Option Paralysis: When Less is More¶
Real Woods & Darnell Carson
In A Bit of a Jam
Imagine this: You walk into your local grocery store on a Saturday afternoon, ready to shop. As you enter, you are beckoned to a display table and asked to taste test from a selection of jams. Depending on the day, the researchers could present you with as few as six jams or as many as 24! How does the number of options influence your likeliness to stop at the booth? And how does it impact the likelihood that you’ll end up buying one of the jams?
This is precisely what researchers Mark Lepper and Sheena Iyengar set out to discover (Iyengar & Lepper, 2000). With the help of some research assistants, they set up shop in a Menlo Park grocery store and asked people to stop at their displays of “exotic” jams, meaning flavors other than your typical strawberry or grape. They wanted to know how the number of options would affect the customers’ decision-making.
From this study and two others reported within the same paper, Lepper and Iyengar found that, in general, people were more attracted to the possibility of having more choice. People were more likely to stop at the display of 30 jams than the display of 6 jams. However, they found that what they called the “initial attractiveness of selections” did not influence subsequent buying behavior. They found the opposite: people presented with fewer choices were more likely to buy one of the jams.
Underlying this experiment was the choice overload hypothesis. This chapter will define choice overload, also known as “option paralysis,” and provide some examples of how it manifests in our decision-making.
Option Paralysis¶
Option paralysis, or overchoice, is a state characterized by too many choices causing an impaired ability to decide due to internally conflicting desires or a conflicting unknown about the value that each selection might fulfill. Intuitively, we assume more choices are better because they allow us to analyze the differential value between each alternative and gear our decisions toward the choice that best fulfills our desires. But, how many choices are too many? What happens when, in analyzing one’s options, they find that multiple choices might bring the same fulfillment, might fulfill different desires equally, or they simply can not entirely grasp what they desire. Option paralysis can lead to other psychological outcomes, such as analysis paralysis (see below) and buyer’s remorse (see below).
Not all encounters with multiple choices result in an inability to decide. Certain preconditions are required before a state of option paralysis is experienced. The absence of prior bias is necessary because, despite the number of choices one may have, a decision can be made without any conflicting desires when there is a clear initial bias towards a particular choice (Scheibehenne et al., 2010). Quality equivalence is also necessary for option paralysis to occur (Scheibehenne et al., 2010). If one analyzes their choices and finds that one option is clearly better than the rest, they won’t reach a state of option paralysis. Lastly, unfamiliarity is sometimes necessary for option paralysis to occur (Iyengar & Lepper, 2000). If an individual has experienced the same or similar set of choices before, they have likely learned which option is best suited for them. This was behind the reasoning of removing defaults from the jam study. The researchers didn’t want people to base their choices on flavors with which they were likely familiar. This is not to say that option paralysis is impossible if one has previously experienced the same set of choices. The individual may have different preferences the next time around, or they may have never decided.
We see the effects of overchoice most often as consumers in a capitalist economic system. If you’ve ever walked into a grocery store, you know that there are countless products on shelves that serve more-or-less similar functions. If you shop online, the variety grows to an almost limitless extent. The amount of choice here can seem appealing at first but can also make decisions much harder. We can only process so many items simultaneously, and our options can be under even more pressure if there are other constraints like a time crunch.
To make a purchase, one must first select an assortment of products, and then they must choose from that assortment. Variety and complexity impact the consumer’s final decision on which product to buy, or whether to buy at all (Townsend & Khan, 2014). Variety is the positive aspect of this process because consumers want more options when trying to decide. Complexity, however, is the negative aspect of this process because too much variety increases the complexity of decision-making. When there is too much complexity, consumers may put off or opt-out of the decision.
Examples¶
Analysis Paralysis¶
Analysis paralysis is a state that is very closely linked to overchoice. It describes the act of overthinking or overanalyzing a situation so much that one becomes unable to make a decision. The person thinking about the decision may be so worried about whether their decision is the best decision that they never come to one in the first place (Kurien et al., 2014).
We see this in the fact that so few people decided to take the jams in the study by Iyengar and Lepper. They were presented with many more jams at the display than people in the limited-choice condition but sampled about the same number of jams, just under two jams. Already, the table, they are faced with the issue of choosing which jams to sample. In the jam aisle, they are faced with this decision again, but potentially also with a sense of doubt concerning whether they tried the right flavors. In the end, very few can come to a final decision to buy a jam, unsure that their choice will be the correct one.
Buyer’s Remorse¶
Buyer’s remorse refers to the sense of regret a consumer makes after a purchase. This regret is not limited to purchases of choosing between many options; buyer’s remorse can also come from purchasing expensive items. Buyer’s remorse stems from the cognitive dissonance that comes from having to make difficult decisions (Sweeney et al., 2000). Many factors affect buyer’s remorse, but we will focus on the role of overchoice.
Let’s revisit our jam experiment from the beginning of the chapter. You walk into your local grocery store and are invited to a display of jams, either 6 or 24 in number. Afterward, you have the opportunity to go and buy the jams. Given your display exposure, how likely are you to buy the jam, and how satisfied are you with your purchase afterward?
According to the 2000 Iyengar and Lepper study, 30% of the people who visited the 6-jam display bought a jam, significantly higher than the 3% of people who saw the 24-jam display that purchased a jam. It could be that the people presented with so many options had a hard time deciding the first place, which we’ll look at in the next section.
The people in the limited-choice condition were more likely to buy the jam and were more likely to be satisfied with their choice. In a similar study with chocolates, researchers found that people presented with more extensive choices were more dissatisfied with their decisions than those in limited choice conditions.
Here, overchoice has led to the manifestation of buyer’s remorse. People in the limited choice condition are most likely more sure of the choice they’ve made from already limited options, and therefore more secure and satisfied with their decision. However, people in the extensive choice condition might spend time wondering if the choice they made was the right one, given the number of similarly appealing options.
Combatting Option Paralysis¶
Choice Architecture¶
Choice architecture is concerned with the ways choices are presented to consumers and how those presentations end up impacting the decision-making process. Option paralysis is just one of the outcomes of choice architecture, and understanding how it operates can help us better understand how to nudge consumers towards specific outcomes. The number of choices is just one factor that can impact decision-making. Other things that impact this process include descriptions of the options or the presence of “defaults.”
Iyengar and Lepper made sure to remove flavors we may consider to be “defaults,” like grape and strawberry in the jam study. They were worried that these flavors would affect the study’s findings because people would simply default to familiar jam options instead of trying more “exotic” flavors. By removing these options, they removed the ability of people to default to what they already knew, and obtained a better sense of how decision-making works for similarly appealing unknowns.
Manipulating the choice architecture in experiments allows experimenters to measure what differences these changes make in consumer outcomes, which helps them understand how to best present the choices in a real-world setting.
Summary¶
Overchoice and option paralysis explain to us the reasoning behind the adage, “less is more.” According to a 1965 study, a consumer can only process 7 items at a time (Miller, 1965). When we are presented with too wide a variety of options, our brains need strategies to aid in the decision-making process. In the real world, this results in people either putting off a purchase or deciding not to purchase altogether.
In addition to option paralysis, people can also experience conditions such as buyer’s remorse and analysis paralysis due to decision-making. Studying choice architecture and how people respond to changes in the ways choices are presented can help us better understand how to achieve the results for which we are aiming. The tough decisions that these situations present can be alleviated with the help of heuristics and past knowledge.
References¶
Iyengar, Sheena S.; Lepper, Mark R. (2000). “When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing?” (PDF). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 79 (6): 995–1006. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.79.6.995. PMID 11138768. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2013-11-30.
Kurien, R., Paila, A. R., & Nagendra, A. (2014). Application of Paralysis Analysis Syndrome in Customer Decision Making. Procedia Economics and Finance, 11, 323–334. https://doi.org/10.1016/s2212-5671(14)00200-7
Miller, George A. (1956). “The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information”. Psychological Review. 63 (2): 81–97. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.308.8071. doi:10.1037/h0043158. PMID 13310704.
Scheibehenne, B., Todd, P. M., & Greifeneder, R. (2010). Can there ever be too many options? A meta‐analytic review of choice overload. Journal of Consumer Research, 37(3), 409-425. doi:10.1086/651235
Sweeney, Jillian; Douglas Hausknecht; Geoffrey Soutar (May 2000). “Cognitive Dissonance after Purchase: A Multidimensional Scale”. Psychology & Marketing. 17 (5): 369–385. doi:10.1002/(sici)1520-6793(200005)17:5<369::aid-mar1>3.0.co;2-g
Townsend, Claudia; Kahn, Barbara E. (2014). “The “Visual Preference Heuristic”: The Influence of Visual versus Verbal Depiction on Assortment Processing, Perceived Variety, and Choice Overload”. Journal of Consumer Research. 40 (5): 993–1015. doi:10.1086/673521. S2CID 6758197.