Choice as an object of cultural studies

Choice — the availability of options and the possibility of making a "free choice" — is fundamental to the individual's personal autonomy and mental well-being. The neoliberal approach to public administration is a significant characteristic of modern Western societies, and the concept of cultivating choice, embedded in economic discourse, generates and stimulates competition — the main attribute of the market mechanism.

A modern person sees the natural prospect of being in a permanent reflexive choice of food, clothing and leisure, trajectories of development and education, place of residence, work, friends and partners. The opportunity, as well as the need to constantly make a choice, is one of the main characteristics of modernity. People form their personal identity through an endless series of choices and believe in the high degree of significance of the consequences of their decisions. Choice is freedom, and at the same time obligation, responsibility, risk, regret and guilt; choice can be presented as something ordinary, self—evident, and at the same time vital and even fatal. The problem of choice raises many questions: what choice can be called "right"; what is the proportion and importance of rationality in the process of making a choice; what are the criteria for comparing alternatives to choice; should these criteria take into account exclusively subjective assessments of the person making the choice, or is it possible to develop a universal approach to making a choice?

The problem of choice is on the agenda of the scientific community: the number of articles in the Scopus database of peer—reviewed scientific literature, the title of which includes the word "choice", is increasing every year (2017-2021 - 5241 and 6015 articles per year, respectively). The most common scientific fields of choice study are medicine, social sciences, engineering, economics, management, psychology.

The purpose of this study is to prove the relevance of the culturological approach in the study of choice. The article provides a brief overview of the results of the analysis of modern foreign publications addressing the phenomenon of choice. We are interested in generally accepted interpretations of choice, methods of choice research, as well as ideas about the place of culture in the structure of modern knowledge about choice in various scientific fields.

At the heart of the array of scientific literature, where the choice appears not as an independent object of research, but as a search for the optimal option from the proposed alternatives, lies faith in the logic of scientific rationality — one of the fundamental characteristics of modern culture. In pragmatic studies devoted to the mechanisms, tools and principles that guide a person as a rational (or limited rational) subject, much attention is paid to the socio—cultural context - the mechanisms of acquiring knowledge, as well as the peculiarities of the socio-cultural environment in which the choice is made. In works exploring the existence of free will, performed in a positivist way (in isolation from the metaphysics of choice), cultural conventions largely determine the choice made by individuals (both conscious and unconscious), but their study is not given due attention.

The scientific works carried out in line with the turn to the material — the consideration of non-people as acting agents in situations of choice - are separately touched upon. Particular relevance is seen by the authors in the study of culturally specific practices of making a choice in the digital environment.

In conclusion, recommendations are given on the methodology for studying the phenomenon of choice within the framework of a culturological approach.

Rationality as the basis of choice in scientific research

In the technical and natural sciences (in works in the field of medicine, engineering, computer science, chemistry, etc.), as well as in the overwhelming majority of humanitarian works (mainly in the fields of pedagogy, management theory, marketing, etc.), research on the topic of choice is a comparative analysis of several variants of the technologies, methods, tools used, algorithms or solutions to some problem. In these works, "choice" appears as a "process of making a choice" from several alternatives under consideration, the search for the optimal option. By "choice" is meant the perfect action and the result of this action. For example, "The choice of medical care after mild traumatic brain injury in Australia" (Healthcare choices following mild traumatic brain injury in Australia. J. Thorne, S. Markovic, H. Chih, 2022), or "The choice of production and disposal of wood chips: burial or recycling?" (Wood chip production and disposal choices: Landfill or recycle? W. J. Florkowski, Y. D.-E. Nouve, E. M. Bauske, N. Norton, 2022).

The authors, following the logic of scientific rationality, provide information about the alternatives of choice and the possible consequences of the perfect choice with mandatory author's recommendations about which choice is considered "right". Such articles pursue a noble goal — to deprive the reader of the need to make a choice independently, to remove from him, at least partially, professional and personal responsibility for the consequences of the perfect choice and, finally, to delegate the blame, often unconsciously, to the implicit image of the author. At the heart of this vast literary array, which determines the reader's choice, is the belief in the scientific approach — the faith of the author, the reader and the entire professional community, in which the reader appears as a choosing subject.

Principles and patterns of choice: rationality and irrationality

Numerous works are devoted to the mechanisms, tools and principles that guide a person as a rational (or limited rational) subject of choice, as well as the design of choice situations based on these principles.

In behavioral economics, the default choice is interpreted as the best of the alternatives or what can be evaluated as the best. Since Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky shook the foundation of the classical economic theory ^[1], economists have been particularly interested in one topic — where the boundaries of the classical theory of rational choice pass, when and under what conditions economic agents act irrationally and, most importantly, how to predict and minimize the risks associated with irrational behavior of subjects. (for example, "Irrational Efficiency: Solving the Mystery of Human choice" (Efficiently irrational: deciphering the riddle of human choice. P. W. Glimcher, 2022)).

Economists, as a rule, are little interested in external, culturally-mediated reasons why subjects choose to act this way and not otherwise (with the exception of a few works devoted to economic culture as a set of social values and norms regulating economic behavior), however, within the framework of decision-making theory, calculate the probability with which a person will commit one or another the choice is almost impossible without understanding the socio-cultural context. The authors investigate the mechanisms of knowledge acquisition that precede making a choice, as well as the features of the socio-cultural environment in which the choice is made ^[2]. For example, a person's choice or non-choice of a food product will depend on the subjective perception of this product, which, in turn, will depend on the prevalence of this product in a given territory, the culture of cooking and consumption of food, the representation of the product in the media, etc.

Culture, speaking in the language of decision-making theory, determines the "degree of preference" of a certain result that is universal for representatives of a certain society ^{[3, p. 139]}. The features of the socio-cultural environment that structure people's worldview are understood as the "context effect": social institutions form an available arsenal of means of making a choice, limiting the fan of alternatives and setting the "default" choice parameters, which are unconsciously guided by the majority of actors.

While economists think with a rational-irrational dichotomy, and adherents of decision theory include socio-cultural knowledge in their field of interests, marketers and designers who think in terms of market categories identify optimal parameters for organizing consumer choice (for example, "Brand loyalty when choosing chocolate bars" (The connection between manufacturer and private label brands and brand loyalty in chocolate bar buying decisions. Kiss M., Czine P., Balogh P., Szak?ly Z, 2022)). Researchers have noticed that the increase in alternatives to choice (especially noticeable in consumer choice of goods and services in the digital space) complicates the process of making a choice ^[4]. According to the 2020 survey, 42% of users abandoned their planned purchase in an online store due to too many options (the "Humanizing Digital 2020" report, https://zoovu.com/blog/humanizing-digital-2020-report ). This position narrows research optics to particular aspects of the organization of choice, for example: "The influence of the divider (English divider — dividing line, interface element) in the product catalog on the number of options perceived by the user, the desire to purchase goods and satisfaction with the choice made (The effects of a dividing line in a product assortment on perceived quantity, willingness to buy, and choice satisfaction. Ouyang, J., Jia, Y., Guo, Z, 2022).

Modern marketing and branding communications are based on an anthropocentric approach, according to which user satisfaction is considered the main criterion for the effectiveness of design. When considering the central function of branding in simplifying consumer choice, cultural artifacts are of practical interest as a basis for the formation of images relevant to consumers, however, little attention is paid to the theoretical analysis of the cultural context of identity design in scientific works.

Freedom of choice as an object of research: reality or illusion

A large group of publications considers choice as an object of research in the context of free will: "Economics is about how people make choices. Sociology is about why they have no choice" ^{[5, p. 233]}. While in the sociological theory of modernization (E. Giddens, W. Beck, S. Lesh, Z. Bauman) the possibility of making a choice is a fundamental characteristic of modernity, representatives of the theory of dispositions (P. Bourdieu) believe that culture hides the mechanisms of coercion using the concept of "free choice".

Philosophers traditionally consider the phenomenon of "choice" in the context of the subjective nature of consciousness, and scientific and philosophical debates on the topic of free will are on a par with the fundamental questions of being and are among the most fierce. Despite the fact that the Philosophical Encyclopedic Dictionary does not give an independent definition of the concept of "choice" — it is identified exclusively with freedom and free will ^{[6, p. 97]} — "an alarmingly large number of great philosophers who never doubted the existence of reason or mind believed that Will is just an illusion" ^{[7, p. 242]}.

However, today, along with the classical philosophical discourse, in connection with the development of high-tech scientific methods, researchers are increasingly striving to "look into the head" of the choosing subject. Starting with the experiment of Benjamin Libet ^[8], scientists in the field of neuroscience actively postulate and experimentally prove the biological determinism of any human behavior, including choice, illusorily perceived by subjects as free. We see these views in such books as "Free Will that does not Exist" by Sam Harris (2012), "The Illusion of Conscious Will" by Daniel M. Wegner (2002), etc. Experimental data obtained using high—tech methods of studying the brain indicates the unconscious performance of most of the control functions intuitively attributed by the individual to the sphere of consciousness ^{[9, p. 3]}. Our intuitive belief in the existence of psychological content controlling the action is only a belief in the agency of consciousness. Culture, in the perspective of conscious choice mediated by neural processes, appears as a set of artificially created environmental factors that externally determine the internal, biological content.

Such a deterministic position, on the one hand, is justified by the specifics of natural science thought, on the other hand, it weakly withstands third—party criticism: starting from accusations of reductionism, ending with the methodological crisis of replication observed over the past decade due to the inability to reproduce the results of previously conducted scientific experiments ^[10].

Despite the fact that in the natural science perspective consciousness only passively accompanies unconsciously occurring processes, the concept of consciousness is necessary to substantiate the concept of free will ^{[11, p. 2]}. Many social and legal structures are based on the belief in free will (the ability of the "I" to choose between the proposed alternatives and act independently of biological or social restrictions), which are based on a consciously oriented approach: the concepts of individual responsibility, mental causality and self-organized actions.

The illusion of choice gives rise to the illusion of control: by making a choice that contributes to achieving the desired and avoiding undesirable results (both vital and emotionally significant (for example, choosing a university, form of education and direction of training), and basic everyday (for example, choosing what to focus on), a person exercises "control" over the environment environment ^{[12, p. 459]}. Belief in the ability to control the environment and achieve the desired results is necessary for a person's mental well-being: to choose means to express one's preferences and assert oneself; each choice enhances the sense of control and self-efficacy, and the destruction of choice destroys this adaptive belief.

Through active rationalization, consciousness serves to form personal narratives, while the provision of narrative models of life is imputed to the management of culture ^{[9, p. 4]}. Cognitive and linguistic processes formed by culture structure perceptual experience, organize memory, segment and give meaning to the "events" of life. Due to their construction and dependence on cultural conventions, personal narratives, in turn, reflect the concepts of "potential lives" generally accepted within different cultures ^{[13, p. 11]}. Thus, conditioned by cultural formality, we become variants of canonical forms of culture, and our way of telling about ourselves controls our ability to choose.

 Choice: individual, social or cultural?

The study of individual, social and cultural levels of the process of making a choice is traditionally attributed to different disciplines, both in the domestic and foreign scientific tradition: psychology, sociology and cultural studies, respectively.

Culture is a defining characteristic of mental selective systems, but the optics of psychological research of choice are the individual characteristics of the person choosing, the motives of the individual in the process of making a choice. While representatives of the cognitive-behavioral school conduct experiments in the spirit of behaviorism on the principles of stimulus-awareness-reaction, existential researchers have the opportunity to make a free choice as one of the ultimate givens of human existence ^{[14, p. 14]}. If the first culture, following the natural-scientific path, appears as an objective, material and spiritual environment external to the choosing subject, then the second — the basis on which the meanings generating consciousness are based.

Psychodynamic theories fully include the study of cultural factors as an integral component of the formation of subjectivity. In the course of analyzing foreign scientific literature, it is not easy to classify a particular work as either psychology or cultural studies (sociology of culture).

Culture and cognition is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of humanities, which is responsible for the study of those aspects of social structure and culture that determine human behavior through the formation of the way of thinking of social subjects (thinking processes, cognitive models that characterize certain groups or communities, as well as thinking styles that arise in certain situations and social contexts) ^{[15, p. 1014; 16]}. The central place in the cognitive-oriented model of the influence of culture on choice is occupied by the methods of analyzing frames and schemes. Cultural schemes — attributes of a person's culture — "knowledge structures representing objects or events offering standardized ideas about their characteristics, connections and consequences in conditions of incomplete information" ^{[17, p. 269]}. Frames are attributes of society's culture — situational material matrices that activate schemes internalized by people ^{[18, p. 246]}.

We can conditionally designate two prospects for the development of frame analysis in the context of the study of choice: semiotic and material. And if the first one is successfully integrated into the context of the methodology of cultural semiotics and ethnocognitive lexicography (a culturally contextualized approach to the structure of cognitive lexicography, where culture interacts with cognition and language ^[19]), then the shift towards the material is of particular interest in connection with the development of digital technologies.

 Digitalization as a choice factor

In the studies of choice in the social sciences, under the influence of actor-network theory (M. Kallon, B. Latour, J. Lo), there is a turn to the material — the consideration of non-people as acting agents in choice situations: how a shopping list formed by a subject using paper and a pen imposes restrictions on the choice of goods for the future self, or how notebooks and spreadsheets help a person in making a choice ^{[20, p. 382]}.

A completely different approach to making a choice can be observed when subjects and objects of choice get into the digital environment. Digital platforms are responsible not only for providing users with a wide selection of goods and services, accompanied by a large volume of various kinds of information, but also for organizing an environment for posting reviews, improving the system of popular and expert ratings, modernizing filtering mechanisms (ranking and classification). In recent decades, a new entity has also appeared in the digital environment, changing the approach to making a choice — artificial neural algorithms ^{[21, p. 346]}.

Since digital platforms are not only screen forms with interactive storefronts that allow comparing different options, but rather mechanisms that control choice and expand choice, setting users up for actions relevant to certain discourses and practices, researchers are increasingly interested in how the architecture and design features of digital platforms reconfigure and redefine choice, change the methods used and the instruments of making a choice, as well as transform existing ideas about the subjects of choosing ^[22]. Attention is paid not only to the study of digital systems that are designed to hold people's attention, provoke and encourage them to get into numerous choice situations, but also digital tools for restoring users' control over their choice, allowing them to cut off distracting noises and focus on important tasks ^[23].

In the future, researchers are interested in studying the interweaving of the real and digital worlds: the mutual influence of digital choice and digital environment on real choice and real environment.

 Conclusions

The phenomenon of choice today increasingly appears as an object of research: it is considered in the context of the problem of choice initiation, in applied research in the context of individual aspects of choice, principles and laws of rational and irrational choice, through the prism of a natural scientific understanding of the nature of consciousness.

Despite the fact that studies of choice in different disciplines do not completely ignore the potential of culture in terms of its influence on choice and the formation of the selection process, the task of determining the nature and degree of this impact is facing cultural scientists. The worldviews and values shared within the same society — "cultural biases" — are systems of principles that regulate the boundaries of roles and requirements and affect a person's perception of the surrounding world ^{[24, p. 293]}. Culture offers actors an assortment of choice alternatives, repertoires of "choice methods", as well as culturally specific "choice techniques" ^{[25, p. 850]}.

The process of making a choice is a cultural practice — a culturally specific way of acting based on normativity, relying both on practical knowledge (culturally specific decision-making skills) and on the reflection of reality in a person's mind (since the choice depends on the calculation and manipulation of knowledge).

Leaving aside the arguments about the metaphysics of free will, a detailed study of the cultural repertoires of choice can be implemented by methods of comparative analysis, analysis of frames and cultural schemes (since people's perception is rooted in their values and worldview, which are formed by the socio-cultural context), narrative analysis (where choice is considered in the aspect of building personal narratives) and discourse analysis (discursive the elements fine-tune the subject to make a certain choice by the subject). Comparative analysis can be based on such characteristics of culture as: normativity, materiality, historicity and locality. It is promising to conduct a comparative interdisciplinary study at the intersection of cultural studies and psychology with the consideration of cultural factors in the formation of an individual's thinking and the identification of cultural differences in cognition, perception and attention, universal and non-universal patterns of thinking among representatives of different cultures.

This study is a comparative analysis of a wide range of modern scientific papers. We do not consider the historical and philosophical reconstruction of the concept of choice, as well as some relevant theories indirectly related to choice (for example, the theory of regrets). These directions go beyond the scope of our research.

Thus, the study of choice as an object of cultural research with the unification of ideas and ideas from different scientific fields, the integration of disconnected discussions about the normativity and materiality of choice contributes to a more objective analysis of the phenomenon of choice as a socio-cultural phenomenon and the increment of scientific knowledge. The consideration of choice as a set of cultural practices should take place under the auspices of various sciences, whose approaches will allow multidimensional construction of the phenomenon of choice taking into account technical, material, epistemological, semiotic and normative dimensions.