The Illusion of Choice

The Dynamics of Choice in a Social World: Consumption and the Illusion of the Self

Deconstructing assumptions about individual agency within a society structured by class distinctions

Sociology 4120 // Professor Ekaterina Makarova

Final Research Paper //12 December 2019

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For breakfast, I toast some wheat bread from the Wegman’s bakery with avocado and a fried egg. I season it with sea salt and pepper. I love breakfast, whereas my roommate runs out the door for class with a Kind Bar. I think about the teaching assistant grading papers and eating out at Michael’s Bistro last night, and the student who was walking down Main Street with an infamous Roots to-go bowl.

I observe three types of food consumption for students at the University of Virginia: a pre-paid meal plan at university dining halls (or the Elevate meal plan for Corner restaurants), generally eating out for most meals, and cooking at home which could include packing a lunch.

At the University of Virginia, my experience as a student has led me to believe that individuals’ food choices are agentive, even if they are influenced by relative access to economic resources. If a low-income student wants to eat on the Corner, they can grab a $5 bagel from Bodo’s rather than an $11 rice bowl from Roots. If the TA didn’t want to spend money on drinks, they could’ve gone to 1515, a student lounge, to grade papers for free instead.

From left to right: a typical meal from UVA's central dining hall, Newcomb; aisles of convenience store staples at Corner Grocery on W. Main St; and the fresh produce section of the super-grocery store in Charlottesville, Wegman's. Images from Google.

However, this assumption doesn’t account for groups of friends that meet up for drinks or share a meal. On a nice day, students can be seen sitting outside Trinity Irish Pub, as mutual friends passing by stop to hang over the rail and engage in the conversation. One could argue that students are simply taking advantage of great happy hours deals or that the bar’s location is more convenient than other bars along the walk home.

To me, the fact that the outdoor patio is visible in such a high traffic pedestrian area suggests that patrons might enjoy being seen in a leisure space as much as they are taking advantage of happy hour. If individual choice is agentive, when will students that don’t have as much leisure time get to enjoy being seen on the patio? Those students don’t have as much choice about what or where they are eating that night.

Another barrier to accessing food, not for the sake of being seen, but for the sake of eating healthy, is the spatial distribution of food centers near the university. Meal plans are too inflexible or unaffordable for many students. Yet more often than not, restaurant entrees usually don’t include a whole serving of fresh fruits and vegetables, and if they do, there’s an upcharge. If a student wants to eat those vegetables but doesn’t have a car to drive or 2 hours to spare for a bus ride to the grocery store, then they are at a loss.

Is it the responsibility of the student to always consume sufficient nutrients, the responsibility of the restaurants and dining halls to provide more affordable options, or the responsibility of the agricultural ecosystem at large to lower prices and open food centers that are closer to students? In this vein, individual choice about food consumption is extremely limited.

Class distinctions and spatial disparities disadvantage specific social groups in the name of prestige or profit. I challenge whatever systems disadvantage students from obtaining food while in school, be it a stratified social setting like Trinity Irish Pub or a relative access to healthy produce in general. If an individual choice is motivated by demonstrating social status or if it is motivated by a lack of resources, each of those motivations operate above and beyond the control of the individual.

I realized that individual choice is influenced by larger social structures so much that individual choice is essentially an illusion. Consumption choices do (and have always) functioned as a marker of one’s own social position within a group, both to establish belonging to the prestigious group and distinction from less the prestigious group.

Consumption choices do (and have always) functioned as a marker of one’s own social position within a group, both to establish belonging to the prestigious group and distinction from less the prestigious group.

To make sense of this illusion of individual choice, the following research explores literature about the culture of decision making, the rise (and fall) of individualism, shifting consumption practices, the construction of cultural capital and taste to inconspicuously maintain class distinction, and finally, the broader consequences of assuming that choice is individually agentive.

My original hypothesis argued that individual choices can be made independent of external influences, but my revelation of this illusion, through the lens of food consumption at UVA, has demonstrated the need to deconstruct this assumption and to clarify the potential and limitations of ‘choices’ that operate within larger social systems.

CULTURAL ATTITUDES ABOUT CHOICE

In America, it seems the whole world is at our feet when we walk down the aisle at the grocery store. The option between 24 flavors of jam should be liberating because the one we do choose is an act of self-expression. Yet more often than not, research shows people are paralyzed by too much choice, despite society at large telling us that we need it.[1]

Dr. Sheenya Iyengar, a social psychologist, explains this to a New York Times journalist, “We’re born with the desire, but we don’t really know how to choose. We don’t know what our taste is, and we don’t know what we are seeing. I’m a great believer in the idea of not choosing based on our taste….Everyone is convinced their opinion is the truth,” Her solution to overcoming the paralysis of too much choice is to collect opinions and make an executive decision once she knows how that decision will be perceived. “You have to invite criticism,” she says.[2]

This is the problem with the American Dream of endless choice and individual autonomy; others aren’t important when making decisions for oneself. To better understand the dynamics of decision making, Iyengar has built a career conducting research experiments that test the diverse cultural attitudes that influence human behavior when making decisions. Her findings, as she describes in her TED Talk “The Art of Choosing”, are counterintuitive and reveal that Americans make a series of common yet problematic assumptions about choice and could learn from multicultural perspectives. She addresses that Americans elevate the individual as the ‘primary locus of choice,’ which is unsustainable in the long run.

She supports this claim with the results of an experiment testing the behavior of American and Asian-American elementary students. After giving the students an assignment, she found that first-generation students were heavily influenced by their parents’ approach to choice, rather than the notion of the American mantra ‘the individual consumer knows best’. Instead, the first-generation students approached choice as a means of building harmonious community in context of their parents, or people they respect.

Iyengar emphasizes that the children’s individual choices were shaped by the preferences of others as a ‘collective’ self. These findings are significant because they suggest that individual well-being increases when others support that person’s choices: “The American paradigm leaves little room for interdependence…It requires that everyone treat choice as a private and self-defining act…It is a mistake to assume that everyone thrives under the pressure of choosing alone.”[3]

Steve Waldman similarly acknowledges in his article “The Tyranny of Choice” that the burden of developing taste on the individual is having to navigate so much choice in the contemporary market economy. He argues that choice ultimately erodes the self: “In theory, choice enables an individual to select the car, money market fund, or spouse that expresses herself most precisely. But if choice is self-definition, more choices mean more possible definitions…[which] leave the scars of perpetual self-doubt…The quest to re-create virtually supplants whatever person was once there.”[4] After providing a series of consequences that result from having so much choice, Waldman concludes the article with this passage, arguing that the solution to choice paralysis requires a mental reorientation:

“Choice overload helped me finally understand what was so offensive about the stereotypical yuppie obsession with ‘quality’, of which I have often been guilty. It’s not that some coffee beans aren’t, in fact, more flavorful that others, it’s that the people who spend so much of their lives thinking about small differences become small people.

Imagine instead a world in which we used our choice brain lobes for the most important decisions and acted more arbitrarily on the rest…[Sometimes] it feels good to let an ad take us by the hand…We must acknowledge our powerlessness. We cannot knowledgeably make even a fraction of the appropriate choices available. Say it out loud. Today I will make several wrong choices. Now, whether you’ve selected an inferior vacuum cleaner, bought the large soda when jumbo was a better deal, or accidentally prayed to the wrong god—forgive yourself.”[5]

So, while Waldman encourages an individual mental reorientation, his argument supplements Iyengar’s solution to navigating choice by collecting others’ opinions because it suggests that there is no need to master decision-making in an overpopulated material world.

SELF-LOVE AND INDEPENDENCE

Iynegar’s affinity for positive, collective influence directly contrasts much of the pro-individualism sentiment that has shaped American culture since the Revolution. David Brooks recalls the writings of Benjamin Franklin as a source of moral inspiration for the development of America’s middle class. Franklin’s values stem from a religious ideal: “God helps those that help themselves,” which voiced a neutral shift to somewhere between classical preaching about self-denial and the historical self-indulgence of European aristocrats.

Franklin’s focus on honesty, industry, perseverance, cleanliness, and punctuality essentially built a framework for bourgeois ‘self-improvement in moderation’.[6] These ideals paved the road for a capitalist free market and neoliberalism, which operate under the assumption that the market naturally rewards individuals that contribute to it. Everyone has the opportunity to improve their social position in life. Status symbols and material goods have become the markers of social position and an inescapable element of cultural categorization.

Douglas and Isherwood explain that the meanings of these material status markers are not fixed, but that the hierarchical systems the goods serve to maintain are rather anchored for the sake of distinction. In their article, they address that economists usually reject the notion that social meanings of materials are inescapable because of the ‘solitary consumer’. The man who eats or walks or listens to music alone is privately consuming goods, and in private, social semiotics are meaningless.

Douglas and Isherwood argue that no consumer can ever be truly solitary because manners of eating are deeply, socially embedded and music is highly subjective per tastes: “The individual human being, stripped of his humanity, is of no use as a conceptual base from which to make a picture of human society. No human exists except steeped in the culture of his time and place. The falsely abstracted individual has been sadly misleading to Western political thought.”[7] Even if no one is around to witness private behaviors, consumption choices still make clear statements about one’s social position in relation to material meanings.

CHOICE IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION

The illusion of a solitary consumer demonstrates that choice, in the form of material goods for Douglas and Isherwood, is a social construction ‘imposed’ upon reality by individuals interacting together; in other words, knowledge is never about individual learning, but about collectively establishing and communicating ‘visible and stable categories of culture.’ They propose that when consumption choices are perceived this way, rather than solely as a means of ‘subsistence’ or ‘competitive display,’ then understanding the dynamic origins and systems of social stratification becomes much easier.[8]

“Forget that commodities are good for eating, clothing, and shelter,” they write, “Forget their usefulness and try instead the idea that commodities are good for thinking; treat them as a nonverbal medium for the human faculty.”[9] Commodities can be tools of cognition, or even material extensions of our physical bodies, that make sense of categories of culture: “The [choices of goods] are arranged in vistas and hierarchies that can give play to the full range of discrimination of which the human mind is capable.”[10] The very essence of categories invites criticism, distinction, and inevitable stratification, and is, in the case of material goods, expressed through hierarchical social positions.

The very essence of categories invites criticism, distinction, and inevitable stratification, and is, in the case of material goods, expressed through hierarchical social positions.

However, history has shown that this categorization process is inherently fluid, despite seemingly ‘fixed’ social meanings for goods. Over time, technology and urbanization have changed social priorities and lifestyles in general, so meanings attached to specific goods have also changed. And as the meaning of goods change, the agreeable behaviors associated with consuming them evolve to create new social categories, which implies that the need for cultural categorization is only masking the need for social distinction and prestige.

CULTURAL CAPITAL, NOT MATERIALISM

David Brooks, a journalist, satirically illustrates the decline of materialism and the rise of the ‘Bobo’ class and culture in his article:

“Slowly, slowly a new set of rules and sumptuary codes is emerging to replace the competing codes of the bohemians and the bourgeoisie [and to organize] the consumption patterns of the educated class, encouraging some kinds of spending, which are deemed virtuous, and discouraging others that seem vulgar or elitist…A person who follows these precepts can dispose up to $4 or $5 million annually in a manner that demonstrates how little he or she cares about material things.”[11]

As Bobos redefine elite culture to pardon themselves from the outrageous glamour of displaying economic capital, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of ‘cultural capital’ becomes true when describing the major shift in wealthy consumption patterns. Brooks calls this new set of rules the ‘Code of Financial Correctness’, which characterizes the motivations to shop for specific goods; taking care to buy the professional grade commodity, the more nuanced and convenient version of a good, and the most amount of rustic texture to appear more authentic. “We members of the educated elite attach more spiritual weight to the purity of our food than to five of the Ten Commandments,” he writes.[12]

The point of Bobo consumption is to 1) hide economic wealth behind seemingly common goods, while 2) simultaneously purchase the best, most nuanced version of the common good to demonstrate how much leisure time one has to learn about the best, most nuanced common good. This level of dedication to conscientious consumption, which “renounces accumulation and embraces cultivation,”[13] shows how different class groups are directly defined and maintained by their means of consumption (cultural capital), not just the semiotics of material goods.

As an extension of Douglas and Isherwood’s initial claims about goods as communicators of social position and Brooks’ acknowledgement of the changing consumption patterns of those goods, Douglas B. Holt’s arguments about ‘taste’ clarify how cultural capital structures broader class preferences – all in the effort of maintaining distinction: “Societies segregate into different reputational groupings based not only on economic position, but also on noneconomic criteria such as morals, culture, and lifestyle that are sustained because people tend to interact with their social peers.”[14]

He further explains how geographic mobility and fluid interactional groups make it difficult to establish a consensus for the group’s taste, yet regardless, an individual’s taste is still directly influenced by tastes relative to others.[15] Scaling up from the individual, group taste evolves as the market for maintaining wealth changes; contemporary America values education and knowledge production more than extreme displays of material goods because that is seen as wasteful in a culture driven by sustainability. Value changes have led to a new type of elite class that differs from historically extravagant, elitist consumption patterns.

INCONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION

Brooks’ Code of Financial Correctness complements Elizabeth Currid-Halkett’s interpretation of ‘aspirational class’ consumption in her book The Sum of Small Things. She explains that 21st century signifiers of wealth are no longer expensive objects but are rather “more subtle, less materialistic forms of conveying status particularly to others in-the-know. Sometimes these choices aren’t even intended to display status at all. Whether they are extraordinarily expensive versions of goods everyone buys, or investments in the life chances of their children, these new forms of inconspicuous consumption are goods and services purchased for the sake of making one’s life easier.”[16]

The invisibility of such investments allows Bobos / aspirational elites to establish clear, symbolic boundaries between social groups. The things elites actually spend on – education, healthcare, childcare – are the expenses that invest in future generations’ social and cultural capital. These experiences are impossible to overcome with material goods.[17] Low-income people don’t have the same opportunities to engage with highly educated social circles, while this pecuniary obstacle is deemed a personal choice made by the low-income person.

Low-income people don’t have the same opportunities to engage with highly educated social circles, while this pecuniary obstacle is deemed a personal choice made by the low-income person.

Ironically, the wealth of the middle class, or 90% of America, hasn’t grown in over 30 years. Currid-Halkett’s research shows how wage stagnation and increasing prices of inconspicuous goods that actually affect quality of life, like education and healthcare, are contributing to the declining collective wealth of the middle class.[18] The pervasively widening class gap has become so unfathomable, elites are so blindly removed and the middle class doesn’t realize the quality of life they are missing. The imaginary of consumption choices within these class distinctions persists as an illusion of individual agency.

Holt similarly explains how cultural capital is fostered and reproduced by an upbringing, social interactions, and a highly formal education that all emphasize cultural, critical-thinking skills over laborious, specialized trades. Holt cites Bourdieu, who writes that “status is continually reproduced as an unintended consequence of social interaction because all interactions are necessarily classifying practices; that is, micropolitical acts of status claiming in which individuals constantly negotiate their reputational positions.”[19]

In this way, Currid-Halkett, Brooks, and Holt ultimately prove that consumption preferences are not an individual phenomenon but a larger expression of economic capital, cultural capital, and social position, because individual choice is limited by pecuniary and nonpecuniary barriers to information that could improve one’s social position. The ability to make consumption choices is somehow always limited for someone because cultural capital may not be fiscally measured but persists in wealthier social circles. Such barriers circulate an exclusive body of knowledge about inconspicuous consumption that requires privileged social connections or substantial wealth to actually achieve class mobility.

Regardless of materialism or inconspicuous consumption, this inequity presents a problem of access to acquiring more capital, either in the form of money or knowledge, because a lack of capital is perceived as an idiosyncratic choice. Changing the ideology of choice to recognize the larger social structures that discriminate and distinguish class status based on consumption choices, rather than seeing choice as individually agentive, might begin to change the conversation.

BURDEN OF ASSUMING INDIVIDUAL CHOICE IN PUBLIC POLICY

Sociologist Juliet Schor addresses the controversies of choice and class distinction in her manifesto “Towards a New Politics of Consumption”:

“Americans did not suddenly become greedy. The aspirational gap has been created by structural changes – such as the decline of community and social connection, the intensification of inequality, the growing role of mass media, and heightened penalties for failing in the labor market…The profoundly social nature of consumption ensures that issues cannot be resolved by an act of pure will. Our notions of what is adequate, necessary, or luxurious are shaped by the larger social context. Most of us are deeply tied to our particular class and other identities, and our spending patterns help reproduce them.”[20]

However, traditional economic theorists project the very opposite of this truth when they imply that consumers are consistently well-informed, rational, and operate independent of others’ preferences, and that producers in a capitalist market are best fit to provide consumers choices. They romanticize how much a competitive and rational market can promote individual choice, regardless of political intervention. Schor explains how assumptions like these are dysfunctional because they neglect to describe a wide range of unpredictable consumer behaviors, they exaggerate consumer rationality, and they undermine the pressure on individuals to conform to normative consumption behaviors.[21]

Assumptions like these are dysfunctional because they neglect to describe a wide range of unpredictable consumer behaviors, they exaggerate consumer rationality, and they undermine the pressure on individuals to conform to normative consumption behaviors.

Some conventional theorists usually recognize limitations to this idealized reality, including the notions that not all consumers are fully capable of acting in their own self-interest (child-minor protection laws) and that the state regulation of highly addictive commodities like drugs and explosives as well the regulation of a minimum standard of product quality all limit the agency of individual choice.[22] These limitations only begin to recognize how assuming that consumers have free choice within any kind of government-regulated system is illusionary because the ‘market for public goods’ operates under so many constraints.

Schor emphasizes how private business interests have privileged influence over public policy, which results in corrupt, wasteful production: “We don’t get enough, or good enough, education, arts, recreation, mass transport, and other conventional, public goods. We [instead] get too many cars, too many clothes, too many collectibles…Without bicycle lanes or mass transport, private cars become unavoidable…As public telephone booths disappear, mobile phones become more necessary.”[23] Biases like these are extremely problematic because they operate under a larger system of policy decisions and therefore constrain the choices available to individuals. For this reason, spending is not directly indicative of consumer preferences, but rather of social necessity.

DISCUSSION

There are two states – abundance or no abundance. When resources are sufficient, choice is not a question of access, but of social status. When resources are insufficient, there is a question of access, and this insufficiency inevitably marks social status. Choice marks social status, regardless of access to resources. This is the reality of which I assumed otherwise.

I understand the current state of choice to be an aristocracy of neoliberal values. Free markets cannot naturally regulate themselves to reward hard-working individuals. Rather, free markets cannot remain free because humans naturally categorize culture which unavoidably creates a social hierarchy, as explained by Douglas and Isherwood.

Someone or some group inevitably rises up – if not a traditional aristocrat or a extremely successful entrepreneur, then anyone with abundant economic or cultural wealth. The coercion of money in politics has led to the rise and maintenance of a wealthy 1% class, which resembles the class of nobles in 16th century Elizabethan Europe, all performing social status together by exploiting the labor of lower income groups.

While the 21st century is no longer an aristocracy by name, market ‘royals’ have an aristocratic control over the seemingly free market by monopolizing access to consumptive choice. As cultural and economic capital become more and more unattainable for the sake of protecting the top 1%’s wealth, inequality will continue to grow. The readings above prove that income inequality is not a choice, but a product of systemic discrimination beginning with formal education and cultural socialization.

I agree with Iyengar and Waldman that the solution to inequity in the social institution of consumption is to change the cultural narrative about choice. I question if individual changes such as collecting opinions from trusted friends or allowing an ad to ‘take us by the hand’ are enough to affect structural, political changes. I argue that individual-scale changes are a great place to start, but that the key to enacting structural change is to “revive the distinction between needs and desires”, in the words of Juliet Schor.

The 2020 Democratic primary, particularly the voice of Bernie Sanders, is stimulating a nationwide conversation about healthcare being a human right, not a profitable business transaction. The first element of Schor’s manifesto for a new politics of consumption is establishing a right to a decent standard of living: “I believe that our politics would profit from reviving a discourse of need, in which we talk about the material requirements for every person and household to participate fully in society.”[24] Profiteering, private insurance companies have established a lobbyist stronghold in federal policy, which has blurred the designation of healthcare as a human right.

In a similar way, structural decisions being made about food consumption, at least for the University of Virginia and the city of Charlottesville at large, also need to readdress what types of foods are wants and needs – cheaply-made, pantry goods are easily accessible while fresh produce is limited to pricey, distant grocery stores. A revived discourse about access to healthy food as a human right would begin to shift marketing strategies and welcome the thought of redeveloping the existing food network in Charlottesville to become more inclusive.

These structural visions reveal that larger social systems exist to categorize and maintain distinctive social positions. Because of the resulting obstacles in achieving class mobility, economic and cultural capital are reserved for the already-wealthy. While redistributing extreme wealth to everyone equally is not my goal, I do believe that corporate wealth and policy decisions can better serve constituents, as they should already be doing. A visionary proposal like Schor’s would bring light to others like me, who assume that individual choice is the ultimate marker of success in life, by revealing that our society is structured in ways that unfairly limit the potential of individual choice to protect the wealthy from others with less than them. I believe that social welfare is not a gift, but it is most certainly not a privilege. -

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Notes

[1] Green, P. “An Expert on Choice Chooses.” The New York Times. 17 March 2010.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Iyengar, S. “The Art of Choosing.” Talk given at TED Global, July 2010.

[4] Waldman, S. “The Tyranny of Choice.” From Consumer Society in American History, 1999. pg. 364.

[5] Ibid. pg. 365-6.

[6] Brooks, D. “Consumption.” From Bobos in Paradise, 2000. pg. 64-5.

[7] Ibid. pg. 63.

[8] Holt, D. B. “Does Cultural Capital...", 2000. pg. 59,63.

[9] Ibid. pg. 62.

[10] Ibid. pg. 64.

[11] Brooks, D. “Consumption.” From Bobos in Paradise, 2000. pg. 84-5.

[12] Ibid. pg. 102.

[13] Brooks, D. “Consumption.” From Bobos in Paradise, 2000. pg. 85.

[14] Holt, D. B. “Does Cultural Capital...", 2000. pg. 213.

[15] Ibid. pg. 215-6.

[16] Currid-Halkett, E., The Sum of Small Things. Princeton University Press, 2017. pg. 49.

[17] Ibid. pg. 76-7.

[18] Ibid. pg. 189.

[19] Holt, D. B. “Does Cultural Capital Structure...", 2000. pg. 216,8.

[20] Schor, J.. “Towards a New Politics of Consumption.” 2000. pg. 451-2.

[21] Ibid. pg. 453-4.

[22] Ibid. pg. 454.

[23] Ibid. pg. 458.

[24] Ibid. pg. 459.

Citations

Brooks, David. “Consumption.” From Bobos in Paradise. Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Currid-Halkett, Elizabeth, The Sum of Small Things. Princeton University Press, 2017.

Douglas, Mary and Baron Isherwood, “The Uses of Goods.” From The World of Goods. Routledge, 1979.

Green, Penelope, “An Expert on Choice Chooses.” The New York Times. Published 17 March 2010. Web. Accessed 11 December 2019.

Holt, Douglas B. “Does Cultural Capital Structure American Consumption?” From The Consumer Society Reader, J. Schor and D. Holt, eds., 2000.

Iyengar, Sheena. “The Art of Choosing.” Talk given at TED Global, July 2010.

Schor, Juliet. “Towards a New Politics of Consumption.” From The Consumer Society Reader, J. Schor and D. Holt, eds, 2000.

Waldman, Steve. “The Tyranny of Choice.” From Consumer Society in American History, L. Glickman, ed., 1999.