How to design a choice: The art of choosing

How to design a choice: The paradox of choice

Something interesting is going on which choice. It is a paradox, a concept cornered by Barry Schwartz. He describes the paradox of choice as follows:

So, what does this implicate? Is less indeed more? Well, yes and no. In most cases, too many options to choose from isn’t in our best interest. This has to do with our bounded rationality. We, as human beings, cannot make every decision in our daily lives wholly rational or, better put, with focused attention. There are too many decisions for us to deal with to do so.

Just think about your morning. From the moment you heard your alarm go off, you had to decide to turn it off or snooze. You had to decide to stretch or do another roll-over on your side right into that comfy spot that has the perfect temperature; You had to decide to get up or sleep in for just a little bit longer. You had to decide to get dressed right away or get your first coffee in PJ’s first. You had to decide to have coffee indeed, or did you decide to have something else? Or did you decide to go pee first? I have not even begun to talk about the decision to check your phone, turn on the radio, heating or toaster yet. Or the decision to combine all of these with checking your to-dos of the day. And your day has only just started.

These examples all may seem trivial, but they’re not. It is estimated that your brain has to compute about 35.000 decisions a day, from minor ones to bigger ones. Your brain cannot process all of them consciously or with extensive thought; It would simply crash. Therefore, a lot of our decisions are made automatically and unconscious. As Nobel laureates Kahneman and Tversky have discovered, we have two operating systems in our brain: A deliberate and an automatic one. And the automatic one has the upper hand, which is a good thing. It simply shows our brain is wired to help us navigate as with as little effort as possible through life.

How to design a choice: The phenomenon of choice overload

Now back to too many options to choose from. Why does it work against us?

First of all, having too many options causes apathy simply as it requires too much cognitive activity. This can lead to decision fatigue or even not making any decision at all. This phenomenon is called choice paralysis (also referred to as choice deferral).

There is a cognitive bias related to this phenomenon called regret aversion. When people anticipate regret from a choice, they tend to not act at all. This can have severe consequences. A meta-analysis has shown that people’s behaviour to accept medical treatments is influenced more to avoid regretting making the wrong choice than it is influenced by other kinds of anticipated negative emotions. Therefore, when designing a choice, you have to be aware that the number of options you present to someone also enhances the probability of choice regret. Which in return enhances inertia. In the mentioned example, this has shown to seriously impact behaviour concerning health.

Secondly, when we have more options to choose from, we tend to make worse decisions as we tend to rely even more on our system 1 cues, which can be biased. Examples are our tendency to stick to defaults, recommendations, or reliance on peer choices. Have you ever said in a restaurant: I am having what he/she is having’? Well, probably this was caused by option overload on the menu. Research showed what happens if there are either six or thirty food options on a menu. In the first case, people tend to choose for themselves. In the second case, they choose what their partner chooses.

Thirdly, we tend to make more conservative choices to minimise the potential for regret.

And finally, the more options to choose from we have, the less satisfied we are with the choice we did make. The more options, the more we feel we ‘missed out on.’ In his book, Schwartz described two experiments. One in which people had to choose between 20 varieties of jams and another could choose between six models of jeans. The experiment showed that the more choices people had, the less satisfied they were with their final choice. This matches Sheena Iyengar’s research, professor at the Columbia Business School and author of ‘The Art of Choosing’, which taught us that:

‘The existence of multiple alternatives makes it easy for us to imagine alternatives that don’t exist. And to the extent that we engage our imaginations in this way, we will be even less satisfied with the alternative we end up choosing. So, once again, a greater variety of choices actually makes us feel worse.‘

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