The question of choice is historically and philosophically entangled with that of freedom, particularly through the idea of free will.1 However, it does not seem so obvious to intimately associate choice and freedom when we ask ourselves, for instance: how many options must we have to consider ourselves free? If we are between a rock and hard place, can we exercise our freedom? Having a thousand options when the one coveted is out of reach, does it really matter?
The goal of this article is to examine the reasons that can explain the preponderance of choice in contemporary Western cultures. We will first focus on the historical, political, philosophical and economic context in which choice was gradually valued. Then we will detail psychological elements linked to contemporary scientific research on decision-making. Finally, we will question this prevalence of choice.
A Cultural Centrality
The cultural centrality of the notion of choice dates back to ancient Greece, which saw the emergence of democratic practices that contrasted with authoritarian regimes (aristocracy, royalty, tyranny). At that time, beliefs in forms of determinism innervated mentalities,2 freedom was conceived primarily as a limitation of constraints. Aristotle’s philosophical reflections on contingent futures and ‘what depends on us’, Stoic logical analyses and questions on the possibility that things happened differently than they actually happened led to the idea of free will. The latter was born in the Platonic and Christian circles of the first centuries of our era, who conceived an immaterial soul capable of initiating actions in the material world.3
Due to their metaphysical character, we will leave aside the questions of free will and determinism here – it is nevertheless important to be aware of their philosophical imprint. Let us instead focus on the choice from a political standpoint and from an economic standpoint.
On the political level, Western democracies inherit moderately from the Greek example, in particular because the Roman Republic inspired the French revolutionaries more,4 or because the English and French nations, since their origins, are considerably more populated than the Greek cities which experienced a democratic regime. Indirect democracies were thus created, granting to representatives elected by citizens the ability to choose the orientations of a nation. In this context, choice became a pivotal point in political life, perhaps more than in a direct democracy where citizens can contribute to a greater extent to the creation5 of the constitutional and legislative framework. Indeed, in an indirect democracy, while initiatives are primarily the prerogative of political leaders, citizens, although they are free to express their opinions, do not participate directly in the debates from which legislative proposals arise. Overall, they arbitrate by their vote between different programs and projects whose lines are already drawn. Some may possibly influence the discussions, in particular through lobbies or the media, but texts are devised mainly through internal exchanges and compromises within a party/movement as well as through oppositions and negotiations between parties/movements.
Within the multiple economic processes, actors frequently make decisions, especially when they opt for products or services that they wish to use. In a historical context where prices are regulated mainly by the interplay between supply and demand, choice gets the lead role and negotiation a supporting one: the relative value of a good (compared to another good) arises from successive decisions made by individuals prior to their transactions. Hence the importance of the question: how decisions are made? Do they follow from a rational reflection? Yes, according to neoclassical economists, who assumed that actors chose by maximizing, like a calculator, their satisfaction or the utility of their acquisitions. It was only from the second half of the 20th century that sociological6 and particularly psychological7 theories called these presuppositions into question.
Psychological Elements of Choice
Intuition from a Choice Perspective
D. Kahneman and A. Tversky famously questioned the idea of intuition,8 highlighting multiple biases that drive the mind to deviate from logic. Even if the notion of bias is widely accepted, criticisms were levelled against them, for instance by L. J. Cohen9 and G. Gigerenzer,10 on the ground that their approach involves some controversial normative assumptions. In a 1995 article,11 K. S. Bowers notes that if intuition and creativity constitute two privileged paths to knowledge, the scientific publications which take them as their subject practically do not overlap. Moreover, despite the existence of noteworthy exceptions, the scientific literature concerning intuition has been “an appendix to literatures concerned with judgment and decision making under conditions of uncertainty on one hand (Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky 1982) and with insight in problem solving on the other (Metcalfe and Wiebe 1987).” Now, research on judgment and decision-making has been driven to a large extent by economic concerns, as we have emphasized12 with regard to D. Kahneman and A. Tversky. In this kind of research, it is less a question of understanding how heuristics work13 than of drawing attention to their negative consequences relative to a historically idealized human rationality.
There is nevertheless an approach, that of natural decision making (NDM),14 which studies and values intuition in the context of choices made by experts under conditions of uncertainty. It was born from investigations on chess players carried out by deGroot (1946/1978) then by Chase and Simon (1973). The first observed that grandmasters were able, unlike novices, to quickly assess a position as well as appropriate movements. According to Chase and Simon, experienced chess players have perceptual skills that enable them to recognize complex patterns. This led Simon to define intuition as the recognition of patterns stored in memory. The first work in NDM aimed to describe and analyse the decisions taken by commanders of firefighting companies. They are required to act swiftly in an unpredictable environment, which excludes any rational calculation of options. It was found that instead of restricting the number of possibilities, commanders usually generate only one option, based on their experience, the one they adopt if no shortcoming is detected when they mentally simulate it.
Priming
Whether valued or not, intuition plays a major role in decision-making, underlining its unconscious part. As the psychologist Mathias Pessiglione notices, in most of the choices we make, “we have the (conscious) intuition of what we prefer, but not of the reasons that base our preference. The reasons can possibly come a posteriori, when we observe our own behavior and try to account for it. But nothing guarantees that these are the same reasons that actually determined our choices.” 15
Several experiments support the unconscious nature of factors participating in decision-making, particularly those in which a conceptual or a behavioural priming is performed. In this type of experimentation, a person is exposed, consciously or not, to a stimulus in order to observe her brain activity, to get her to act in a certain way or to suggest an idea. Daniel Kahneman notes that priming derives from an older notion formulated and favoured by David Hume, that of association of ideas.
When it comes to conscious priming stimuli, the experiments carried out by John Bargh during the last two decades of the 20th century are among the most famous. In Thinking, Fast and Slow,16 D. Kahneman reports that during one of them students at New York University were asked to compose sentences of four words from a series of five. For one group of students, half of the jumbled sentences contained words associated with old age, such as Florida, oblivion, bald, gray, wrinkled. When they finished their exercise, the young subjects were sent to participate in another test in an office across the hall. The time took by the students to move from one end of the corridor to the other was measured and, as Bargh predicted, the young people who had composed a sentence from words linked to old age moved significantly slower than the others.
The opposite experiment, which consists in making people walk slowly to make them recognize faster words associated with old age (e.g. forgetfulness, lonely, etc.), was successfully implemented by a German university.
Researcher Stanislas Dehaene, who holds the chair of experimental cognitive psychology at the Collège de France,17 reports in his 2023 course an experiment involving a subliminal (and therefore unconscious) stimulus.18 In this, images are presented for a time varying between 29 and 500 milliseconds to a participant, one word (“radio”) being able to initiate another (“RADIO”):
The word “radio” is not consciously perceived when a mask-type image precedes and follows it. It is consciously perceived, even displayed for only 29ms, if a blank screen precedes and follows it. When the participant is asked to categorize the target word (RADIO), the presence of a prime accelerates her response time. Furthermore, if we force her to choose between two prime words, which she has not consciously perceived, she does better than chance by selecting the prime more.
M. Pessiglione discusses other experiments, carried out in his laboratory, which aimed to influence the behaviour of participants using priming effects. He warns: “In fact, psychologists must put a lot of effort into making their subliminal information have any impact. In particular, it is necessary to repeat the exposures hundreds of times, and to ensure that the participant maintains her attention on the masked image throughout the experiment, which is naturally difficult to obtain outside the laboratory. Experiments undertaken in the 2000s nevertheless demonstrated that it was possible to influence the values associated with certain actions, without the person being aware of it.”19 Influencing through unconscious perceptions is therefore possible, but it requires a certain conditioning of the person which necessitates more than a handful of subliminal images. These observations run counter to a common tendency to fear being manipulated by images or subliminal messages and, consequently, being deprived of free will. These apprehensions accompany fantasies about priming that are conveyed especially in movies and series.
Decision, Experience and Emotion
Emotions, which philosophers until the 20th century called “passions” and, for many of them, opposed to reason, are traditionally seen as contributing to decision-making.20 The American neuroscientist Antonio Damasio deconstructed the reason/passion antagonism from his first essay, Descartes’ Error, in which he presented the broad outlines of his somatic marker hypothesis (somatic comes from the Greek soma, the body, as opposed to the mind). A somatic marker is the perception of a body state associated with emotions and produced automatically, which can guide a choice to the extent that it has been linked to the predictable consequence of an action thanks to a form of learning.
A. Damasio’s theory is based in particular on an experiment in which participants, some suffering from a cortical lesion, took part in a game of chance. Each player receives four piles of cards to turn over as well as a loan of $2,000 in fictitious notes, the goal being to win money rather than lose it. She ignores that piles A and B generate overall losses while piles C and D generate an overall gain. After losing a certain amount of money, uninjured players begin to produce skin conductance before drawing a card from the disadvantageous piles while injured players do not produce any.
Several objections have been raised against the experimental method used by Damasio’s team. Here are some recently put forward by M. Pessiglione:
- Why would skin conductance be a cause of choice rather than a consequence?
- The options are always the same and presented simultaneously. It is therefore not possible to identify which pile the conductance relates to.
- To what extent do participants sense skin conductance and to what extent does this actually guide choice?
- Since there are multiple decision factors, how can we ensure that skin conductance is a determining factor?
If the causal connexions that lead to a decision are not obvious, emotions appear clearly correlated to decision-making. As automatisms linked to past experiences, emotions can, if not direct a choice, inform, provide a subjective evaluation. For example, the fear felt by a person at the sight of a dog, having previously been bitten, indicates approximately how negatively this experience was perceived.
Personally, I frequently use emotions, not as a compass, but as forms of evaluation: each emotion discloses an aspect of a reaction to a given context.
Anticipation, Regrets and Anxiety
The psychologist Olivier Houdé subscribes to the somatic marker hypothesis while emphasizing that it is appropriate to add an important factor in decision-making: anticipation. The brain “must also be able to imagine virtual, hypothetical scenarios [. . .] and to anticipate regrets in relation to them [. . .] Regret is the distinctive feeling of this type of process (patients no longer experience it) and, associated with the sense of responsibility, even guilt which characterizes the emotions of healthy individuals, it is essential for cognitive and social adaptation, that is to say, for making right choices.”21
Any decision can lead to regret of not having selected the best alternative. While O. Houdé connects the notion of responsibility and the feeling of guilt to regret, the Slovenian philosopher Renata Salecl, in The Tyranny of Choice,22 underlines anxiety (a major emotional component of guilt) more generally. In this regard, she mentions:
When we ask people what is traumatic about choice, they often offer the following explanations:
– they want to make the ideal choice (which explains why they keep changing telephone providers, for example);
– they wonder what others will think of their choices, and what kind of choices others would make in their place;
– they have the impression that no one is responsible in society in general (they ask themselves, for example, if they really want to take responsibility for choosing their electricity supplier, if this should be an individual choice);
– they are afraid of not making a truly free choice (since they suspect that other people or even companies, with their marketing strategies, have already “chosen” for them).
This list emphasizes how the social context plays a determining role in decision-making, with free will only coming in last place here. The ideal targeted when deciding most often matches a social ideal. It can sometimes be personalized but rarely deviates from a goal shared by the members of a community. Its social character is consistent with the importance attached to the view of others.
Let us specify: it is not only a question of making an ideal choice, but also one of not making a mistake, perhaps especially in France where error and failure are perceived negatively, where the Augustinian heritage is particularly present, notably via Descartes who writes in his Metaphysical Meditations: “error, as such, is not something real that depends on God, but is only a defect (in the sense of a lack of perfection.”23
The anxiety associated with a choice can be explained socially and philosophically, it can also be justified by aspects that are more psychological, for example by loss aversion, which was brought to the fore by D. Kahneman and A. Tversky within their Prospect theory. Loss aversion occurs in economic situations where it is possible to make profits or losses, for example in a coin toss game where one:
• loses €100 if the coin lands on tails;
• wins €150 if the coin lands on heads.
According to Kahneman,24 rejecting this bet is a System 2 [rational] action, but it is based on critical information that is an emotional reaction from System 1. For most people, the fear of losing 100 euros is more intense than the hope of winning 150.
Choice vs. Design of Orientations
The psychological elements reviewed so far point to a cultural preponderance of choice. Was the neurophysiologist Alain Berthoz influenced by it when he proposed to conceive human perception as a decision?25 It would probably be appropriate to distinguish different decision levels, for example:
- Life choices: education, work, family, vocation, etc.
- Large-scale projects, personal or professional: real estate purchase, travel lasting several months, etc.
- Daily decisions.
- Automated actions, reflexes.
- Memory, preparation for action.
- Perceptions.
Some psychologists liken the brain to a statistician because they are interested in levels 4 to 6 whose processes can be modeled using Bayesian statistics on a regular basis. In such a framework, choices are formally constrained. Daily decisions, often of an economic nature, can be described by means of economic theories and psychological theories on heuristics and biases, which in turn provide a certain number of formal constraints that affect choices. Concerning large-scale projects and life choices, individual decisions seem open in democracy while being dependent on social determinisms.
In a certain way, the preeminence of choice in our societies reveals how it can be socially and psychologically conditioned: we attribute all the more value to it because we do not create the options available to us, even because our role in decision-making is reduced to contemplating a theatre of factors, some of which never appear on stage.
Today more than ever, with the various crises piling up and the prospects darkening, the feeling of opting for the less bad instead of the best is significant. In a world where politics and economics can leave one indifferent or bitter, the temptation is all the stronger to escape by building a bubble and/or escaping into a virtual universe. Doesn’t this collective evasion, probably inevitable, constitute the most resistant arc of the vicious circle into which we are dragged? It generates a new form of population massification, a population reduced to following an active political minority whose lack of control seems linked to a sacralization of choice since the end of the 18th century.
Specialization, or social division of labor, goes hand in hand with this sacralization of choice. If it is necessary to produce efficiently, it has been established as a social pivot since Durkheim, encouraging the delegation of knowledge and action. Gradually, we became incapable of developing a global perspective that could help us find overall solutions instead of maintaining expertise in patching. Worse, we find it increasingly difficult to decide collectively! Is there not a contradiction between moral principle and political result?
Adding to the pitfall of collective decision is reluctance in terms of commitment – getting involved induces putting alternatives on hold or even abandoning them definitively. R. Salecl mentions this problem with regard to marital love: the fear of commitment “seems to have been elevated to the rank of ideal. The plurality of possibilities nourishes the belief in this ideal, and the association with a partner is consciously postponed until later, in a future that always slips away.”26 I would extend this observation to commitments which do not necessarily involve third parties and which I would qualify as life orientations.27 However, it is possible to design an orientation, to create it throughout a reflective process rather than adopting one that is already constructed or prefabricated. Intuition plays a leading role in this perspective, even though it regularly leads to errors: human intelligence is prone to making errors and adjusting its conceptualizations. By excessively favouring choice, do we not lose, on the one hand, creative momentum and, on the other hand, the sense of commitment? Perhaps a fundamental problem is not so much that of permanently having a range of options, but rather that of being able to create, individually or collectively, orientations that please us and satisfy us… in the long term.
Notes
1.↑ La question de la liberté – essai – Damien Gimenez Damien Gimenez
2.↑ https://damiengimenez.fr/le-changement-un-concept-naturel-en-grece-ancienne/
3.↑ Susanne Bobzien, Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 411.
4.↑ Michel Dubuisson, « La Révolution française et l’Antiquité », Cahiers de Clio, 100 (1989), pp. 29-42. Accessible en ligne : Gladiator (ulg.ac.be)
5.↑ Concerning the conception of politics as an original and creative action, see the work of Hannah Arendt.
6.↑ In particular Herbert Simon’s bounded rationality.
7.↑ See especially the work of D. Kahneman and A. Tversky. See also, more recently, Renata Salecl, The Tyranny of Choice, Profile Books, 2011.
8.↑ For a synthesis, see Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
9.↑ Critique des hypothèses normatives de D. Kahneman et A. Tversky par L. J. Cohen – Damien Gimenez
10.↑ Une expérience non intuitive sur l’intuition – Damien Gimenez
11.↑ Bowers, K. S., Farvolden, P. & Mermigis, L, “Intuitive antecedents of insight” in The creative cognition approah (eds Smith, S. M. et al.) 27–52 (MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995). URL : https://archive.org/details/creativecognitio0000unse/
12.↑ L’intuition, un pilier philosophique devenu par ailleurs écueil scientifique – Damien Gimenez
13.↑ Patrick Lemaire, André Didierjean, Introduction à la psychologie cognitive, De Boeck Supérieur, 2018, p. 258.
14.↑ Kahneman, D. & Klein, G, “Conditions for intuitive expertise. A failure to disagree” in Am. Psychol., 64, 515–526 (2009).
15.↑ Mathias Pessiglione, Les Vacances de Momo Sapiens [VMS], Odile Jacob, 2021. I translate.
16.↑ Daniel Kahneman, op. cit.
17.↑ Stanislas Dehaene – Psychologie cognitive expérimentale | Collège de France (college-de-france.fr). Mathias Pessiglione, Ibid., cites the same experimentation.
18.↑ Comment prendre une décision ou faire des calculs avec des vecteurs dynamiques ? | Collège de France (college-de-france.fr), slide 11.
19.↑ VMS.
20.↑ https://damiengimenez.fr/wpdgi_instant/ce-qui-depend-de-nous-les-conceptualisations-daristote-de-chrysippe-et-depictete/
21.↑ Olivier Houdé, L’intelligence humaine n’est pas un algorithme, Odile Jacob, 2019.
22.↑ Renata Salecl, La tyrannie du choix [TC], Albin Michel, 2012. I translate.
23.↑ René Descartes, Méditations métaphysiques, Flammarion, 2009.
24.↑ Daniel Kahneman, op. cit.
25.↑ Alain Berthoz, La Décision, Odile Jacob, 2003 : « Je voudrais avancer l’idée que la perception est en fait non seulement une action simulée mais aussi et essentiellement une – décision. »
26.↑ Renata Salecl, op. cit.
27.↑ The notion of orientation is similar to that of a philosophical rule but located at an individual, not universal, level. This is how it differs significantly, for example, from the Stoic or Epicurean rules.