The burden of choice

Lately I’ve been mining the archives of presentations at the annual TED conference.  Each 20-minute talk addresses a subject from the field of technology, entertainment, or design, and many are presented by geniuses: Stephen Hawking and Frank Gehry’s talks are lined up in my downloads right now.  Three of the talks that I watched recently share a common theme: choice.  Their juxtaposition in my queue was coincidental, but maybe I selected them through a subconscious desire to excuse my occasionally lousy decision-making skills.  (I tend to vacillate endlessly and research exhaustively when presented with an important decision, such as which new brand of toothpaste to try.)

Barry Schwartz – The paradox of choice

More options don’t always result in greater satisfaction.  In this talk, Schwartz discusses the hidden costs that come with freedom of choice.  In his words, they are:

1. Regret and anticipated regret
2. Opportunity costs
3. Escalation of expectations
4. Self-blame

There’s an excellent anecdote in there about buying jeans that illustrates his point perfectly.

Malcolm Gladwell – What we can learn from spaghetti sauce

Gladwell explains how experimental psychologist Howard Moskowitz handles the difficult task of figuring out what we want when we don’t really know what we want, and how companies use the results to provide us with choices that didn’t previously exist.

If I asked all of you, for example, in this room what you want in a coffee, you know what you’d say?  Every one of you would say, “I want a dark, rich, hearty roast.” … What percentage of you actually like a dark, rich, hearty roast?  According to Howard, somewhere between 25 and 27 percent.  Most of you like milky, wheat coffee.  But you will never ever say to someone who asks you what you want that I want a milky, wheat coffee.

David Pogue – When it comes to tech, simplicity sells

Pogue argues convincingly that extra features commonly hurt tech products.  I agree wholeheartedly, as this idea has fueled my recent interest in interaction design.  My favorite part comes at the end, when Pogue praises the latest version of his favorite speech recognition software.  The new version added no new features; the company just greatly improved the speech recognition accuracy and made the software much more enjoyable to use.

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PS – Our houseguests this week are Lucy’s comics friend Erika Moen (who does the fabulous webcomic DAR, please check it out) and her husband, Matt Nolan.  To see Erika interview Lucy, check out The Erika Moen Show on Ustream.

My only post about the new Malcolm Gladwell book, I promise

As Lucy's comic suggests, I'm a huge Malcolm Gladwell fan.  I could blog my thoughts on almost every chapter in his latest book, Outliers, but I'm not sure I'd be able to curb my desire to just copy the book into my blog verbatim in an attempt to expose more people to his fascinating socio-economic hypotheses, so I'll try to keep it brief.  Here are a few points of interest from his recent writings.

• Convergence tests & divergence tests

Many of the tests we take in school can be categorized as a convergence test.  For example, on a multiple choice test, a list of possibilities are presented for each question, and you have to converge upon the correct answer.  A divergence test, on the other hand, requires your mind to move in as many different directions as possible.  In the example used in Outliers, students are asked to write down as many different uses as they can think of for two objects: a brick and a blanket.  Gladwell discusses these testing methods while writing about different kinds of intelligence, and uses them to explain why affirmative action graduates of Michigan's law school, who didn't perform as well academically as other students, enjoy careers that are every bit as successful as their white counterparts.  In the same chapter, he convincingly suggests that Harvard should introduce a lottery structure to its admissions process.

• Unconventional comparisons

In Gladwell's latest New Yorker article, he likens the selection of public school teachers to the selection of NFL quarterbacks.  Blogging about the response to this article, he espouses the value of drawing parallels between seemingly unconnected things.

"...non-symetrical comparisons are far more interesting and thought-provoking than symetrical comparisons. If I wrote a piece about how finding good point guards in the NBA was a lot like finding good quarterbacks in the NFL, the comparison would be exact. And as a result, it would be relatively useless.  What new light does the addition of a second, identical example shed on the first?"

This pretty well summarizes why I find Gladwell's work so interesting: he's good at combining ideas in previously unrecognized ways.  Would that I had such insight.  When I was younger, I was amazed at how musicians, scientists, and other creative minds were able to produce brilliance seemingly out of nothing.  The older I get, the more often I see that breakthrough discoveries or artistic achievements are the result of (or the combination of) many preceding accomplishments & influences.  My definition of creativity has been reshaped with time.