 |
 |
 |
Imagine that you’re at a bakery. It’s early morning, and you find yourself deliberating between the pumpkin scone and the cranberry muffin. On the one hand, the scone looks healthy and quite interesting. And yet the cranberry muffin beckons. This kind of deliberation and hesitation interest Princeton psychologist Susan Sugarman. Why is it so hard to choose, especially among agreeable options? Is it because in choosing one, we lose the other(s)? Is it because we strive for the best choice, and cannot compute what constitutes “the best”? Even if these surmises are correct, says Sugarman, the basis of our indecisiveness remains elusive. Insofar as we fear loss, she asks, why do we feel it so easily and dread it so much? Why do we need the best? Sugarman’s current research examines these questions, mining observations of child development to illuminate adult experience. In a forthcoming paper in the International Journal of Infant Observation, Sugarman discusses the paradoxes of choice and possible sources of our indecision. It is ironic that we yearn for freedom in our choices and yet long to sacrifice the freedom when the moment for choosing arrives, Sugarman observes. “Having identified three appealing dishes on a menu,” she notes, “we may despair over which dish to select. To escape the difficulty we might select a fourth dish or defer the choice to someone else.” Based upon studies of toddlers, Sugarman theorizes that choice is not natural for us. When confronted with a so-called choice between two toys, for example, the youngest children pick the object they notice, or they reach for the two toys at once. They do not pause to consider that an alternative object will be lost in the choosing. “One theory of why we adults have
difficulty with choice is that we ‘reach for both things’
and do not easily give up what we want,” Sugarman remarks.
Yet, as adults, we at least think more is going on. We believe we
do not know “which one we want,” or imagine we want
the “best” choice and fear making the “wrong”
choice. Are these new dilemmas, Sugarman continues, or old ones
in grown-up clothing?
|
 |
|
 |
|||
