The jam study and choice overload

In a now-classic study, researchers set up a tasting booth in an upscale grocery store, offering samples of jam. Sometimes they displayed twenty four different varieties, sometimes only six. The large display attracted more people to stop and look, unsurprisingly, more choice drew more curiosity. But then came the telling part. Of the people who stopped at the twenty four jam display, only about three percent actually bought a jar. Of those who stopped at the six jam display, about thirty percent bought one, roughly ten times the rate. Faced with too many options, people sampled, felt unable to decide, and walked away with nothing. The smaller selection, easier to evaluate, led far more people to actually choose and purchase. More choice had attracted attention but paralysed decision. Later research has refined this, the effect is real but its strength depends on the situation, so treat it as a genuine tendency rather than an ironclad rule.

The wider literature does not support this as a general effect. One meta-analysis found a mean effect close to zero across studies, which is not the absence of an effect so much as strong positive and strong negative results cancelling each other out. A later analysis pooling 99 observations across more than seven thousand people identified when it does appear, and it comes down to four conditions: options that are hard to compare against each other, time pressure or too many attributes per option, a chooser who does not already know what they want, and browsing rather than arriving to buy. When those are low, more options performs better than fewer.

More options can make people less likely to choose at all, because too much choice is overwhelming and the effort of comparing everything leads people to simply give up and pick nothing. This runs against the instinct that offering more is always better and more generous. When you present people with choices, whether customers, colleagues, or anyone you are trying to help decide, a smaller, well-curated set often leads to more actual decisions than an exhaustive one that leaves people frozen. The precise strength of this varies by situation, but the direction is a useful default: reducing and curating the options is frequently more helpful than piling them on, even though piling them on feels like doing more for people.

Which makes the practical lever comparability rather than count. There is no number of options at which choice overload switches on, and anyone offering one is inventing it. Twenty options that differ on a single legible axis are easy to choose between. Six that differ on four attributes each are not. Before cutting a range, the question is not how many things are on offer but how hard it is for someone to tell them apart.

Source: Iyengar and Lepper, When Choice Is Demotivating, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000. The meta-analytic picture: Scheibehenne, Greifeneder and Todd, 2010, finding a mean effect near zero, and Chernev, Bockenholt and Goodman, 2015, identifying the conditions under which it appears.

The Paradox of Choice

Barry Schwartz, 2004

The popular case for choice overload, and effectively the book that spread it. Read it as the strong version of the argument, since the meta-analytic picture that followed is a good deal more qualified.