Does Choice Mean Freedom and Well-Being?

Abstract

Americans live in a political, social, and historical context that values personal freedom and choice above all else, an emphasis that has been amplified by contemporary psychology. However, this article reviews research that shows that in non-Western cultures and among working-class Westerners, freedom and choice do not have the meaning or importance they do for the university-educated people who have been the subjects of almost all research on this topic. We cannot assume that choice, as understood by educated, affluent Westerners, is a universal aspiration. The meaning and significance of choice are cultural constructions. Moreover, even when choice can foster freedom, empowerment, and independence, it is not an unalloyed good. Too much choice can produce a paralyzing uncertainty, depression, and selfishness. In the United States, the path to well-being may require that we strike a balance between the positive and negative consequences of proliferating choice in every domain of life. (c) 2010 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

Do consumer choices augment narcissism? The role of self-referent processing

“…This research is the first to examine how the act of making consumer choices -a ubiquitous practice that lies at the heart of consumption (Rick et al, 2014) -influences narcissism. The findings add to a growing body of research challenging the view that choice is unconditionally beneficial for individual or societal well-being (Markus & Schwartz, 2010;Schwartz & Cheek, 2017). Moreover, the research enriches the consumer psychology literature on narcissism (Cisek et al, 2014;Lee et al, 2013;Sedikides et al, 2007) with a novel perspective, suggesting that narcissism can be treated as a state that is temporarily elevated in a consumer context by self-referent processing as a result of the act of choosing.…”

What Makes Things Cool? How Autonomy Influences Perceived Coolness

“…Another limitation is that our research investigates perceptions of coolness exclusively in Western consumers, who tend to be individualistic and hold a model of agency that suggests it is better to control the environment than to try to adjust to fit within it (Markus and Schwartz 2010;Oyserman, Coon, and Kemmelmeier 2002). In contrast, consumers from collectivistic cultures are more likely to believe that it is better to adjust one's self to fit within the environment than to try to control it (Markus and Schwartz 2010;Oyserman et al 2002).…”

“…Participants then indicated their preference for using the brand in different social contexts, which we varied to manipulate participants' desire to express autonomy. Although Western consumers, like our participants, often want to express an autonomous identity (Brewer 1991;Markus and Schwartz 2010), there are social contexts that increase their desire to fit in. We predicted that although cool brands will be liked better than uncool brands in general, this will not hold in contexts in which consumers want to fit in.…”

Reimagining Society Through Retail Practice

“…How is it that RD vendors and patrons are 'up for' forging certain types of selves or participating in certain practices and not others? Are these issues a matter of individual will or reflexive choice in the face of discursive constraints (Markus and Schwartz 2010;Murray and Ozanne 1997), or perhaps linked in part to the situatedness of being and hence to the emplacement of practices (see Sherry 2000)? We are partial to the latter explanation.…”

“…These insights are underpinned by evidence that consumers have difficulty assessing goods in isolation (Simonson 1999) and that, in addition to diverging tastes, they can exhibit variety-seeking behavior (Kahn 1998). While a large assortment and subsequent breadth of choice may be an important basis for Western conceptualizations of consumer agency (Markus and Schwartz 2010), it also carries a paradoxical downside of increasing consumers' information-processing costs (e.g., Chernev 2006; Van Herpen and Pieters 2007) thereby diminishing their sense of agency through heightened states of myopia and feelings of tedium (Svendsen 2005). Thus, consumers may not prefer large assortments, for instance, when the risk of acquisition is low (Boyd and Bahn 2009), when the products are of high quality (Kwak, Duvvuri, and Russell 2015), or when they are knowledgeable of the complexity of product choice from a large and homogenous assortment (Chernev 2006).…”