Behavioral New World
December 1, 2023
In a cognitive jam
Imagine for a moment that there was only one type of jam that you could buy at the grocery store. “You can have any kind you want ma’am, as long as it’s blueberry,” a shop assistant might say. Although jam occupies a tiny sliver of your life, it would still be rather annoying not to have a choice. Blueberry is great, but it can get old after a few years.
Then one day, you go to the store and there are two types, blueberry and strawberry. Yay! Even if you love blueberry jam, an occasional break from it is welcome. So having a choice makes you feel better off.
What if there are three choices? That might not make you feel even better off, but maybe a little.
Is there a limit to all this? That is, does increasing the number of choices always make you feel at least to some degree better off? The famous “jam study”[1] suggests that Yes, there is a limit after which more choices make you feel worse off. In some situations at least.
We all have experienced the “samples tables” in grocery stores. Now imagine one table with 24 different jams to taste and another with only six. This was the setup in the jam study. The researchers then tracked which of these two setups led to more purchases of jam.
The answer, as you might be expecting at this point, is that fewer shoppers bought jam when faced with 24 choices than when faced with six choices (3% versus 30%). A plausible explanation is that the shoppers felt overwhelmed by 24 choices and just moved on, while six choices were not as intimidating.
This phenomenon is called the “paradox of choice” and there is an entire book dedicated to it,[2] not to mention a substantial field of research (you might guess that marketing experts have a lot of interest in this topic, and you’d be right). The book’s author provides two explanations for the “less is more” phenomenon.
First, there is “analysis paralysis,” a self-explanatory phrase bandied about in business schools. This inability to decide is strongly connected with the notion that we can be overwhelmed by choice.
Second, there is the possibility of the buyer imagining, perhaps not consciously, that they might experience greater buyer’s remorse. With a whopping 24 choices, you may have overlooked an alternative that was much better than the choice you made. With six choices, the likely satisfaction gap is smaller.
I would add a third possible explanation, something called decision fatigue. There is cognitive energy expended when you are trying to decide and the more decisions you must make, the greater the cognitive expenditure. In economic terms, it is costly to evaluate choices, and the more choices, the greater the cost of evaluation. Using your brain, especially for complex decisions, is often hard work – when done right at least. Plow through enough such decisions and you’ve depleted your cognitive energy fuel tank.
Not everyone is a believer in the paradox of choice. For example, a well-known British economist points out that there are more than 80,000 (?!) drink combinations at Starbucks, but people still go to Starbucks. They do not seem overwhelmed.[3]
I think these views can be reconciled, however: The paradox of choice applies in some situations and not in others. Sounds like a copout, I know, but consider: What is different about buying jam in a supermarket compared with buying coffee in a coffee shop? Maybe there is almost no cognitive expenditure associated with ordering the coffee you have already decided on, but your opinion about jams is not well-established.
What do you think? Click on “Comment” below.
What can we do when we feel overwhelmed by the number of choices? First, recognize that in many situations, making the “wrong” choice doesn’t really matter that much. So you bought blueberry rather than strawberry jam—so what?
And that leads to a second recommendation: Adopt a “satisficer” mindset rather than a “maximizer” mindset. In brief, be content with “good enough” decisions rather than trying to identify the single best decision. Good enough very frequently can still be pretty darn good or even better. Not surprisingly, if you consider the consequences of these two modes of decision-making, research shows that satisficers often live happier lives than maximizers.[4]
[1]https://faculty.washington.edu/jdb/345/345%20Articles/Iyengar%20%26%20Lepper%20(2000).pdf. I use the word “suggest;” the study is not proof.
[2] Conveniently called The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz. His YouTube video.
[3] Unfortunately behind a paywall: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/more-is-more-why-the-paradox-of-choice-might-be-a-myth/278658/
[4] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/science-choice/201506/satisficing-vs-maximizing
Fun reading with good learning. I learned the paradox of choice in my consumer journey. I try to narrow down to 2-4 options first. After that, I often delegate making a decision at shopping or eateries. Recently at Sycamore, I asked to share thoughts on two dishes to a server and the dish was delicious. After all, most of things, it doesn’t too much matter, “satisficer”mindset. Often say to myself, pick the battle.