Too Many Choices? Not So Fast, Psychologists Say

Tuesday, January 19, 2010 - 21:28 in Psychology & Sociology

Some pyschologists suggests that too many choices can negatively impact our health. But a meta-analysis of 50 published and unpublished experiments that investigated choice overload  found that consumers generally respond positively to having many choices. Across the 50 experiments, which depict the choices of 5,036 individual participants, the authors found that the overall effect of choice overload was virtually zero. "This suggests that adverse consequences do not necessarily follow from increases in the number of options," the authors write. "In fact, contrary to the notion of choice overload, these results suggest that having many options to choose from will, on average, not lead to a decrease in satisfaction or motivation to make a choice." read more

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