Spoiled for choice, spoiled by choice?

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Imagine you need to relocate for work, more than 100 miles away, and you need to find a new home. You’ve managed to arrange nine viewings on one Saturday, confident that this is the best way to find the ideal home from a bunch that, on paper, ticks all the boxes. You set off early and arrive in good time at the first property. It looks good from the outside, but once inside, you’re less than enamoured by the open-plan kitchen. No worries, there’s eight more to view. House number three is not bad, but it lacks the en-suite bathroom of the previous one. By the time you get to the last one, you’ve got a clear view of the various flaws of each of the nine options, and you’re in no mind to commit to any of them (and you’re seriously considering turning down the new job). Being unable to pick a home from a set of no less than nine plausible candidates, isn’t that odd?

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This evokes a phenomenon known as the paradox of choice, popularized by Barry Schwartz in his eponymous 2004 book. However, subsequent research challenged in particular the assumption that the tendency to suffer from choice overload is universal, and a review by Alexander Chernev and colleagues identified the conditions in which it is more likely to occur. Now, new research by Tila Pronk and Jaap Denissen, investigating the paradox that despite the abundant access to more candidate romantic partners than ever before via online dating platforms, people are more likely to be single – shows that it is not necessarily the size of the choice set that leads to a decrease in actual choices made.

Using a customized app, modelled after the popular Tinder dating platform, the researchers discovered that participants became increasingly likely to reject offered candidates: the first candidate had the highest chance of being accepted, and this likelihood dropped until it stabilized after about 12 candidates. Intriguingly, the main driver was not the total number of candidates, but the number of candidates already rejected. This appears to fuel pessimism regarding finding a suitable candidate, and suggests that the phenomenon observed here is less the result of exhaustion, and more a consequence of a build-up of negative emotion – rejection leads to more rejection.

But why are we so quick to reject a choice in the first place? We have a tendency to place options in categories – likely a cognitive adaptation. Categories of “nutritious” or “toxic” plants or fruits will have been helpful to our ancestors. Fast, confident and accurate decisions will have boosted survival rates. Even now, if we are only given two categories in which to place possible choices, we will implicitly treat them as (“good” and “bad”) and sort the options accordingly, typically, with a slight bias towards categorizing uncertain ones as “bad”, since mistaking a bad option for a good one is usually worse than the other way round.

However, our problem lies deeper. Categorizing options into good and bad interacts with another strong tendency: the urge to optimize. When organisms evolved the ability not only to sort vital survival resources like food or shelter into good and bad, but also to distinguish degrees of goodness (and badness), they acquired the technical capability to optimize. Once you can compare the goodness of several alternatives, finding the optimum is just a matter of effort. But effort is costly, and to our ancestors, the benefit of doing any more than opportunistically pick the better option within reach never outweighed the physical and cognitive cost.

With our vastly larger cognitive capabilities and our societies in which the choice – whether in toothpaste, streaming media, homes or indeed potential romantic partners – is huge, the ancestral cost barriers have vanished. When our grandparents grew up, choice was, by our standards, severely restricted – at best just two types of bread, and weekday and Sunday clothes. (Even the mass-produced Ford T was available in any colour, as long as it was black!) For our forebears, from way back until very recently, options were scarce and they were mostly satisficers – a term coined by economics Nobel laureate and polymath Herbert Simon. They were satisfied with what suffices, content with what is ‘good enough’. This is much harder to do when we face an abundance of options, and become convinced that the best one is somewhere in that vast collection, so we can, and must, find it.

Here lies the root of the escalating rejection bias: we start out mildly reluctant to accept, since a large pool makes it easy to start off believing something better is still out there, and since turning down a good option is usually less costly than accepting a bad one. Pronk and Denissen show how this mild reluctance compounds with the number of options already rejected. Each thumbs-down makes the next one more likely, until the rate settles at a steady high. Platforms like Tinder even benefit from users’ over-rejecting: they stay single (and hence remain an active, revenue-generating user on the platform) for longer. The same mechanism can affect us even if nobody is trying to exploit it and when the stakes are not so high. Choosing a film for the evening can trigger exactly the same rejection creep as choosing a potential life partner, leaving us with nothing to watch.

Most biases are reinforced over thousands of generations, almost impossible to shift. But here, our tendency to optimize is so recent it has not yet had the time to become as ingrained as our inclination to satisfice, which has been the norm since before human history began. A recent override sitting on top of much older wiring means the older tendency is still there to be reactivated, given a little help, for example by restricting the number of options we will consider. (We still use it, anyway: if we have just the one possibility, our yay/nay decision inevitably boils down to determining whether it is good enough.) Splitting up a large number of candidates into smaller groups can reduce the pressure to reject, and allows us to identify the best of the bunch before we tackle the next group.

But perhaps the most useful approach is to appreciate the rewards satisficing offers. It saves time, but more importantly, it makes our life more pleasant. What is more enjoyable: trying to work out the very best dish on the menu, then feeling, once you’ve finally chosen, the nagging worry that you should have gone for something else -- or picking any dish that sounds good enough and moving on? Agonizing over what is the most entertaining movie to watch until it’s getting so late that you’re forced to pick something at random, or going with whatever in the Netflix suggestions seems interesting enough? Scrutinizing every potential new home for everything that doesn’t fully meet your preferences, or instead simply answering the question whether you think you would be happy living there?

Choosing from a set of options that are all good enough might still require some consideration. But the knowledge that, whichever one you eventually pick, it will be good enough will relieve the burden of choice and may, who knows, one day save you from having to turn down a wonderful new job in another town, just because you couldn’t decide on where to live.633 Spoiled for choice, spoiled by choice?