If the "paradox of choice" is a myth, which “breakthrough ideas” can you trust?

The "Paradox of Choice" is an idea that has been made popular by Barry Schwartz and states that more choice for consumers might actually decrease motivation to chose and satisfaction with the chosen option. This idea has been marketed heavily with talks at high-level conferences and books. Below is his talk at the TED conference in 2005.

Indeed, this idea has everything it takes to make it spread easily: a contradictory statement (“More choice is less”), a situation we are all familiar with (standing in front of a shelf in the supermarket) and an excellent name that makes it easy to remember.

There is just one problem: the paradox of choice does not exist

Or to be more precise: The paradox of choice exists, but just under very special conditions and psychologists and social scientists don’t understand these conditions yet. This makes every tactical recommendation and every strategic decision based on this "paradox of choice" useless.

The Financial Times was one of the first who picked up these findings by Benjamin Scheibehenne, a psychologist at the University of Basel, who tried to reproduce the “paradox of choice” but was not able to do so.

But a more fundamental objection to the “choice is bad” thesis is that the psychological effect may not actually exist at all. It is hard to find much evidence that retailers are ferociously simplifying their offerings in an effort to boost sales. Starbucks boasts about its “87,000 drink combinations”; supermarkets are packed with options. This suggests that “choice demotivates” is not a universal human truth, but an effect that emerges under special circumstances.

Benjamin Scheibehenne, a psychologist at the University of Basel, was thinking along these lines when he decided (with Peter Todd and, later, Rainer Greifeneder) to design a range of experiments to figure out when choice demotivates, and when it does not.

But a curious thing happened almost immediately. They began by trying to replicate some classic experiments – such as the jam study, and a similar one with luxury chocolates. They couldn’t find any sign of the “choice is bad” effect. Neither the original Lepper-Iyengar experiments nor the new study appears to be at fault: the results are just different and we don’t know why.

Source: “Given the choice, how much choice would you like?”

Unable to reproduce the findings, Scheibehenne performed a meta-analysis that included 50 experiments in his publication Can There Ever Be Too Many Options? A Meta-Analytic Review of Choice Overload.

The conclusion was that sometimes there is a paradox of choice, and sometimes there is no paradox of choice. Researchers don’t understand the different parameters that influence whether this phenomenon exists or not. There are contextual parameters such as categorization and arrangement of products, general information overload and time pressure for customers that influences these results. The decision strategies of consumers have an impact on these results as well. Scheibehenne concludes:

Although strong instances of choice overload have been reported in the past, direct replications and the results of our meta-analysis indicated that adverse effects due to an increase in the number of choice options are not very robust: The overall effect size in the meta-analysis was virtually zero.

[…]

It will be essential to consider the interaction between the broader context of the structure of assortments—beyond the mere number of options available—and the decision processes that people adopt.

These findings are in stark contrast to the core idea of the paradox of choice. But the key point is less about the paradox of choice, but about other “breakthrough ideas”. There are many similar ideas and concepts floating around which inevitable raises the question: What other “accepted” ideas and concepts are we following that might not “work as advertised”?

The absence of the paradox of choice is an excellent reminder to put more trust in facts gained through direct observation and to take the stories told by professional speakers and book authors with a grain of salt.