Do Opposites Attract?

I'm told that the sign of a great truth is that its opposite is also true. I experienced this today, and I think you'd enjoy it if I shared the experience with you. It'll cost you about 40 minutes to have the same experience, or about 5 minutes to read about it here. Or you can do both, and I hope you do.

Perhaps you've heard of TED conferences. It's a series of talks by famous (or not) experts on a variety of subjects (originally having to do with Technology, Entertainment, or Design, but now beyond those three), based on an annual conference, and they have a large free archive online. Go to ted.com if you want to check out the whole thing, but beware: the talks are fascinating, and you can spend hours there, very enlightening hours.

I just listened to two of the lectures, and they say the opposite, and they're both true.

Here's the first talk. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6449479356304659254

It's given by Malcolm Gladwell, the guy who wrote Blink and The Tipping Point (which thought I mentioned on this blog a long time ago, but now I can't find the review). Anyway, he described the work of a fellow who revolutionized the food industry by developing the concept of varities of the same product, say six kinds of spaghetti sauce, and how it made us all happier by giving us what we like. He supports this with examples and figures. His premise is that we are better off when people take into account individual differences.

Here's the second talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO6XEQIsCoM

It's given by Barry Schwartz, who wrote The Paradox of Choice. He treats the variety described by the previous talk as so ingrained in our culture that it accepted without examination. He describes several bad consequences of all this choice. It tends to distract us, make us put off decisions, makes us less satisfied with our choice, raises our expectations unrealistically, and blame ourselves when things aren't perfect. His premise is that this multiplicity of choice has deleterious effects on us. The secret to happiness is low expectations.

I'm using the speakers' terminology, which allows for a bit of conceptual leeway here, but it struck me as I watched how they were describing the same concept from opposite and true perspectives.

What do you think?