I want the plain kind

Anyone who knows me has probably heard me fulminate about the mad proliferation of choices we face when shopping. Do we really need a dozen flavors of Cheez-Its (although even one may be too many), or half a dozen kinds of macaroni and cheese, or multiple varieties of each brand of toothpaste? Awhile back I found that the house brand of ice cream at Marsh supermarkets comes in three different flavors of vanilla. That’s too many. And I think it was Barry Schwartz, in his book The Paradox of Choice, who told a story of going to buy blue jeans and being baffled by the sudden explosion of styles and colors, and asking the clerk for the kind you used to get when there was only one kind. I understand entirely what he was up against.

Well, perhaps my complaints about having too many options have some rational basis. A recent study looked at behavior in a variety of venues and found that decision-making seems to sap people’s ability to focus on a task and stay undistracted. Some of the work was done in the lab, where people either had to make a choice about something or simply evaluate information on the same topic; the former task was more likely to make it harder for people to complete a goal-oriented task. Another part of the study involved querying shoppers in a mall about the decisions they had made and checking their ability to solve simple math problems; the more decisions they’d made (and these were self-motivated decisions), the worse their performance (after correcting for other factors like gender, age, and time spent shopping). The study also looked at the performance of students preparing for a math test, and found that performance was degraded in those who had had to make choices about their courses, with more time frittered away in distractions rather than studying.

All three lines of inquiry seem to indicate that some reservoir of mental energy is drained by the process of choosing between alternatives. This story from Science Daily has the details. So maybe I’m not the only one worn down by the process of shopping, evaluating health care options, etc. It’s not that I want to go back to the days when you could get any color of Ford you wanted as long as it was black, but I certainly wouldn’t mind having the kind of vanilla ice cream you got when there was only one kind.