Choice and Suffering

in San Francisco

Alana Conner Snibbe & Hazel Rose Markus

Origin: Static Issue 03
Content: Text

" Listen to mainstream middle-class European-Americans and you will hear that not enough choice causes suffering. Attend to the rumblings among our educated élite and you’ll find a new idea: too much choice causes suffering. Ask our working-class residents and many of our immigrants from East Asia and India and they will say: choice has little to do with suffering."  

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Contributors:

Alana Conner Snibbe is the senior editor of the Stanford Social Innovation Review. She received her Ph.D. in social psychology from Stanford University, and now writes about culture, psychology and health for various publications, including The New York Times Magazine. She may be reached at senioreditor@ssireview.com.

Hazel Rose Markus is the Davis Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences and the Director of the Research Institute of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. She is a social psychologist who has written extensively on the self and identity and on the sociocultural shaping of agency, motivation, emotion and well-being. She may be reached at hmarkus@psych.stanford.edu.

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