For many of us, the holidays are a season filled with shopping. Shopping for the best recipes and ingredients to make a delicious family feast. Shopping for the perfect presents. Shopping for plane, train, or bus tickets. Shopping, shopping, and more shopping. It can get overwhelming!
If you, like me, are tempted to run in the other direction when facing a wall of choices, then you’ll particularly appreciate this month’s newsletter. I’ll share a conversation with psychologist and bestselling author Barry Schwartz, who has researched a phenomenon called choice overload. It turns out that more options aren’t always better.
But before I share that Q+A, here are a few recommended listens and reads...
Recommended Listens and Reads
The Power of Negative Thinking: In this episode of Choiceology, bestselling author and poker champion Annie Duke unpacks why negative thinking (which helps you anticipate and avoid obstacles) can counter-intuitively be more valuable than positive thinking.
Five Steps to Forming a Habit: For this CNN article, I pulled some of my favorite tips about building a good habit from my book, How to Change.
Stop Confusing Correlation with Causation: Harvard Business School Professor Mike Luca argues for the importance of using strong causal evidence to support our decisions.
I also want to mention an upcoming event that I think you might enjoy. On 12/3 at 12 pm ET, fellow Wharton Professor Angela Duckworth and I will host a conversation with three brilliant academics and friends about their fabulous recent books. Join us to ask your questions live.
Q&A: Choice Overload
In this Q&A from Choiceology with psychologist and emeritus Swarthmore College Professor Barry Schwartz, we talk about research by Barry and his collaborators on choice overload and what can be done to overcome it.
Me: Barry, could you define choice overload?
Barry: Although it seems obvious that the more choice we have, the better off we are, there's evidence that's not true. A life with no choice is unbearable, but as you keep adding options, instead of making people feel free or more liberated, you end up with people who even when they make good decisions feel like they could have made better ones.
Me: It feels counterintuitive that there could ever be too many options. Could you describe some of the evidence?
Barry: The classic study was done 20 years ago with expensive imported jams in a gourmet food store in Palo Alto. One day they put out 24 flavors of jam and people could stop by and taste and get a coupon that would save them a dollar on any jam. Another day they offered six flavors. What they found was that a tenth as many people bought jam when they encountered the large, 24-jam display than the small display.
Me: This is a really interesting pattern and I know it’s now been shown in many other settings too when people make really different types of decisions. Do you know how many choices we need to experience choice overload — 3, 10, 30, 100?
Barry: A couple of studies tried to map this, suggesting that eight, 10, or maybe 12 is the sweet spot where you give people enough variety that anyone can find something but not so much that they're overwhelmed. But I hesitate to generalize on the basis of those studies because they were choices of trivial things like pens. There's no reason to think that your choice of pen and your choice of job and your choice of automobile and your choice of computer are all going to have the same sweet spot. I think it depends both on the domain you're choosing in and on the person.
Me: Why do scientists think we get overwhelmed by too much choice and can be dissuaded from making any decision at all?
Barry: I think one possibility is that when there are a lot of options, you start making comparisons, looking for the option that is perfect in every way. It's the cheapest, the most reliable, the easiest to use, the coolest. You don't do that when there are only a few options.
The story I tell in my book is about buying jeans. When all you had to choose from was Lee's and Levi's, you didn't expect the jeans you bought to be perfect. When there are hundreds or thousands of jeans to choose from, now you think that somewhere out there ought to be the perfect pair of jeans. And so, you look and try on and you get great jeans but they aren't perfect and you feel like you have to keep looking. I think it tortures people.
Me: How robust is choice overload? I seem to recall some recent research papers arguing that it may be quite overblown.
Barry: As with all things in psychology research, it doesn't always happen. Sometimes the more options people have the better off they are, the happier they are. Yet, sometimes choice overload happens. This is not something you can simply assume will always be true.
Two meta-analyses looked at the robustness of choice overload. The first showed that the average effect size was essentially zero. Meaning there's nothing there. What that paper obscured is that almost every study gets effects. It's just that some of them show more choice is better and some of them show more choice is worse and when you average that together you get an effect size of about zero. About five years later, another meta-analysis showed fairly robustly that there is a too-much choice effect and that it seems to be drive by how complex the decision is and by how clear people's preferences are.
Me: Okay, well, if choice overload is a robust bias—and it’s certainly something I can relate to—then why do retailers and online streaming services like Netflix keep offering so many choices? Why are Amazon and Walmart, for instance, still thriving?
Barry: There are a couple of answers. People might say my story can't be true because if it was, some smart retailer would figure it out and offer limited options. Let me point out a couple stores people are happiest shopping in—Costco and Trader Joe's—both offer extremely limited options.
I think the reason many retailers don't take advantage of this is an ideology deeply embedded in our culture that says when you add options, you're bound to make somebody better off and nobody worse off. As a retailer, you don't want people to walk into your store and say “do you have X?” and you shrug your shoulders and say “sorry, we don't carry X.” And when the question is between two options or four, the answer is four, but when the question is between 25 options or 40, the answer is 25.
Me: Why can't we just ignore the options we don't want and benefit from having more choices?
Barry: Here’s the logic: When there are 2,000 kinds of jeans to choose from, all of a sudden when you choose jeans, you are not just covering your behind. You’re also making a statement to the world about your identity. And if you view your decisions as statements about identity, every decision is consequential. And so large choice sets raise the stakes for pretty much any decision.
To learn more about choice overload, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig into the topic or read Barry’s best-selling book The Paradox of Choice.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
That’s all for this month’s newsletter. See you in December!
Katy Milkman, PhD
Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and Bestselling Author of How to Change