Introduction

Hey folks, it’s been a while!

I’ve been quite busy the last few months trying to catch up with my academics and pursuing other ambitions. Life at college is definitely quite stressful, especially when you have to manage your time diligently, but I have a feeling this semester is gonna be better!

In spite of having too much on my plate, I made it a point to at least write down the topics I’d like to write about in the future and I’m happy to report that the list has gotten quite big and exciting! Those unfinished drafts are finally beginning to take shape but I decided to put them on hold and write about this topic first.

I had a hard time deciding on which post to publish first and that’s when I realized that I’m in this awkward situation because of too many choices!

I know, I’ve written about Shiny Object Syndrome and Intellectual Stimulation and I still stand by my views on these topics.

However, I felt the need to write about this topic in particular, because I genuinely believe that choices can seriously impair judgment and it’s essential to know ways to deal with this!

The Psychology of Choice

We’re all familiar with what choices are. You have them all around you - the freedom to choose what outfit to wear, the freedom to choose what music to play, the freedom to choose what to eat, and so on!

The psychology of choice deals with the human behavior behind choosing something when presented with multiple options. We’ll talk more about this later.

But what if I told you, this is extremely inefficient.

Human brains aren’t equipped to handle the vast number of choices that we are presented with in today’s consumer culture. Instead of increasing our sense of freedom and helping us choose the “perfect” choice, it will just lead to anxiety and stress. More often than none this leads to loss aversion where you feel worse about losing something than gaining something of equal value, say 100$.

You end up making the wrong choice and end up regretting your choice because you’re not satisfied also called the buyer’s remorse.

Funnily enough, apart from loss aversion, you can also experience decision paralysis. You struggle to make the right choice and if it’s not something urgent, you decide to just choose later - hence, you procrastinate.

Let’s explore loss aversion and decision paralysis more closely with the help of a famous experiment conducted by the psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper called the “Jam Study”

Jam Study

In the early 2000s, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper conducted an experiment that later became a classic in the field of decision-making studies. They wanted to understand the impact of choice on consumer behaviour and to test this hypothesis, they chose a gourmet food store and different varieties of jam.

The booth offering samples of jam would sometimes offer 6 varieties or 24 varieties.

Now, you’d think that more choice equals more sales, right? Well, not really, because this is where it gets interesting.

When there were 24 varieties of jam on display, it attracted more attention. People love choices - but when it came to actually buying the jam, the booth with fewer options won out. In fact, people who saw the smaller selection were ten times more likely to buy jam than those who saw the larger selection.

So what’s going on here? This is what psychologists call “The Paradox of Choice”. While we might think we want more options, too many choices can actually lead to decision paralysis and increased anxiety.

Consumers who had 24 choices couldn’t decide upon a single one since they weren’t sure which one would be the best. This is decision paralysis, where you’re unable to make a choice out of so many choices!

I’m sure that regardless of whichever they chose, they’d always wonder if they made the right choice and possibly regret not choosing another variety! This is loss aversion - it doesn’t really matter what you’re choosing, but you feel bad regardless because you believe there’s a “perfect” choice that you couldn’t decide.

What can I do to avoid this?

If you’re wondering how you can navigate the sea of choices in today’s world without experiencing regret - here’s something that has worked for me:

Prioritize your decisions

Did you know that you can begin experiencing decision fatigue if you keep spending your energy and time trying to make decisions? Save your energy, sometimes it doesn’t matter which jam you wanna try, just choose the best-selling one - you can always experiment later! Spend more time on decisions that have a significant impact on your life and less time on trivial ones.

Limit your options

An easy way out is to just limit your options. Imagine, just trying to choose among the top 5 best-selling flavours rather than all 24! This will save you a lot of anxiety and you can avoid feeling overwhelmed. Next time you have to choose among 5 different choices, just take 3 random ones and choose one among them!

Seek different opinions

You know, more often than none I end up taking opinions from my closest friends and then arrive at a conclusion. This works weirdly well because I can get caught up with the small things, but others wouldn’t spend too much time making “a decision” as opposed to me wanting to make the “perfect” decision. This also goes to say, that you gotta accept the fact that no choice will be perfect in every aspect.

Practice gratitude

Funnily enough, this is the one topic I’ve been wanting to write about for so long now. Gratitude. We have to stop being pessimistic about other “better” options and appreciate our current choice! Life just becomes so much easier when you stop whining about the past, and focus on the present while looking forward to an even better tomorrow!

Conclusion

I wanted to go deeper into the psychology of choice and talk about the two decision-making styles - Maximisers and Satisficers.

Essentially, the former spends a lot of time analyzing all the different options and are concerned with making the best choice thereby experiencing regret while the latter makes a choice that meets certain criteria - regardless of whether it is the best choice or not.

I think it’s important for all of us to learn to be satisfied with what we have. It’s good to want better but not at the cost of overwhelming anxiety that does more harm than good!

Hopefully, this article will help you introspect and make easier decisions!