Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [38]
A group of researchers set up a sample table of high-quality jams in a gourmet food store to find out what happens when you present people with choice. Any customer who sampled a jam was given a dollar-off coupon if they bought a jar. Free taste of jam, one dollar off, what could be better? But those clever researchers introduced one variable—the amount of choice on offer. On one day, the researchers set up the table with six varieties of jam for tasting. On another day, they offered twenty-four different jams. The same twenty-four were always available for purchase, regardless of the day, but consumers either had six to sample or a bewildering twenty-four. As you might expect, the vast array of twenty-four samples attracted more customers, although the rest of the tale does not turn out quite how one would imagine. Whether six samples or twenty-four are on offer, people taste about the same number on average. But the shocking part of the study came when the researchers tallied up how many people bought jam. When only six samples were offered, 30 percent of the samplers ended up purchasing a jar. When customer were offered twenty-four samples, though, a paltry 3 percent bought a jar. In other words, in the face of virtually endless choice, consumers locked up. They froze. They failed to make it over the most basic hurdle essential to a consumer society—they didn’t buy anything! Perhaps you think that jams offer some element of complexity that undid the tasters. Some conundrum involving the subtle implications of pectins, say. So, the researchers ran a similar test in the controlled environment of a laboratory with chocolates, and they came up with strikingly similar results.
What’s going on here? The researchers give a number of explanations, but let’s focus on the big picture. Our entire economy is predicated on the idea that more choice is always better, but what these studies show is that more choice is sometimes worse. Give people enough choice, and it makes it difficult for them to make any decision at all. As Barry Schwartz has written in his excellent book on the subject, The Paradox of Choice, “At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.”
It doesn’t even take that much choice. You can create difficulties for people with only three alternatives when two of the choices are roughly similar. What if I offered you a dollar and a half for filling out a survey or a pen worth two dollars? When researchers offered students precisely this choice, roughly 75 percent of the participants chose the pen. Then the researchers ran the study again—only this time, participants were offered three choices, one dollar fifty, a nice two-dollar pen, or two less-expensive pens worth two dollars. Any rational analysis of the choice based on the previous study would suggest that at least as high a percentage of students would choose either the two-dollar pen or the two pens. In fact, we might even predict that the number would go up because some students may not like nice pens and would prefer the inexpensive ones. But that isn’t what happened. Instead of sticking with the pens, a majority of students opted for the money. The question is, why? The researchers argue that it was too difficult for most students to choose between the two kinds of pen, so