Choice overload gets its name from the paralyzing effect it has on your decision-making processes.
The more variety there is, the harder it becomes for us to choose.
Choice overload, also known as over choice, choice paralysis, or the paradox of choice, describes how people get overwhelmed when they are presented with a large number of options to choose from.
While we tend to assume that more choice is a good thing, in many cases we have a harder time choosing from a larger array of options.
Choice overload can cause us to delay making decisions—even important ones—because considering the many options available to us is so taxing on your cognitive systems.
Having more options also lead to increased decreased satisfaction and lower confidence in your choice.
Decision-making can be stressful. Some decisions are stressful because they’re just plain hard.
These might be choices with very high stakes or extensive consequences, and/or those that deal with unsavory or particularly disagreeable options.
Major life decisions, such as your choice of career and your choice of romantic partner, are also subject to the effects of overload.
With near-infinite choices in almost everything, many of us feel constantly preoccupied with decisions we need to make or ruminating over choices that we then regret.
This may have consequences for our mental health, playing a role in depression and anxiety.
Having lots of choices is one of the biggest things that separates our modern existence from the lives of our ancestors.
Up until very recently in human history, most people’s paths in life were more or less predetermined.
Few individuals had much say in what job they would have as an adult, or whether or not they would get married, or whether or not they would have children.
In a harsh and unforgiving environment, being choosy about what kind of foods you would eat, or how you dressed, could result in you winding up dead.
Life in the modern world couldn’t be more different.
A lot has changed: industrial and technological advancements have made it possible to manufacture more and more products, and to import others to regions they never would have reached before.
There is a widespread assumption that more choice equals more freedom, and more freedom is always, unambiguously, a good thing.
Disclaimer: The information on this POST is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional advice. The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. All content, including text, graphics, images and information, contained on or available through this article is for general information purposes / educational purposes only, and to ensure discussion or debate.
Thank you ….In many cases (though not universally), more variety makes our lives harder and less pleasant.
Our approach to life is so rooted in this individualist ethos that we struggle to see how choice overload is harming us.
The effects of this bias go beyond complicating your decision-making process.
It also has a big impact on your affective (emotional) experience, decreasing your satisfaction with the choices you make and increasing the likelihood that you will regret those choices.
Do you want to add a word or two?….
Choice overload gets its name from the paralyzing effect it has on your decision-making processes: the more variety there is, the harder it becomes for you to choose.
Not only does this make the experience feel more draining but it also makes us more likely to choose nothing—to put off making a decision entirely, because we feel so overwhelmed.
More choices just means more decisions that we have to make, and making decisions uses up mental energy—of which we only have a limited supply.
When we don’t have the cognitive resources to weigh all of our options, we can end up simply abandoning the effort of making a choice.
When the decision is made more difficult—for example, by adding time constraints or choosing products that differ from each other on many different variables that need to be evaluated—people experience greater choice overload.
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The more choices, the higher our expectations
As we have all experienced at some point, great expectations can be toxic to our actual experience of the world: the higher we have set the bar going into something, the easier it is for us to be let down when reality doesn’t measure up.
Expectation-disconfirmation is a big driver of choice overload. The more options we have to choose from, the more confident we feel that, somewhere in the bunch, we’ll be able to find something that fits our preferences exactly.
This gets our expectations higher than they would be given less variety, setting us up for more disappointment.
To gauge expectation disconfirmation, participants were asked about how their chosen camcorder measured up to their expectations, and had participants give it a rating on a scale of 1 (“much worse than I expected”) to 9 (“much better than I expected”).
As expected, participants who received the larger catalog experienced choicer overload and were less satisfied with their choices.
They also rated their choice of camcorder significantly lower on the expectation disconfirmation question. In other words, the more products people had to choose from, the worse they felt their chosen camcorder stacked up with their initial expectations.4
We all know people vary widely in their personalities, so it’s no surprise that they also take various approaches to making decisions.
Some people are what we call maximizers … people who feel compelled to find the very best option available to them.
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