Spoiled for Choice

Anyone who has stood in a supermarket aisle facing dozens of almost identical bottles of olive oil, each promising to be purer or more authentic than the next, will recognize a peculiarly modern discomfort. We are told that choice is a form of freedom, and in many respects it is. Yet the moment of choosing can feel less like liberation than like a test we never agreed to take, and we often walk away with the bottle we bought last time, faintly annoyed with ourselves for having hesitated at all.

In traditional economic thinking, this discomfort should not exist. If you are offered an extra option, the argument goes, you cannot be worse off, since you remain free to ignore it. Real people, however, cannot ignore options at no cost. Each alternative must be glanced at, weighed and rejected, and each rejection leaves a trace. Economists use the term "opportunity cost" for the value of the best alternative we give up, and psychologically, the more alternatives there are, the easier it becomes to imagine that one of them would have suited us better. And when the chosen product disappoints, the sheer number of alternatives leaves us with only ourselves to blame.

In the 1950s, the American social scientist Herbert Simon challenged the assumption that people choose by calculating which option is best. Real decision makers, he argued, rarely have the time, information or mental capacity for such calculations. Instead, they search until they find an option that is good enough, and then they stop. Simon called this strategy "satisficing", a word formed from "satisfy" and "suffice". He offered it chiefly as a description of how people and organizations really behave, yet to modern ears it sounds remarkably like wisdom.

Psychologists later borrowed Simon's term to describe two broad tendencies. Maximizers want the best possible choice: they compare every option, read every review and keep suspecting that something better is waiting around the corner. Satisficers decide what they need and stop looking as soon as they find something that meets their standards. This does not mean that their standards are low; a satisficer may demand a great deal of a car or an apartment. The difference lies in what happens once the standard has been met. There is some evidence that maximizers, for all their effort, tend to feel less satisfied with their decisions and more troubled by regret.

It would be tempting to conclude that more choice is simply bad for us, and for a time that conclusion was fashionable. Some well-known studies found that shoppers faced with a large display were less likely to buy anything than those offered only a few options. When others tried to repeat such findings, however, the results were mixed: across many studies, a wide range of options sometimes discouraged people, sometimes made no difference and sometimes even helped. Context seems to matter. Choice overload appears more likely when options are hard to compare, when people are unsure what they want, when the decision is complex and when time is short. An experienced cook may be delighted by a shop full of unfamiliar spices; a nervous beginner may simply walk out.

For businesses, the lesson is not that choice should be abolished but that it should be organized. Customers rarely thank a company for a catalog they cannot navigate, yet they also resent being told what to want. Many firms therefore seek a middle way, grouping products into clear categories, highlighting a recommended option or setting sensible defaults that customers remain free to change. Done well, such guidance does not reduce freedom; it makes freedom usable.

Individuals, too, can learn to choose differently. It helps to decide what matters before looking at the options rather than after, to set a limit on the search, and to treat "good enough" as an achievement rather than a defeat. Most of us can afford to satisfice on toothpaste and save our maximizing for the few decisions, such as a job or a home, that are both important and hard to reverse. Once the choice is made, it is worth closing the catalog. The tyranny, in the end, lies less in the number of options on the shelf than in the belief that one of them is perfect, and that failing to find it is our own fault.