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The Paradox of Choice
Psychology teaches us that choosing, perceiving, remembering, and other cognitive activities involve complex processes that compete for limited mental resources. The human brain is an amazing thing, but even when that brain is young and working well, it can reveal its limitations. Interesting research provides some insight into how our brains manage decision-making. Do you think that making a choice puts big demands on our mental processing system? One line of research suggests that it does.
Let’s examine an experiment that was conducted at a small local grocery store by Sheena Iyengar, a graduate student at Stanford University. She set up a table for tasting jam near the front of the store. Sometimes the table had 6 types of jam; other times there were 24 types.
Iyengar and her colleagues measured two things. First, which condition—6 jams or 24 jams—was more likely to get people to stop and taste the products? And second, which condition—6 jams or 24 jams—produced more sales of the jams that were sampled?
Details of the Study
The experiment took place in a small but popular grocery store near the Stanford University campus. A tasting booth was set up in the store on two consecutive typical weekends. Customers were invited to “come try our Wilkin and Sons jams.” Shoppers were given a $1 off coupon to purchase a jam. The jams were priced between $4 and $6, before discount.
At different times, the booth offered either 6 types of jam or 24 types of jam to try. Jam was not sold at the tasting booth. If a person wanted to buy jam, he or she had to go to the shelves, find the jam from a set of 28 flavors of the Wilkin and Sons brand, as well as other jams regularly available. In other words, purchasing one of the jams required the shoppers to make the effort to find a particular jam on the shelves, just as they would on a typical shopping day.
The two experimental conditions in this study are:
A table with 6 jars of jam to sample
A table with 24 jars of jam to sample
A total of 242 customers approached the booth when there were 24 jars on the table.
A total of 260 customers approached the booth when there were 6 jars on the table.
Which table do you think had more customers stop and taste the jam? Take a look at the results below.
60% of the 242 customers (142) stopped at the 24 jam table
40% of the 260 customers (104) stopped at the 6 jam table
More people (and a higher percentage) stopped when there were 24 jars on the table than when there were only 6 jars. This suggests that lots of choices capture our attention and draw us in. Interestingly, customers actually tasted about the same number of jams in the two conditions: usually one or two jams.
The real test in this experiment is found in the amount of jam that was sold.
Which table do you think sold more jam? Take a look at the results below.
Of the customers stopping at the 24 jam table, only 3% (4 customers) used the coupon to buy jam sometime in the following week.
Of the customers stopping at the 6 jam table, 30% (34 customers) used the coupons to buy jam during the following week.
Statistically, there is a very strong difference between these two outcomes.
This result is called “the paradox of choice.” You might think that more options leads to greater likelihood that you will find something you like, and consequently you will be more likely to purchase something under those conditions. But Iyengar and Lepper found the opposite. An extensive number of items seemed to shut people down, making them far less likely to make a choice to purchase one item than when their list was very limited.
Why would people buy fewer products when they were given more choices?
For this assignment you are to submit a 2 page response using essay format. First, explain the results of the experiment described above. Why do you think more choices made it more difficult to make a decision? Second, describe a time in your life when you had to make a decision and found it difficult to do so. How many choices did you have? How did you go about evaluating these choices? In the end, what decision did you come to? In hindsight, did you make the right decision? At that time, if you had more or less choices, do you think your decision would have been different? Explain.
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