I went to buy a couple of T-shirts and a pair of pans in the mall this weekend. I spent probably 2.5 hours there. As it happens every freaking time, I run out of energy in about 30 minutes, and in general and the rest of the experience was awful for me. Also, all the stuff I bought was in the first store we visited. I know many of you have exactly the same feelings and experiences during shopping, so why does it happen?

Why does it get harder and harder to pick stuff the more options we have❓

Why it is getting way more difficult to make decisions the further we look❓

Why we are less satisfied with those decisions❓

When we come to the boutique store with limited choices of things we are looking for, we can still feel what we like. I get an emotional response back from my brain telling me which of the things I prefer more.

When I walk around other stores, I see dozens of other options of the same kind of things, which results in:

1. The head-to-head comparison makes me pay attention to criteria I did not care about before. This creates a multitude of new “scales”, or reference frames in our minds. For example, I was looking for pants. What I cared about is that they should be stretchy and I should like them (they are somewhere on the far right of the “liking” scale for me). But then, I saw a dozen of different options of pants in different stores… And now I’m also comparing them based on price, color, kind of fabric, etc..
2. As I see more and more “samples” on each of the scales (even those I did not have before) - each item becomes more likely to be worse than other items in some of the scales, while being better from other perspectives. Now even if I find something I like, it could be way more expensive than the second option I like, and for the third-best one, the fabric felt better, etc. The more you see the harder it is to decide. This makes us feel overwhelmed by the choices we need to make - we experience a Choice Overload.
3. The last nail in this coffin is that the more options you have - the less satisfied you are with the choice you have made. The reasons are described above - the more options we compared to each of the head-to-head - the more products we identified that are better than what we have picked in one or more categories. And that’s exactly what creates this ruminating in our minds “Why I picked this one, the other was had bigger… better… nicer….”.

This whole thing is called a Paradox of Choice, which was popularized by American psychologist Barry Schwartz in his book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, in 2004.

There’s some controversy about this book and the original study because there is quite a lot of evidence pointing out that in some situations people are more likely to be satisfied when they have more options rather than fewer.

To me, it seems that the core differentiator here is the kind of people in the studies. Some people can be described as Maximizers and some are “Satisficers”. The first ones are looking for the best option and the second ones will be fine with a good option they like.

So, I would happily own the pants I like if I was a Satisficer. None of that would have mattered. Instead, like many other people I know - I’m a maximizer - meaning I can only be satisfied with the best choice, and what I described above makes it challenging to achieve.

Which one are you?

In Summary

✅ The more options you have, the harder it is to make it AND the less satisfied you are with the choice you made. This is called Tinder… 😃 Sorry, it is actually called The Paradox of Choice.

✅ If you want to be happy with your choice - avoid head-to-head comparisons with too many options. Research shows, that people who rely more on their “liking” than on rational choice feel happier about their decision.

✅ This rule especially applies to you if a Good choice is not good enough for you.