The paradox of choice

Do you know that feeling when you're faced with a gazillion options and suddenly picking the right one becomes a guessing game? Yep, we've all been there—stuck between choices and hoping we won't mess it up, right? And when we do, sometimes the frustration kicks in, with the sensation of wasting our time or cash on a choice gone wrong.

This phenomenon was explained as "The Paradox of Choice" by the American psychologist Barry Schwartz¹ in his book, published in 2004. In the book, Schwartz brings a series of arguments and studies, such as the famous "Jam Study".

Now, about this "Jam Study" by Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper²—picture this, they're in a supermarket playing around with jams. Stage one: a table loaded with a whopping twenty-four types of jams for customers to try and buy. Stage two: they repeat the experiment, but this time with just six kinds of jams.

Guess what? More jams, more attention! With the mega jam display, 60% of the curious 242 customers stopped by. On the flip side, only 40% of the 260 folks passed by the limited jam exhibit.

But hold on, here's the twist—despite fewer eyeballs, the jam session with only six choices had customers trying almost the same number of flavours as the twenty-four jam plenty. What? And that.

Now, here's the real shocker: despite the hype, almost 30% of the limited-choice crowd ended up buying a jar, while a measly 3% from the jam-packed world made a purchase.

But speaking of neuroscience, why and how does this happen?

Firstly, it is important to highlight that science and technology have not evolved enough for us to know exactly what is happening. Our brain, in itself, is extremely complex and when we think about the nervous system then... just know that it is distributed throughout our body and that stimuli happen bidirectionally (from the brain to the body and from the body to the brain).

That being said, my approach will be within my knowledge and my interpretation of what we already know and have been studied.

Our brain has several regions and subsections that are closely connected. To make emotional and quick decisions we use our limbic system, and rational and considered decisions, where there is a more elaborate use of our cognitive functions, we especially use the prefrontal cortex.

Executive functions are cognitive skills necessary to control our thoughts, our emotions and, most importantly, our actions. These skills are built and matured in our childhood and youth, according to our experiences, and reach the “final” phase of development in adulthood ((this includes not only functions but the physical structure of the prefrontal cortex itself). This explains why children and adolescents are more impulsive and take more risks and why some people are considered unaccountable under the law, for example.

That said, the great power of our prefrontal cortex is our ability to rationalize: process information and analyze possible consequences in the short, medium and long term.

Among the various processes involved in this, in my opinion, the role of working memory in the study of jams stands out. According to Carla Tieppo³, "working memory is the ability to maintain and manage information in our minds for short periods of time.” Knowing this, we must understand, as cited by Jon Yablonski⁴, that when the amount of information received momentarily exceeds our storage capacity, we begin to discard information to accommodate new ones.

In practice, when we reach the 8th or 9th flavour of jam (each individual will have their own number) and continue to receive new options, the brain begins to discard some of the flavours we have already seen to make room. But this process has a cognitive cost, an increase in cognitive load, increasing decision time and can even culminate in abandonment of the task (brief observation: our brain is so sophisticated, we know which tasks we can abandon and the choice of jam is probably one of them).

Wow, it is a lot... How design can help?

So, about design—guess what? It's a big deal! We humans struggle when faced with a gazillion choices. That's where us designers swoop in with a brilliant idea: let's keep it simple!

This is for a restaurant menu, or meal options in an app (which can be offered in a personalised way with the help of AI, why not?).

This also fits into stores or their e-commerce versions, which can expose the customer to a limited option of items and present their variations as the consumer becomes interested in a specific one and immerses themselves in the experience (if you have 12 colours of the same sneaker, don't need to expose all of them before the client actually becomes interested in the model).

This also applies to the top menu of a website, product pages and everything else you can think of...

In conclusion, to make everything easier and smoother, a good strategy may be to limit the options to those that can really generate customer interest.

Sometimes, in design, less is totally more!

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References:

¹Schwartz, Barry. The Paradox of Choice – Why More Is Less. USA: Harper Perennial, 2004.

²Iyengar SS, Lepper MR. When choice is demotivating: can one desire too much of a good thing? J Pers Soc Psychol. 2000 Dec.

³Tieppo, Carla. Uma viagem pelo cérebro: a via rápida para entender a neurociência. São Paulo, Brasil: Conectomus, 2019.

⁴Yablonski, Jon. Laws of UX: Using Psychology to Design Better Products & Services. Inc, USA: O'Reilly Media, 2020.

Soares, Alex. Design com Neurociências. Brasil: Casa do Código, 2022.