Spoilt for choice

Walk into a large supermarket and you may find more than forty varieties of toothpaste: whitening, sensitive, herbal, charcoal, for children, for smokers, for people who want all of the above. On the face of it, shoppers have never been so spoilt for choice, and this abundance looks like one of the quiet triumphs of modern consumer culture. More options, the reasoning goes, mean a better chance that each of us will find exactly what we want. Yet many of us will recognise a less flattering experience: standing in the aisle, vaguely irritated, unable to decide and faintly suspicious that whatever we pick will turn out to be the wrong one.

The psychologist Barry Schwartz famously called this the paradox of choice. Beyond a certain point, he argued, additional options cease to liberate us and begin to weigh on us instead. Every alternative we reject carries a small sense of loss, and the more alternatives there are, the easier it becomes to imagine that one of them would have been better. Thus, we may end up less satisfied with a good choice made from fifty options than with an adequate one made from five.

The evidence most often cited in support of this idea comes from a now-famous experiment in a Californian supermarket. Shoppers who passed a tasting table displaying twenty-four varieties of jam were more likely to stop than those who saw only six; however, they were far less likely to actually buy a jar. The finding was intuitive, elegant and endlessly quotable, which may partly explain why it travelled so far beyond the academic journal in which it first appeared. In hindsight, it is remarkable how few people thought to take it with a pinch of salt.

Subsequent research has painted a more complicated picture. When other psychologists attempted to replicate the effect, the results were strikingly inconsistent: some studies found that large assortments discouraged people from choosing, while others found no effect at all, or even the reverse. One review that pooled dozens of such experiments concluded that, on average, the effect was close to zero. It would be premature, however, to dismiss choice overload as a myth. The effect appears instead to depend heavily on circumstances, emerging when options are hard to compare, when people are unsure what they want, or when they are under pressure to decide quickly.

This more nuanced picture is arguably more interesting than the original claim. It suggests that what overwhelms us is not the number of options as such but the effort required to navigate them. Few of us agonise over which brand of tissues to buy. Choosing a pension plan, a mobile phone contract or a university course, by contrast, involves comparing features we barely understand, with consequences that may last for years. Under those conditions, more choice can start to feel like homework rather than freedom.

There is, moreover, a social dimension that laboratory studies tend to overlook. In a culture that celebrates personal choice, a disappointing outcome is no longer blamed on fate or on a limited range of options; it is blamed on the chooser. If you could have had anything, settling for something mediocre feels like a personal failure. In the same vein, the endless stream of reviews, rankings and comparison websites, though intended to make decisions easier, can raise the stakes by implying that a perfect option always exists for anyone diligent enough to find it.

What, then, should we conclude? Not that choice is bad, certainly; few people would willingly return to a world with one kind of bread and one television channel. A more defensible conclusion is that choice has costs as well as benefits, and that these costs fall unevenly. Those with time, money and expertise can enjoy abundance; those without may simply find it exhausting. The wisest response may be to ration our deliberation: to reserve careful comparison for decisions that genuinely matter and, for everything else, to accept "good enough" with a clear conscience.