Modern life in America brings with it a degree of personal choice which is unprecedented in history. A typical American faces an abundance of options for most decisions they face throughout the day. We have scores of stores to shop at, restaurants of all varieties to eat at, hundreds of channels of cable or satellite television to watch, and millions of songs to listen to on iTunes. A visit to Starbucks alone allows us to choose from over 38 million potential coffee drinks. In our culture it is almost always assumed that more choice makes us better off. Choice allows people to match their own tastes and preferences more closely. If my favorite coffee drink is a decaf soy sugar-free vanilla latte, it is unlikely that I was very happy with my cup of straight black coffee at the local coffeehouse before Starbucks came to town. Yet in important and overlooked ways, abundant choice can sometimes leave us less happy than we would have been with a more modest set of options.

Sheena Iyengar, a professor at Columbia Business School, researches the situations in which more choice can make us less well off, or where we prefer to have our choices artificially restricted. Her research has yielded counterintuitive results about the relationship between choice and satisfaction. Here she describes a few of her studies:

To explore consumer responses to extensive options, we conducted a field investigation in an upscale grocery store, Draeger’s, in Menlo Park, Calif. On two consecutive Saturdays, a tasting booth for Wilkin & Sons exotic jams was arranged. As consumers passed the tasting booth, they encountered a display with either six or 24 different jams. We observed and calculated the number of people who stopped at the tasting booth as well as the number of people who chose to purchase the jam in question.

The results are striking. They demonstrate that although extensive choice is initially more enticing than limited choice, limited choice is ultimately more motivating. In fact, 60 percent of the passersby approached the table in the extensive-choice condition, as compared to only 40 percent in the limited-choice condition. However, 30 percent of the consumers who encountered the limited selection actually purchased a jam, whereas only 3 percent of those exposed to the extensive selection made a purchase.

In subsequent studies we found that people are actually less satisfied with the choices they make if selected from a larger set of options. For instance, the same Godiva chocolate chosen from a set of 30 chocolates is considered to be less delicious than if it is chosen from a set of six. Moreover, we found that the negative consequences of too much choice extend beyond consumer contexts to work contexts. An examination of individuals completing a task chosen from a larger range of options as compared to a smaller set of options revealed that people performed better at their chosen activities if they have chosen the activity from a smaller range of options.

These results have important implications for the business world, that we are just beginning to understand. Marketers in particular need to be careful to structure consumer choice to prevent regret from eroding the satisfaction people get from their purchasing decisions. Ms. Iyengar has done choice research in many other contexts as well, which I’ll discuss in later posts.

Read more: Hermes Magazine - Choice and its Discontents

Previously:

• Too Many Choices: Who Suffers and Why?
• The Paradox of Choice