Serendipity35

The ordinary man believes he is free when he is permitted to act arbitrarily,
but in this very arbitrariness lies the fact that he is unfree.
Hegel

Before I get into this classroom today, let me tell you that this post is a victim of what it describes. Inveterate notetaker that I am, I have collected a half dozen notes to myself about references to this topic of choice and constraint. Too many notes that are harder to weave into a coherent piece than if I had started writing after the inspiration of one of them.

So here is note #1. Did you ever study "prospect theory" which was developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979? Neither did I - but I saw it referenced and did a little searching. It was intended as a psychologically realistic alternative to expected utility theory - key word is expected, as in what we expect people to do. These guys worked in wonderfully narrow fields like behavioral finance and hedonic psychology. (That latter group I imagine having their annual conference on a beach in Hawaii.)

Prospect theory allows you to describe how people make choices in situations where they have to decide between alternatives that involve risk, and how individuals evaluate potential losses and gains. Financial decisions like purchases are a common example.

A lot of what they and others found goes against our common beliefs. Give shoppers many choices and they will be demotivated to buy. Shoppers who were offered free samples of 6 different jams were more likely to buy one than shoppers who were offered free samples of 24. Many of us would predict the opposite.

If you give your students a choice of reading any one of 24 novels for extra credit versus giving them a choice from amongst 6, would the number who took you up on the offer vary? I'm sure students would tell you that they prefer having 24 to choose from no matter what the results show.

K & T also investigated this idea of risk. Their subjects sometimes showed risk-aversion when given a choice, but when offerred essentially the same choice formulated in a different way might display risk-seeking behavior. An example they give: people may drive across town to save $5 on a $15 calculator but not drive across town to save $5 on a $125 coat.

OK, stay with me. Note 2

"A society which is clamoring for choice, which is filled with many articulate groups, each urging its own brand of salvation, its own variety of economic philosophy, will give each new generation no peace until all have chosen or gone under, unable to bear the condition of choice. The stress is in our civilization.” Margaret Mead in her book, Coming of Age in Samoa

Note 3 is about another book I picked up and will recommend here - The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz. When I read it, that was when I first scribbled a reminder to blog about the hidden dangers of having too many choices. (You can get an overview of the book's ideas from the video at the end of this post.) Schwartz says:

"Given the indisputable fact that choice is good for human well-being,it seems only logical that if some choice is good, more choice is better. Logically true, yes. Psychologically true, no. My colleagues and I, along with other researchers, have begun amassing evidence - both in the laboratory and in the field - that increased choice can lead to decreased well-being. This is especially true for people we have termed "maximizers," people whose goal is to get the best possible result when they make decisions. Choice overload is also a problem for people we call "satisficers," people who seek only "good enough" results from their choices, but the problem is greatly magnified for maximizers."

In an article, "The Tyranny of Choice", Schwartz also says that the modern university has become a kind of intellectual shopping mall that offers a wide array of different "goods" and allows, even encourages, students/customers to shop around until they find what they like.

We have too many choices each day - hundreds of cable TV channels, a supermarket aisle with 175 salad dressings, overwhelming Net search results, too many blogs.

Post-It #4 Journalist Michael Schrage said in an interview that when people call for a ban on PowerPoint presentations, they miss the point.

"The issue is not banning PowerPoint but about putting constraints on it. For example, limit a PowerPoint to no more than 10 slides, no more than 20 words, and 2 of those slides have to have pictures or charts. Just as in the strict rhyming structure of sonnets or haiku, art is defined by constraints. A problem with PowerPoint is that you can just create another slide."

Note #5 came from the Common Craft blog when I read a post that explains how their simple videos in the "paperworks" format work because of constraints.

What are those constraints? Rules that they have decided not to break in making the their copyright infringement-free videos: only using materials like paper, whiteboard, markers, string, and keeping them under 4 minutes in length, using their hands to tell the story, and without an external music track (but they do hum, clap etc.)

Here's a sample video of theirs on social networking:

(Can't see it? Try this link)

I know several poets who have told me that they like working in forms (sonnet, sestina, paradelle) because they find that little box of constraints very liberating. It goes against our basic beliefs of freedom, but it seems to work.

Limiting the scope of possibilities also limits the decisions to be made, and some of the complexity. Choice and complexity does not necessarily lead to any additional creativity.

Teachers sometimes do this when giving assignments - limiting materials or resources or technology or setting a length and so on. When we set these constraints, what may happen is that by eliminating some of their decisions students focus on the ideas and content.

If a student spends 3 hours on a PowerPoint presentation, would you prefer that 2 of those hours be spent on the backgrounds, font sizes, and clip art or the ideas? So, instead you give them a PowerPoint template, limit the number of images, tell them to save it as a PowerPoint show (.pps file) and require it to be timed to 3:30 to 4 minutes. When they present it to the class they no longer control the advance of slides. They'll have to know their material. They'll need to have rehearsed.

My last note was about Malcolm Gladwell who wrote three books that I bought, read, and told my e-marketing major son to read: The Tipping Point:How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Blink and Freakonomics. I wrote on it a Yiddish proverb that Gladwell included: "To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish." I think that's a good place to end.

(Here's Schwartz speaking on Google Video)

And finally, here's a Gladwell presentation from TED in 2004 that is about choice and jumps off from a thorough discussion of how to sell more spaghetti sauce.