with the absolute quality of the experiences themselves.

While virtually all of the research on ‘choice overload’ has involved goods and services, I don’t for one moment believe that choice overload is restricted to the material domain.  I believe it also permeates decisions people face about careers, romantic relationships and even personal identity. But it is important to ask whether there is something about the world of culture that makes it different: is it possible that when it comes to culture, more choice is always better?

There are reasons to regard culture as a special domain, and to believe that the profusion of cultural options has positive externalities that make it good for society even if, at the same time, it adds to the confusion faced by individuals. As you try to decide whether to buy the new Philip Roth novel or the new Stephen King for your flight across the country, you realize that you can buy both. Whichever one you’re in the mood for on the plane, you can read the other later. The same is true of movies, theater, TV, music, museums and galleries. Yes, we all have limits of time and financial resources, but cultural objects and events are not substitutes for one another to the same degree that ordinary material objects are.

As I’ve indicated, I am a huge fan of Amazon. Why do people love it so much?  As I was writing my book about how we are plagued by choices, my enthusiasm for it nagged at the back of my mind as a dramatic counter-example: if the arguments in my book were correct, people should not love Amazon; they should be tortured by it.

I hadn’t resolved my puzzlement when a study appeared by Alexander Chernev, showing that large choice sets are actually preferred to small ones when people know what they like and what they are looking for.  ‘Preference articulation’, he called it: If you know what you like, or what you want, you just keep searching until you find it, and the larger the set of possibilities is, the more likely that one of those possibilities will match your preferences. Moreover, a larger choice set increases the chances that what you are looking for actually exists. Finally, technology (i.e. instantaneous search engines) has enabled us to search through large choice sets about as rapidly as we search through small ones.

As I read Chernev’s article, I realized that my own behaviour virtually always fit this pattern. I knew exactly what I was looking for, and Amazon always seemed to have it; no matter how arcane my interest, the book was there, in some virtual reality, ready to be shipped. Beyond the endless inventory, Amazon also had an algorithm or heuristic that suggested other titles that were similar to the one I asked for. The algorithm wasn’t perfect, but it was surprisingly good. What the combination of my pre-specified goals and the Amazon algorithm did is reduce dramatically the set of choices I actually faced. Indeed, most of the time, the only choice I faced was ‘to buy or not to buy’. So if I knew exactly what I wanted -- or if I was willing to let Amazon filter the possibilities for me -- the potential choice overload problem just ‘went away’.

If I’m right about what makes Amazon a blessing and not a curse, we face a
‘paradox of choice’ in the domain of culture that is different from the one I wrote
about in my book, specifically with regard to the potential contribution that the diversity
of cultural offerings makes to creating and sustaining a vibrant, pluralistic culture. Think about what ‘knowing what you want’ means: it means that you are not very open to cultural diversity or serendipity. Instead, you put blinders on and walk straight ahead until you find what you’re looking for. So while the availability of culture providers like Amazon may mean greater inter-individual diversity, it may also mean less intra-individual diversity. Each of us will shop at our own, private bookstore-within-a-bookstore, making less contact with products that are different from what we already know we like.

The twin phenomena of buying only the culture that you want, or relying
on filters to tell you what you should want, is becoming pervasive—a response, I believe, to overwhelming choice in the world of culture. There are now so many magazines narrowly tailored to particular interests that there is no need – ever -- to read about something that lies outside of your existing worldview. The same is true of broadcast and cable news sources. Political conservatives never have to encounter a fact or opinion that will make them uncomfortable.

The prominence of ‘filtering’, driven by extraordinary amounts of choice, tells us something important: our cultural experiences will only be as diverse as the filters we use to help us select them. With all that is available, unmediated browsing is impossible, and we are more reliant on filters now than ever before. Indeed, we couldn’t get through a day without them, and as a result, an honest appraisal of cultural variety requires an assessment of the filters people use.

If my arguments make sense, we should be thinking about how to limit the range of cultural possibilities in the service both of individual empowerment and collective democratic participation. But the very possibility of limitation raises two questions: how much, and by whom?

The latter question is especially troubling. It’s one thing to limit the number of cereals available for purchase; but when it comes to culture, everyone gets (appropriately) nervous. Nonetheless, this is an issue that must be faced. I can dispense with the first question—how many choices—quickly: no one knows. I think the only way to know you have enough is to experience too much. Most of us now experience too much: a novel every 30 seconds is too much, as is 300 TV channels. But there is certainly no ‘magic number’ of cultural options that will bring us all the benefits of cultural diversity with none of the costs.

The second question—who decides—is much thornier. At the moment, with
respect to mass culture, we seem to have only a single decision maker—the market. The market has some virtues: it is, at least potentially, an expression of the popular will.
People get what they want. They vote with their dollars or their remotes. But the market
has only a single criterion for doing its filtering—profitability—and even if that is a
legitimate criterion, it should not be the only one.

With respect to ‘elite’ culture, there are alternatives to the market, in the form of
non-profit arts organizations, universities, museums, libraries and the like. Institutions like these can provide a diverse and helpful set of filters, and they require and deserve significant public support. But two questions arise with respect to these mediating cultural institutions:  first, can they participate more actively in filtering the mainstream cultural productions that have been left entirely to the market? And second, do they need to change the way in which they filter to accommodate the modern explosion of choice?

I have nothing useful or optimistic to say about the first question. On the contrary, the powerlessness of non-profit institutions in the face of the market has led many of them to make decisions about their own programming that exacerbate the choice problem rather than ameliorating it. Under financial pressure to ‘put backsides in seats’, longer seasons -- with programs that aim to appeal to everybody -- have become the trend. They offer patrons more to choose from, not less. Taking on the market in the world of popular culture is, at best, a question for long-term consideration.

It is the second question, I believe, that can benefit from reflection in the short term.
Non-profit cultural institutions have always been both sources of cultural diversity and filters of that diversity. Though they have taken both of these roles quite seriously, the emphasis in recent years, has been on promoting diversity -- a refreshing change, perhaps, from their historic, stodgy past. For example, non-profit theaters prefer doing premieres to doing second productions, and funders prefer supporting something new to continuing to support what they have supported in the past. I believe the time has come for the pendulum to swing back again, and for these institutions to step up as our guides in the overwhelming cultural landscape by focusing more on filtering diversity than on creating it. They should think about concentrating what they offer rather than diluting it, putting lower value on novelty for its own sake, and about reaching out to one another and pooling resources with the aim of creating fewer but grander productions that capture the attention of a larger public.

Whereas it is extremely important for universities and other cultural institutions to be open to novelty and innovation, it is just as essential that they take their responsibilities as filters very seriously. Sacrificing either good for the other will serve neither culture nor society. It is important that each of us reads different books, so that we can educate one another; but it is also important that we read at least some books in common, so that the process of education has a platform from which to launch.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett once wrote that “it takes two to create anything.” What he meant was that creativity requires both someone to generate novelty and someone to select from that novelty the bits that are actually worthwhile. This model of creativity is based on the way creativity happens in nature: natural selection. Random genetic recombination and mutation generate novelty, and reproductive effectiveness selects from that novelty.

We often think of creativity as the generation of novelty, making ‘selectors’— editors, critics, program directors, creators of syllabi— the enemies of creativity. I would argue that this view is mistaken, especially in the modern world. Cultural creativity crucially depends on diverse, discerning, and engaged filters. If we want a vibrant and creative culture, we need to cultivate vibrant and creative filters, for in modern times, it is in the process of selection where the key to creativity lies.

[This article has been reprinted, with permission, from Rotman Management, the magazine of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management]

Post Your Comment
Required
Required, will not be published
All comments are moderated