Choice… is it a good thing?

I, and suspect many of you feel this too, tend to really value my ability to choose.  Free will is deeply enshrined in our social systems and even though these days much of this freedom is illusory, we treasure it.

Yesterday I went to a talk on Behavioural Economics, which is the study of why we make our buying decisions.  However, it touched on some deeper issues, like why do we choose to preserve freedoms even when they doesn’t make us happy.  Just think of the happily married man, with a lovely wife and children who is serially unfaithful.  He has no desire to wreck his happy home or harm the people he loves but keeps exercising that old right to choose… 

He quoted from an experiment with MIT, where students (all very clever chaps), were asked to make a series of choices with aim of maximising their ‘profit’ from this exercise.  Each choice cost them points, and won them variable amounts of money.  The fascinating thing was that even when they were told that limiting their options would make them more money, they still couldn’t resist keeping them open.

I wonder how often in life we delay a choice, wondering if something better may come along, only to miss out in the end.  Apparently, not only may ‘a bird in the hand be worth two in the bush’ but the bird we have may make us happier too!

This kind of behaviour goes very deep, but it is always a good idea to remind ourselves what we are trying to achieve before making, or delaying, a decision; and asking what the cost and potential benefit of doing so is…

Do you have any stories about preserving choices and getting bitten in the bum?

 “There are always two choices. Two paths to take. One is easy. And its only reward is that it’s easy.”

“It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”  Joanne Kathleen Rowling

 

Tags: choice, freedom, hapiness, options

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 14:00 and is filed under Hints, Tips & Techniques, Personal Change, Values & Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.