It may not surprise you to learn that healthy, well-fed individuals are often unhappy and anxious in affluent countries. But Zbigniew Lipowski was startled when he came to the full realization of this fact. He emigrated from Dublin to North America in 1955, and was placed in charge of psychiatry activities at two Montreal hospitals in the mid-nineteen-sixties, Royal Victoria and Montreal Neurological. Why would so many people living in such good conditions have so much anxiety, he thought, as he worked there?
Born in Poland, Lipowski participated in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, a mass insurrection against the German Army that left more than two hundred thousand civilians dead. One of the fortunate few who escaped was Lipowski, masquerading as a French refugee returning to France. He would later remember, "Those two months were the most valuable experience of my life." Day and night, the scent of burning meat was with us.
Every day, we were bombed and shelled, food was very scarce, and some distance away, water had to be collected at night from a well. I was so starved for food that I nearly hallucinated.
With endless abundance and leisure, though, North America welcomed him. Lipowski thought of Buridan's butt as he pondered the contrast: an apocryphal donkey that found itself standing between two similarly attractive hay stacks. It starves to death, unable to determine which one to drink. The donkey was named after Jean Buridan, the nominalist scholar and Catholic priest of the fourteenth century who wrote extensively about free will. Buridan concluded that often free will could lead to inaction: an inability to choose because of excess ambiguity and, likely, excess choice. In exchange, Buridan's butt became the mascot for that general concept (although in Buridan's no equines of any kind actually appearAss, in particular, became the mascot for that general concept (although in Buridan 's fiction, no equines of any sort actually appear). For Lipowski, this condition helped to understand the kind of fear he was feeling around him. He named it an approach-approach conflict: you find yourself unable to commit to either of them easily, faced with tempting choices. And even though you're picking, you're still thinking about the options you would have lost: maybe the other stack of hay tasted sweeter.
In a paper written in The American Journal of Psychiatry in 1970, Lipowski summarised his hypothesis. "I suggest that it is precisely the overabundance of desirable alternatives, sponsored and promoted by a wealthy and increasingly complex culture," he argued, "which leads to conflict, dissatisfaction, unrelieved appetite stress, more impulses to approach and more conflict, a real vicious circle."
"Far-reaching and probably harmful effects on the mental and physical health of affected individuals." Lipowski concluded that the main source of the anxiety around him was the overabundance of good scenarios. It was here, in the land of abundance, he wrote, 'that the fate of the ass of Buridan haunts us.'
While the work of Lipowski gained some immediate broad interest, it rapidly fell into relative obscurity. Thirty years later, psychologist Sheena Iyengar from Columbia University resurrected the notion of conflict generated by an overabundance of choice, a term that would then be popularized and renamed as the paradox of choice by Swarthmore University psychologist Barry Schwartz, but, unlike Lipowski, she concentrated largely on the concept of cognitive demands. When it was appropriate for shoppers to choose betweenThey were more likely to make a decision when faced with six options than when confronted with twenty-four or thirty, jams or chocolates, she noticed. In their final decision, they were even more happy. Too much choice, concluded Iyengar, would decrease motivation. However, why precisely that will be the case has remained unexplored. One hypothesis, she speculated in her conclusion, was that an array of alternatives could "attract and repel choice-makers concurrently," an explanation focused on feelings not unlike the one Lipowski had considered. Even, there was more conjecture than reality about the possibility of an overarching emotional tug-of - war.
