The Paradox of Choice, extrapolated
Based on this post – Too many choices…
People see 6 varieties of jam in store. 30% buy jam.
A week later, the same set of people see 24 varieties of jam. Only 3% buy jam.
They attribute this to the Paradox of Choice. (Too many choices is demotivating)
I find a flaw in this study. The problem is with the phrase “A week later, the same set of people…” Why the same booth in the same store, with so small a time gap (one week). Which means, people who already bought jam when first exposed to the free tasting booth will likely not bother with it again (”nothing new there”), because their refrigerators already has enough jam. This might have affected the results. The team should have tested this theory in two very different places.
The study above measured the activity of ‘buying’ only. But certain things cant be ‘measured’ quantitatively. What if people felt happier seeing 24 varieties of jam on the store shelves as compared to 6. Certainly I would feel happy on seein’ 24 varieties of jam ‘in stock’. Certain things are also assumed to be ‘inferred’. The availability of 24 varieties of jam means the supermarket is healthy economically, the jam manufacturers who employ people like you and me *want to cater to 24 different tastes as opposed to only 6, thereby demonstratin’ willingness to cater to different ‘tastes’. It means the manufacturers and stockists of 24 varieties of jam still chose to produce and stock this many varieties, signifying prosperity, bounty, abundance.
The post I linked to above contains this sentence: “So, if you ask your customers if they want extensive choice, they will say they do – but they really don’t.”
Having choices cant be a bad thing, could it?, and too many choices couldnt be a bad thing either. Its all good, atleast to me. As a man, what if you had 24 women to choose from, vs. only 5 or 6?
Competition and choice is always good, and there’s a long history of antitrust lawsuits, meaning the Feds want choice in the economy, but they dont have problems with too many choices. The market will evolve, the fittest will survive.
2 Comments to “The Paradox of Choice, extrapolated”
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Ignorance=bliss
Though I agree the fact that there is ‘only’ a week in between may have had an impact on sales rates, you could have bothered to read the original article. It is likely that some people saw both stands, but there will have also been plenty others that did not see stand #1
The conditions under which too much choice is a problem are limited to those in which you are motivated to select the best but do not have much knowledge. For example, what if you had 24 women to choose from for marriage, but only knew their IQ. Would you choose one or prefer to say no to all?