Is more choice better? Ten years ago the answer seemed obvious: Yes. Now the conventional wisdom is the opposite: lots of choice makes people less likely to choose anything, and less happy when they do choose.
The most famous supporting evidence is an experiment conducted by two psychologists, Mark Lepper and Sheena Iyengar. They set up a jam-tasting stall in a posh supermarket in California. Sometimes they offered six varieties of jam, at other times 24; jam tasters were then offered a voucher to buy jam at a discount.
The bigger display attracted more customers but very few of them actually bought jam. The display that offered less choice made many more sales – in fact, only 3 per cent of jam tasters at the 24-flavour stand used their discount voucher, versus 30 per cent at the six-flavour stand. This is an astonishingly strong effect – and utterly counter to mainstream economic theory.
One practical response to such experiments is that choice can be a good thing overall even if it does discourage us. I may find the choice between Robertson’s jam and Wilkin and Sons’ jam irritating and of no practical consequence to me, but you can bet that it has consequences for the two companies. We are often offered an apparently pointless choice between two equally good products, not appreciating that they are only good because we have been offered the choice.
The counter-argument was once put in a sketch about TV deregulation by Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie: a waiter whisks away silver cutlery from a politician responsible for the proliferation of channels before dumping a sackful of plastic coffee stirrers in his lap. “They may be complete crap, but you’ve got choice, haven’t you?” Funny, but Fry and Laurie had it backwards. Zero choice is the fastest route to low quality.
But a more fundamental objection to the “choice is bad” thesis is that the psychological effect may not actually exist at all. It is hard to find much evidence that retailers are ferociously simplifying their offerings in an effort to boost sales. Starbucks boasts about its “87,000 drink combinations”; supermarkets are packed with options. This suggests that “choice demotivates” is not a universal human truth, but an effect that emerges under special circumstances.
Benjamin Scheibehenne, a psychologist at the University of Basel, was thinking along these lines when he decided (with Peter Todd and, later, Rainer Greifeneder) to design a range of experiments to figure out when choice demotivates, and when it does not.
But a curious thing happened almost immediately. They began by trying to replicate some classic experiments – such as the jam study, and a similar one with luxury chocolates. They couldn’t find any sign of the “choice is bad” effect. Neither the original Lepper-Iyengar experiments nor the new study appears to be at fault: the results are just different and we don’t know why.
After designing 10 different experiments in which participants were asked to make a choice, and finding very little evidence that variety caused any problems, Scheibehenne and his colleagues tried to assemble all the studies, published and unpublished, of the effect.
The average of all these studies suggests that offering lots of extra choices seems to make no important difference either way. There seem to be circumstances where choice is counterproductive but, despite looking hard for them, we don’t yet know much about what they are. Overall, says Scheibehenne: “If you did one of these studies tomorrow, the most probable result would be no effect.” Perhaps choice is not as paradoxical as some psychologists have come to believe. One way or another, we seem to be able to cope with it.
Also published at ft.com.