Benjamin Scheibehenne

Who they are

Scheibehenne studies decision-making. On his 2009 paper in Psychology & Marketing he is listed at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Indiana University.

This page records only what the papers and their published records state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

The effect of having too much choice (2008), doctoral dissertation. Three replications in the field and the laboratory, with 850 participants, in which the effect did not reappear. One repeated the jam set-up in a German supermarket.

What moderates the too-much-choice effect? (2009), with Greifeneder and Todd. Three studies with 598 participants. Of the conditions tested, only having to justify the choice proved an effective moderator.

Can there ever be too many options? A meta-analytic review of choice overload (2010), with Greifeneder and Todd. Covering 63 conditions from 50 experiments and 5,036 participants, the mean effect was virtually zero, with large variation between studies. The authors found slight publication bias in favour of overload results, and that more recent experiments were less likely to find the effect.

Key ideas

The central idea is that a famous result needs to be tested against its average, not its best example. Choice overload appears in some studies and reverses in others, and the jam study is not typical of the record. A 2015 meta-analysis by Alexander Chernev and colleagues later found that the effect does appear under four specific conditions, which refines rather than overturns the 2010 finding.

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