Blog · Choosing

Too Many Choices? How to Pick a Favorite When You Can't Decide

It's Friday, a little after seven. The takeaway app is open, and so is the fridge, and neither is helping. Pizza sounds fine. So does the Thai place, and so do the dumplings you had last week. Someone says "you choose", and you scroll back to the top of the menu for the third time. Nothing on it is bad. That's the trouble.

You know the feeling from other places too. The evening slides away while you scroll a streaming app. The baby-name list on the fridge gets longer every week instead of shorter. A group chat spends an hour failing to pick a restaurant. Each option is fine on its own. It's the whole list at once that stops you.

Here's the short answer. Stop judging the whole list at once. Compare two options, keep the one you prefer, and bring in the next until one is left. Eight options take seven quick picks. Research on choice overload is mixed, but it hits hardest when the options are complex and you're unsure what you want. Two at a time keeps each decision small.

Why more choice can feel worse: the paradox of choice

The idea that more options can leave you worse off was popularized by the psychologist Barry Schwartz. His book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less came out in 2004, and his TED talk took it further. His argument is that a huge menu promises freedom but often delivers paralysis, and when you do choose, you're more likely to wonder about the ones you didn't pick.

Schwartz also studied two styles of choosing. "Maximizers" try to find the very best option. "Satisficers" stop at the first one that's good enough. In a 2002 study he led, people who leaned toward maximizing reported less happiness and more regret. That's a correlation, not proof that maximizing causes unhappiness, but it will sound familiar. You probably know someone who reads every review before ordering, and someone who picks the second thing that sounds nice and enjoys it more.

The jam study everyone quotes

The study you've most likely heard of comes from Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper in 2000. At an upscale grocery store, a tasting booth showed either 24 jams or 6. The big display drew more people: 60% of passers-by stopped, against 40% at the small one. But buying went the other way. Of the people who stopped, nearly 30% bought jam after the 6-jar display, and about 3% did after the 24-jar display. In the same paper, people choosing from 6 chocolates rather than 30 were more satisfied with their pick.

Those percentages are easy to stretch, so read them carefully. The 30% and 3% are shares of the people who stopped at the booth, not of everyone in the shop. It was one field experiment, run over two Saturdays. It's a striking result, and it started a lot of research. It isn't, on its own, a law of how people behave.

Is choice overload real? What bigger studies found

When researchers pooled many studies, the picture got more interesting. Benjamin Scheibehenne, Rainer Greifeneder and Peter Todd looked at 63 conditions from 50 experiments, with 5,036 people in all. Averaged together, the effect of more choice was virtually zero. The studies varied a great deal, though. In some, more options hurt. In others, they helped.

A later review by Alexander Chernev, Ulf Böckenholt and Joseph Goodman, covering 99 observations and 7,202 people, asked when overload shows up. They found four things that make it more likely:

  • the options are complex and hard to compare
  • the decision itself is difficult
  • you're not sure what you want
  • you mostly just want the decision over with

Once those were taken into account, the size of the choice set did matter.

So too many options isn't always a problem. It bites when the choices are hard to compare, you don't know what you want, and you're tired of deciding. In other words, it bites on a normal Friday night.

Is decision fatigue real?

You've probably heard that judges get harsher as the day wears on. That comes from a 2011 study of Israeli parole hearings by Shai Danziger, Jonathan Levav and Liora Avnaim-Pesso. They reported favorable rulings falling from about 65% to near zero within each session, then bouncing back after a food break. It became the headline example of "decision fatigue".

It's also disputed. Keren Weinshall-Margel and John Shapard pointed out that cases weren't heard in random order, and that prisoners without lawyers, for example, tended to come last. Andreas Glöckner later showed in a simulation that scheduling alone could produce much of the pattern. That's what happens if judges don't start a long case that's likely to be granted just before a break. The pattern was reported, and whether hunger or tiredness explains it is still argued.

The theory underneath, called ego depletion, says self-control runs on a limited supply that choices use up. It has fared poorly in large tests. A 23-lab replication led by Martin Hagger, with 2,141 people, found an effect close to zero. A 36-lab project led by Kathleen Vohs, with 3,531 people, also found an effect near zero.

Feeling worn out after a long run of choices is real enough as an experience. The tidy story of a willpower battery that drains with every decision hasn't held up.

How to choose between many options: make it two at a time

Comparing things in pairs is an old idea. In 1927 the psychologist L. L. Thurstone described a "law of comparative judgment". It was a way to measure how people feel about things using nothing but "which of these two?" answers. In 1952 Ralph Bradley and Milton Terry published a model for turning lots of "A beat B" results into a strength for each option. Researchers have trusted the humble pair for a long time.

Here's why it feels easier, and this part is our reasoning rather than a study. A pair is the smallest choice there is, so each step is simple. You don't need to know your whole order of preference up front, only "this one or that one?" That eases two of Chernev's four triggers: the options stop being hard to compare, and you don't have to know what you want in general, only in this moment. We can't promise it makes overload disappear. It keeps each decision small, and that's usually enough to get moving.

You already know how to do this. It's the "this or that" game children play in the back seat. Keep the winner, bring in a challenger, repeat. Every pick knocks one option out, so finding one favorite takes one pick fewer than you have options. Eight options take seven picks, and twenty take nineteen.

One honest caveat. A single run finds a winner, and it doesn't tell you who came a true second. Close calls can go either way depending on your mood or which option you met first. If two options are neck and neck, shuffle and run it again, and see whether the same one wins.

Try it on your own list: dinner, a show, a baby name

Dinner tonight. Back to Friday. Type out the contenders: pizza, sushi, tacos, ramen, pho, curry, burger, dumplings. Now you're never looking at eight things, only two. Sushi or tacos? Tacos. Tacos or ramen? Still tacos. Seven taps later you have dinner, and the oven isn't even warm yet.

What to watch. A watchlist is a harder call, because you care more and the options are closer. Paste your shortlist and use Narrow down instead of a single pass. It repeats the matchups in passes and drops the lowest scorer after each one. If a clear leader emerges early, you can accept it and start watching.

Baby names. This one is gentler with two people. Agree on a shortlist first. Then each of you goes through it separately, two names at a time. The order is shuffled every run, so neither of you sees the names in the same sequence. If the same name wins for both of you, you may have your answer. If not, put your two winners head to head and talk about why each of you loved yours.

If you'd like a tool to keep track, Favorite Picker does exactly this. Choose Custom, then paste anywhere from 2 to 64 options, one per line, or add images, up to 32 of them. Then choose 1 vs 1 for a quick winner or Narrow down for a closer call. Tap the one you like more in each pair. If you tap the wrong one, undo the last pick. You make every pick, and your list stays in your browser.

If you'd rather leave it to chance, that's a different job. Spin the Decision Wheel or drop a marble in Plinko Picker.

When two at a time isn't the right tool

Pairs are best for questions of taste: which dinner, which show, which name you love. For decisions with real trade-offs, like a job, a flat or a car, a quick tap captures your gut feeling, not the rent, the commute or the contract. Write down what matters first and rule out what doesn't fit. Then use pairs to break the final tie between the options that are left.

Questions people ask about choosing

What is the paradox of choice? It's the idea, popularized by Barry Schwartz in his 2004 book, that more options can make choosing harder and leave you less satisfied with what you pick. Later research finds it in some situations and not in others. Treat it as a risk to watch for, not a rule.

Is choice overload real? Sometimes. A 2010 review of 50 experiments found an average effect near zero, with wide differences between studies. A 2015 review found overload tends to appear when options are complex, the task is hard, you're unsure what you want, or you just want to be done.

Is decision fatigue real? Feeling drained by lots of choices is common, but the science behind the popular version is shaky. Large multi-lab tests of ego depletion found effects close to zero, and the famous parole study has well-argued alternative explanations.

How do I choose between two things I like equally? Here's a tip people find useful. Imagine you've already picked one, and notice whether you feel relief or a small pang of disappointment. If it's still a dead heat, either choice is fine, so pick one and enjoy it.

What's the fastest way to pick one favorite from a long list? Keep the winner of each pair and bring in the next option. You need one pick fewer than the number of options, so ten options take nine picks. For a close call, shuffle and run it again.

You don't need a perfect order of everything you like. You need a winner you're happy with tonight. Next time the menu won't end, open Favorite Picker and let the list shrink two at a time.

Sources