Paper Topic Ideas

When indecision is the topic decision

Recently, I was working with a class where students could choose any topic to explore in a short research assignment. While for some students, this sort of freedom is wonderful because they can learn more about something they are authentically interested in, for others, wide open topic selection can feel completely overwhelming and leave their minds totally blank. Everyone has different cognitive strengths and struggles, and getting started when the possibilities are wide open can be paralyzing. As someone who is a slow cognitive processor and is prone to overwhelm, I can relate. 

There was a student in the class who was really struggling with topic selection and none of my usual suggestions were helping. I talked to them about their course materials and asked if anything had particularly interested them so far to see if there was a potential topic in there. I also showed them web pages and news sources related to their discipline to give them ideas. Nothing resonated with them and they seemed more stuck than ever, like Artax in the swamp in The Neverending Story (a childhood fave).

Luckily at that moment, I made an offhand comment that sparked their interest.

“It’s so common to get overwhelmed by all this choice. In fact, there’s quite a bit of research on the difficulty people have in making decisions and how more choices leads to more anxiety. It’s sometimes called the tyranny of choice.”

They immediately jumped on that topic and it’s a great one because it’s researchable and it’s personal. Maybe through their research they’ll come to understand themselves better. Maybe it’ll help them to be more decisive in the future or at least be easier on themselves for it. If nothing else, they will certainly understand that they’re not the only person who struggles to make decisions.

There are a lot of different ways that one could explore decision or indecision:

•  The paradox of choice (or tyranny of choice) refers to the idea that having more choices actually leads to increased anxiety. Is that true? Much of the research comes from consumer research, exploring how having more choices in the market (dozens or even hundreds of cereal choices, for example) leads to anxiety and lower purchasing overall. 
• In his paradox of choice research, psychologist Barry Schwartz (who coined the term) describes two types of people: maximizers and satisficers. Maximizers are focused on making the very best choice while satisficers are less perfectionistic, make quicker decisions, and don’t worry about whether the choice they’re making is the very best. You could explore these two personality types. Which type of person is happier overall? Is it better for our overall well-being to make the best possible decision or to not agonize over decisions? Are people maximizers and satisficers in every part of their life or only on specific decisions (do maximizers obsess over their cereal choices as much as their healthcare choices)? Which personality type is more likely to regret decisions? As a chronic maximizer, I kind of suspect life is better for you satisficers.
• You could look at the cognitive process of decision-making. How do people make choices? You could focus on how decisions are made in different areas of one’s life: medical decisions, moral decisions, purchasing decisions, decisions to have (or not have) children, or even research topic choices. 
• You could look at how cognitive differences and conditions impact decision-making, such as ADHD, depression, autism spectrum disorder, anxiety disorder, and more.
• You could look for strategies to improve decision-making. What can people do to make better decisions or to make decisions less stressful? Maybe it’ll help you become a better decision-maker!
• What tools can help with decision-making? Are ratings and reviews useful or do they just make things more confusing? Do pro/con lists and other more sophisticated analytical tools help? Can or should AI help us make decisions? 

From https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/economics/the-paradox-of-choice 

There are certainly dozens more topics one could choose related to choice and decision-making beyond this list. The best topic is one that resonates with you in some way – that is personal to you, interesting, and/or that you’re curious to learn more about. As a maximizer, I’m really interested in whether maximizers are happier overall than satisfiers. As I wrote earlier, my theory is that satisficers are happier and less anxious, but I’d love to be wrong! 

When finding sources, I find it helpful to think about who I would want to hear from on the topic because it helps me determine whether a source is a good fit when I’m looking through a bunch of search results. Certainly economists and psychologists with PhDs in their field who conduct behavioral research are going to be excellent sources of information on maximizers and satisficers, but there are other kinds of expertise that might be valuable. I’d also love to read personal accounts from people about their own decision-making styles and how that style affects them. Where scholarly research provides strong, credible evidence and data, personal accounts can bring an emotional and human resonance to our writing. Also, I’m probably going to want to hear from journalists, who bring personal stories, data, summaries of scholarly research, interviews with experts, and more into their news stories. 

To find scholarly sources, I would search in Google Scholar (if you haven’t already, be sure to add PCC as your library in your Google Scholar preferences to get links to PCC Library resources. Free links to full-text will always be to the right of the title.). Here’s an example search on this topic where I used terms like happiness, well-being, and mental health in addition to satisficers and maximizers. If I was in a psychology class or related discipline, I might also try searching in PsycINFO, our psychology database (here’s an example search).

To find news sources, I would search in the library database US Major Dailies (here’s an example search), but you may also find good news stories on the free web, like this one from Slate about a maximizer who tried to become a satisficer (a news article AND a personal account!).

To find personal accounts, I might just search Google or I might find them in existing news stories like in my previous example. Here’s a great example of a newsletter/blog post about maximizing vs. satisficing and here’s a whole thread from maximizers who wish they were satisficers.

Those last few articles I found made me realize that I’m really curious about whether maximizers can become satisficers. Could I become a satisficer? It’s totally normal to change your topic during the research process as different pieces of information pull you in different directions. Just make sure you can find enough quality information on that new topic to meet your specific assignment requirements.