![]() ![]() The researchers called it ‘the paradox of choice.’ You might call it ‘feeling overwhelmed by options.’ But some economists are calling it something else: ‘complete hogwash.’ Sometimes, they concluded, too many options repel us. But the smaller array led to ten times more purchases. The second, larger array attracted more traffic. In one version, there were six varieties shown to shoppers. Researchers presented an array of tasty jams and enticed shoppers to buy a jar. It could be one of the most memorable economic studies of the last half century. A few months ago, Derek Thompson published an article in The Atlantic titled “More Is More: Why the Paradox of Choice Might Be a Myth.” Referring to what has become the classic piece of research on this topic, by Iyengar and Mark Lepper, Thompson wrote this: Several writers have jumped on this result as evidence that the initial findings were just more “junk” social science that doesn’t replicate, suggesting economists and the rest of us should rest easy with their assumption that more choice is always better than less. Indeed, averaged across all the studies they could find, the average effect of choice set size was close to zero. Research on the phenomenon continued, extending its scope, but also identifying its limits (e.g., for people who know a domain well, more choice seems better than less, and if options are organized into categories, the too-much-choice effect is mitigated or eliminated.)īut then Benjamin Scheibehenne and two colleagues published a thorough analysis of all the existing studies and concluded that the original findings were not very robust. (Indeed Paul Solman did a lovely piece with me about the book for The News Hour.) This counterintuitive result attracted a great deal of attention, and I wrote a whole book about it, “The Paradox of Choice,” which attracted even more. Iyengar found that there are circumstances in which adding options reduces the likelihood that people will select any, whether the decision in question is trivial (gourmet jam) or very significant (401k participation). Adding options is what economists call a “Pareto improvement,” making some people better off while making nobody worse off.īecause of the “obvious” truth of the proposition that more choice makes us better off, it was big news when Sheena Iyengar published a series of studies more than a decade ago showing the opposite. People who don’t care about added options can ignore them, and people who do care may be able to find the perfect thing. We’re much obliged.īarry Schwartz: It seems a simple matter of logic that if people have more options in a choice domain (cereals in the grocery, shirts in the department store, mutual funds in the financial market, health insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act), they’re better off. (The link is to a Financial Times article that sits behind a pay-to-read firewall.) But, when I asked him, Barry Schwartz was gracious enough to respond to the pro-choice literature that’s been coming out recently, and in the process, to summarize it. Is more choice a good thing? Apparently the famous jam experiment doesn't replicate: by Justin Wolfers January 23, 2014 Today, then, the news story would not be that the proliferation of consumer choice is paralyzing us, as Schwartz argued, but that he’s wrong.Īnd indeed, that’s been the counterattack lately, which came to my attention the other day when economist Justin Wolfers tweeted this: Paul Solman: In 2003, our NewsHour economics crew traipsed to the western outskirts of Philadelphia to rendezvous with Swarthmore psychology professor Barry Schwartz and hear him make the case, at the something-for-everyone King of Prussia Mall, for the thesis around which he’d just written a book, “The Paradox of Choice.”Ī decade, a TED talk and a Freakonomics seal of approval later, the choice thesis has become something of a commonplace. ![]()
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