Is there such a thing as too many choices?\u00a0 Are too many choices a bad thing? \u00a0Are 31 flavors of ice cream better than 3?\u00a0 Do you want paper, or plastic, or the green reusable shopping bag?\u00a0 Do we want kiddie sized, regular sized, medium sized, or super-sized meals?\u00a0 There are a million options every day of even the smallest of choices.\u00a0 So how do we choose?<\/p>\n
Researching the answer used to be helpful.\u00a0 You made a few calls, talked to a few people, and you figured it out, but now it\u2019s totally different.\u00a0 We have the Internet, and even better we have Google!\u00a0 It\u2019s like having the world\u2019s largest library at your fingertips, and now thanks to Siri you don\u2019t even have to type your search term, you can simply hit a button and talk to the device. But, Is having access to mounds of research on the Intranet a helpful thing when it comes to making choices, or does it make the process far too difficult because it overloads us with data to sort through in our evaluation of our options to pick from?<\/p>\n
The reason this topic is on my mind today is that my husband and I flew out to North Carolina at the end of last week in order to attend the big annual furniture market held there.\u00a0 This event is the largest furniture market in the U.S. (if not the world?).\u00a0 \u00a0We were going there for the purpose of picking out furniture for our new home we are building.\u00a0 Going into the trip I knew it would be exhausting just based on the size and scope of this expo they hold each year.\u00a0 Buyers fly in from all around the world with the purpose of finding furniture to carry in their shops.\u00a0 The entire city is packed with people going from showroom to showroom looking at about every brand of furniture available.\u00a0 When our decorator first suggested we come I thought \u201cfantastic, this will give me tons of selections to choose from.\u201d\u00a0 And it did. But what I didn\u2019t realize was that while having tons of choices sounded great coming into the trip, the reality was that as more and more choices cropped up to choose from I felt more and more stressed out, more and more unsure of my decisions, and ultimately I found myself totally drained and unable to figure out what I wanted.<\/p>\n
I had to wonder why I was feeling this way?\u00a0 I had been so excited at the prospect of so many options, so why was I now feeling overwhelmed by them?\u00a0 So once the trip was done I decided to research a little on the topic and I came across this article:<\/p>\n
This is an excerpt from an article was written in 2010 by Alina Tugend in which she shared:<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is a famous jam study (famous, at least, among those who research choice), that is often used to bolster this point. Sheena Iyengar, a professor of business at Columbia University and the author of \u201cThe Art of Choosing,\u201d conducted the study in 1995.<\/p>\n
In a California gourmet market, Professor Iyengar and her research assistants set up a booth of samples of Wilkin & Sons jams. Every few hours, they switched from offering a selection of 24 jams to a group of six jams. On average, customers tasted two jams, regardless of the size of the assortment, and each one received a coupon good for $1 off one Wilkin & Sons jam.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the interesting part. Sixty percent of customers were drawn to the large assortment, while only 40 percent stopped by the small one. But 30 percent of the people who had sampled from the small assortment decided to buy jam, while only 3 percent of those confronted with the two dozen jams purchased a jar.<\/p>\n
That study \u201craised the hypothesis that the presence of choice might be appealing as a theory,\u201d Professor Iyengar said last year, \u201cbut in reality, people might find more and more choice to actually be debilitating.\u201d\u201d<\/p>\n
Ah, ha! It wasn\u2019t just me!!!\u00a0 Others felt the same way that I was!\u00a0 Others thought they wanted all the options to select from, but in the end having too many options proved to hurt the situation rather than help.\u00a0 And I learned that too much research on a decision can leave you even more stressed out, and not just before you make the choice, but afterwards as well because it leaves you with that nagging feeling that perhaps you could have gotten a better deal or made a better choice then you had.<\/p>\n
Barry Schwartz shared his thoughts on if there are a right number of options to offer people:<\/p>\n
Barry answered, \u201cNo, there’s no right number of choices. Two different things are going on: One of them is, the greater the number of options, the more likely you are to find something that suits your desires, so that’s what’s good about it. But probably a point is reached at which additional options don’t add much. Because one of the eight is good enough. And when you add more options, you don’t produce much more additional benefit in being able to select what you want, and all of the negative effects — difficulty choosing, regret, missed opportunity — add up, and you start to pay a price. This one guy did a study with pens, where people got to choose a pen from 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, or 20, and what he found was that optimum satisfaction with the choice seemed to occur between 8 and 12.. So that’s a ballpark number for ballpoint pens, but for dishes on a restaurant menu, the number could be different.\u201d<\/p>\n
Barry\u2019s suggestion for alleviating the anxiety we feel from choices is to voluntarily limit the number of items you consider. Why couldn\u2019t I have read his article last week before I spent several days filling my head with a million options??!!??\u00a0 Oh, well. Live and learn\u2026.live and learn\u2026<\/p>\n
Have a great day all!<\/p>\n
~Amy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Is there such a thing as too many choices?\u00a0 Are too many choices a bad thing? \u00a0Are 31 flavors of ice cream better than 3?\u00a0 Do you want paper, or plastic, or the green reusable shopping bag?\u00a0 Do we want kiddie sized, regular sized, medium sized, or super-sized meals?\u00a0 There are a million options every […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2595,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[174,877,504,159,873,874,97,875,275,876],"class_list":["post-2929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-anxiety","tag-barry-schwartz","tag-choice","tag-choices","tag-decision","tag-decision-making","tag-decisions","tag-options","tag-stress","tag-too-many-choices"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2929"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2936,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2929\/revisions\/2936"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}