Too many options can lead to anxiety and decision paralysis.
Schwartz's 2004 book, built on Iyengar and Lepper's jam study. Choice overload appears under particular conditions rather than as a general consequence of larger assortments: meta-analytic effects are small and inconsistent, and the original jam finding has not replicated reliably.
In practice
- A customer comparing forty policies takes an hour longer, buys one, and spends the evening thinking about the other thirty-nine.
- What does hold is narrower: choice raises the cost of deciding and the scope for regret, which is a claim about effort rather than about paralysis.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is the cost of comparison, which rises with the number of options. Another is anticipated regret, since a large assortment makes it likelier that a better option was missed. A third is that overload appears only when options are hard to tell apart.
- In its favour
- Choice overload does appear under particular conditions, and the book changed how retailers and websites think about assortment size.
- Against it
- Meta-analytic estimates find the average effect close to zero, with results depending heavily on the conditions, so the general claim that more choice reduces satisfaction is not supported.
- Standing
- Choice-overload effects are small and inconsistent in meta-analysis.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- Moralists, aphorists and the self-help tradition