Does having too many choices make us unhappy? How can we learn practical wisdom?
Dr. Barry Schwartz is the Dorwin Cartwright Professor Emeritus of Social Theory and Social Action in the psychology department at Swarthmore College. He is the author of many books, including Why We Work, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, and co-author of Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing.

BARRY SCHWARTZ

The original edition of The Paradox of Choice came out in 2004, and the internet was just getting started in a major league way, and already the choice overload was a problem. I would say that from the modern perspective, 2004 seems like the 18th century, and as near as I can tell, all of these changes, every single one of them has made the problem substantially worse. The idea that you can get information to help guide you through - well, yeah, but what information do you believe? What's trustworthy? What's being motivated by an opportunity to sell you something?

AI & The Future of Humanity
I have very mixed feelings about AI, and I think its future and our future with it is very much up for grabs. And here's the reason why. At the moment, these extraordinary achievements like ChatGPT, I mean literally mind-boggling achievements, are completely indifferent to truth. They crawl around in the web and learn how words go together, and so they produce coherent meaningful strings of words, sentences, and paragraphs that you're astonished could have been produced by a machine. However, there are no filters that weed out the false concatenations of words from the true ones. And so you get something that's totally believable, and totally plausible, and totally grammatical. But is it true? And if AI continues to move in this direction, getting more and more sophisticated as a mock human, and continuing to be indifferent to truth, the problems that we started our conversation with are only going to get worse.

Capitalism, Education & The Marketplace
Capitalism when it first developed was a very significant part of life, but it wasn't all of life. In other words, it had its place, but that place wasn't every place. And what's happened over the years, what some people call economic imperialism, is that the incredible efficiencies of the market started being exported to other aspects of life. And so the classroom, the educational institution is just another market. The students are customers, the professors are the retailers, and you operate to keep the customers happy. It wouldn't have occurred to anyone to think about education in those terms, but it's increasingly become a market. And that influence is so pervasive that I think it can exert itself without our even realizing. It doesn't occur to people growing up now that they've got a kind of market capitalist lens through which they look at everything. When they're trying to decide whether to form a friendship, they ask themselves: is it worth it to me to invest my time in this relationship? Notice the language. Is it worth it to invest my time? And it doesn't occur to people that this is a sort of distorted way to be thinking about developing close relations to other people. It's just become the language of our time. So you get influenced by being awash in markets and consumerism without realizing that that's what's happening to you. So that's a hard influence to overcome because you don't even realize its presence. That's what makes it so difficult for people to change,

*

When I started in the late 1960s, there was just a tiny fraction of the specialization that there is now. So education in psychology meant education in all of psychology, which is not to say that you were an expert in everything, but you knew something about everything. and that's just not true anymore. When you go to graduate school, right away you go into a lab and you start doing research. And you learn more and more about less and less as you do research. And the effort to sort of generally educate you in psychology is just disappeared. at least at the graduate level and to some degree at the undergraduate level.

You want your best students to get into the lab as early as possible and work with you. And that's just within psychology. To be a good psychologist, you need to know a little economics, you need to know a little sociology, history…there's a lot of other stuff you need to know. And all that gets crowded out too. so we are certainly not educating people to be wise. But there's a trade-off. The more time you spend getting generally educated, the less time you have to become a real specialist. And certain fields now demand that kind of specialization. So, you can try dividing the labor and having groups that consist of some generalists and some specialists who talk to one another.

*

Clifford Geertz said that human beings uniquely are unfinished animals. And what he meant by that is that we come into the world with some structure, some constraints, some essential knowledge, but very incomplete. And society completes us. And that is not true of most of the other species in the world. They come into the world a lot closer to being complete than we do.

*

This too is a skill, learning how to listen. It takes humility. It takes openness. It takes a certain kind of courage because if you really listen to someone else, there's a chance that your view of the world will be changed. And this is not something that people are comfortable with. So we say it's important to be a good listener, but I think we underappreciate just how hard it really, really is to listen to what other people are saying.

I think it's important for young people to understand that life is hard and that they need to be, on the one hand, ambitious, and on the other hand, humble. Because they are likely to make mistakes and every mistake is an opportunity to become wiser and become smarter. The task is to try to make it so that the consequences of mistakes are not catastrophic so that you actually get to live another day and do it better the next day than you did this day. And I want young people to appreciate how much they have to learn from one another and from older people.

Photo credit: Bill Holsinger-Robinson
CC BY 2.0

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this episode was Sophie Garnier. The Creative Process is produced by Mia Funk. Additional production support by Katie Foster.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).