Iyengar and Lepper, 2000
The 24-flavour table drew the crowd; the 6-flavour table made the sales. Too much choice stops the choosing.
Two tasting tables in an upmarket grocery: 24 jams on some days, 6 on others.
More people stopped at the big table (about 60% versus 40%). Purchases went the other way: roughly 3% bought from the 24-jam table and roughly 30% from the 6-jam table. A tenfold gap.
The big table is fun to look at and impossible to leave with anything.
The study got famous fast, and meta-analyses of the replications find an average effect near zero. The settled view is that it appears under some conditions and not others.
It shows up when the product is hard to evaluate, you have no firm preference, and time is short. If you know exactly what you like, more options are better for you.
It is here precisely because neither "more is better" nor "less is better" survives as a slogan.
A second finding replicates rather better: more options tends to mean less satisfaction afterwards, because "maybe the other one" multiplies.
Pick one of 24 and 23 of them become a "maybe". Pick one of 6 and you carry a quarter of that.
The choosing is not the hard part; carrying what you did not choose is.
The ramen ticket machine
Forty buttons and a queue behind you. Most people have pressed the top-left one just to move.
Shops put the signature bowl in the top-left corner because they know it.
"Today's set" on the board
The longer the menu, the more one recommended dish speeds everything up. It does not remove options; it offers one road where no choosing is required.
Wearing the same thing every day
Deliberately not choosing, to have fewer decisions. Whatever the size of the effect, each decision does cost something, and that part matches experience.
The judgment saved on clothes is spent elsewhere.
If you take one thing
Fix one criterion before you look and 24 options decide as fast as 6. Perhaps what needs cutting is the number of criteria, not the number of options.
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