Why do we overthink?
What experiments on choice, standards and unfinished goals say about why extra thinking so often fails to help, and what closed the loop in the lab.
Answer to the question
Why do we overthink?
We overthink when more thinking feels like more care. Experiments show that analysing your reasons can move a choice away from expert opinion, that aiming for the best keeps options open, and that an unfinished goal intrudes on unrelated tasks until a specific plan is made for it.
Key takeaways
- Students who analysed why they liked strawberry jams agreed less with expert ratings than students who did not, and students who analysed reasons for college course choices also matched expert opinion less closely (Wilson and Schooler, 1991).
- People who aim for the best possible option reported less satisfaction with their consumer decisions and made more social comparisons (Schwartz and colleagues, 2002).
- Nir Eyal's Indistractable describes rumination as a passive comparison of your situation with a standard you have not yet reached.
- Unfulfilled goals produced intrusive thoughts during an unrelated reading task and poorer anagram performance (Masicampo and Baumeister, 2011).
- Making a specific plan for the goal eliminated those effects, and the reduction depended on how earnestly participants committed to the plan.
This article is general information about research on how people think over decisions and unfinished tasks. It is not medical advice, and nothing in it is a reason to change any treatment or to stop seeking care. Speak to a GP or another clinician about your own health. Medical review: Reja Batool.
We overthink when more thinking feels like more care. Three lines of research show where that feeling goes wrong. Analysing your reasons can pull a choice away from what you actually like, a high standard keeps every option provisional, and an unfinished task keeps asking for attention until something closes it. Each was tested in a controlled setting, each has a measured effect, and each points to a different way out of the loop. Overthinking is a habit of the ordinary mind and not a flaw of character, and the research treats it that way.
Why we overthink even simple choices
Students in one early experiment tasted strawberry jams and rated them, and their ratings were compared with the ratings of trained experts. Those who were asked to analyse why they felt as they did agreed less with the experts than those who simply gave a rating. Timothy Wilson and Jonathan Schooler ran a second study on the choice of college courses. Some students analysed their reasons, and others evaluated every attribute of every course. Both kinds of introspection led to choices that matched expert opinion less closely than the choices of a control group.
The authors offered two explanations. Analysing reasons can turn attention toward criteria that are easy to put into words but are not the ones that drive real satisfaction, and the later choice then follows those criteria. Evaluating many attributes can soften each judgement, so the options start to look alike and are harder to tell apart. For anyone who tends to overthink, the point is practical. The extra hour spent overthinking a choice of taste is not neutral, and in these studies it moved the answer. The pattern is related to what the Introspection Illusion describes: people trust their own account of why they like something more than that account deserves.
A standard that never gets closer
Nir Eyal's Indistractable lists rumination among four mechanisms that keep satisfaction from lasting, and describes it as a passive, repeated comparison of your situation with a standard you have not yet reached. Eyal treats it as double-edged, because looking back at what went wrong can surface real errors, while the same review run passively is the pattern he warns about. The comparison never settles because the standard never moves closer, which is how a short decision turns into a long evening of overthinking.
The same logic runs through research on people who aim for the best possible option and people who accept one that clears a set bar. Barry Schwartz and colleagues built a scale to measure that difference and tested it across several studies. People who scored as maximisers were less satisfied with their consumer decisions than other people, and they made more social comparisons.
Maximisers were also more affected when a comparison pointed upward, and they were more sensitive to regret in a bargaining game. When the goal is the best option, no option ever clears it, so the search stays open and the review of what was chosen stays open too. It is a close cousin of Choice Overload, where a longer list adds to the pull of the next option.
Most of these findings are correlations from questionnaires and short tasks. They describe who tends to overthink a choice and do not show that a standard causes the loop, so they are best held loosely and read next to the experiments above. Readers who overthink a choice can still use the finding: the useful question is whether a standard has been set at all.
A goal with nowhere to go
An older observation helps here. Unresolved business pulls at memory, an idea set out in The Zeigarnik Effect, and the same pull is why a half-finished task still occupies you after you have switched to something else, as described in Why Attention Residue Lingers at Work. Much of what feels like overthinking late in the day is a goal that has nowhere to go. A person who has five loose ends open is likely to overthink all five at once, and none of them gets smaller.
E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister tested this directly. In their studies, participants given a goal they had not fulfilled had intrusive thoughts about it during an unrelated reading task, and they did worse on anagrams. Both effects were measured in the same people, which is what makes the result useful. The unfinished goal cost something on a task that had nothing to do with it, and the people paying the cost had not chosen to think about the goal at all.
Parking a goal with a plan
The plan-making studies are useful because they separate two things that are easy to run together. Finishing a goal and committing to a plan for it are different acts. Masicampo and Baumeister proposed that a plan satisfies the processes that normally keep a goal active, so its drive is suspended until the time to act arrives, and that this frees mental resources for other pursuits. The proposal fits the everyday case of a thought that returns at the wrong hour. If the thought is waiting for a decision about when, an answer to when can be enough to quiet it, even though the work itself is still ahead.
The studies point to four small moves. The first two come from the plan-making research, the third from the standard-setting research and the fourth from the jam and course choices. They are our reading of the findings and not a tested programme.
- Name the one task or decision the thought keeps returning to.
- Write a specific plan for it, with what you will do and when.
- Decide what good enough means before you look at the options.
- For a choice of taste, give the first answer more weight than a long list of reasons.
The first two moves matter most, because Masicampo and Baumeister found that letting participants make specific plans eliminated both the intrusive thoughts and the drop in anagram performance. The reduction depended on how earnestly people committed to the plan, and it did not depend on a change in how they felt. The goal was not completed. It was parked, with a time attached, and the thought left the reading task alone.
Common questions
Why do we overthink?
We tend to treat more thinking as more care. Research suggests it can backfire: analysing reasons shifted choices away from expert opinion, a high standard keeps options open, and an unfinished goal intrudes on unrelated tasks.
Does overthinking make decisions better?
For choices of taste, not in the experiments run by Wilson and Schooler. Students who analysed their reasons matched expert ratings less closely than those who did not.
Why does an unfinished task stay on my mind?
In Masicampo and Baumeister's studies, unfulfilled goals produced intrusive thoughts and poorer anagram performance on an unrelated task.
What stopped the intrusive thoughts in the research?
Making a specific plan for the goal. The effect depended on how earnestly participants committed to it.
Sources
Eyal, N. Indistractable. Seed book; vault hub Books/Indistractable.
Wilson, T. D., & Schooler, J. W. (1991). Thinking too much: Introspection can reduce the quality of preferences and decisions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60(2), 181-192. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.60.2.181 https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.60.2.181
Schwartz, B., Ward, A., Monterosso, J., Lyubomirsky, S., White, K., & Lehman, D. R. (2002). Maximizing versus satisficing: Happiness is a matter of choice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(5), 1178-1197. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.83.5.1178 https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.83.5.1178
Masicampo, E. J., & Baumeister, R. F. (2011). Consider it done! Plan making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(4), 667-683. doi:10.1037/a0024192 https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024192