Choice Overload

What it is

The claim has two parts. The first is that a large assortment draws attention: more people notice it, approach it and sample from it. The second is that a large assortment can then stall the decision itself, so fewer people buy, and those who do may feel less sure they chose well. Choice overload is the second part, and it is the part that is contested.

Iyengar and Lepper set up a tasting table at a supermarket in Menlo Park, California, on two Saturdays, and alternated between a display of 6 jams and a display of 24, all from one maker. Of the shoppers who passed, 60 per cent stopped at the large display against 40 per cent at the small one. Of those who stopped, nearly 30 per cent bought a jar after seeing 6 jams, against 3 per cent after seeing 24. The paper, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, reported two further studies, one on essay topics and one on chocolates, in which a choice from 30 options produced less follow-through or less satisfaction than a choice from 6.

Iyengar later extended the idea to a high-stakes setting. In a 2004 study with Huberman and Jiang, using records for nearly 800,000 employees, participation in workplace retirement savings plans was higher in plans that offered a handful of funds.

In effect

The finding spread quickly from psychology into retail, marketing and policy writing, usually as advice to cut a range. Later research complicated that advice in three stages.

First, direct repeats did not find the effect. Benjamin Scheibehenne's 2008 doctoral work reported three replications in the field and the laboratory, with 850 participants, in which it did not reappear. One of them repeated the jam set-up in a German supermarket.

Second, the averages came in near zero. In 2010 Scheibehenne, Rainer Greifeneder and Todd published a meta-analysis in the Journal of Consumer Research covering 63 conditions from 50 experiments and 5,036 participants. The mean effect was virtually zero, with large variation between studies in both directions. The authors also found slight publication bias in favour of results that showed overload, and found that more recent experiments were less likely to show it.

Third, a later meta-analysis looked for conditions instead of an average. Alexander Chernev, Böckenholt and Goodman, writing in the Journal of Consumer Psychology in 2015, analysed 99 observations and identified four moderators: how complex the set of options is, how difficult the decision task is, how uncertain the chooser's preferences are, and whether the chooser is trying to minimise effort or find the best option. With those included, the overall effect was significant.

The argument has not closed. A working paper by Mark Dean, Ravindran and Stoye, first posted in 2022 and revised since, argues that many existing tests were underpowered and that more powerful tests find strong evidence of choice overload in experimental data.

What it does not say

Choice overload does not say that people dislike choice, or that smaller ranges always sell more. The jam study's own figures show the large display attracted more shoppers. The meta-analytic record says that cutting options helps under some conditions and makes no difference, or does harm, under others.

It also does not say how many options is too many. Neither the original study nor the later reviews give a threshold that applies across products, and the number depends on how easy the options are to compare and how sure the buyer is of what they want.

For a shop, the practical reading is to change how people choose before changing what they choose from: group options, give a clear default or recommendation, and make comparison easy. In Richard Shotton's The Illusion of Choice (2023), the jam study's figures are given as shares of everyone who walked past the table, and the book advises against paring back a range in a rush.

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