The Stuck Decision

Marble hekataion (statuette of triple-bodied Hekate) and the three Graces, 1st–2nd century CE. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (CC0).

Eleven tabs are open. Three apartments, two of which are almost the same. The thought has said the same sentence for an hour: one more option might be better. It does not decide, and it does not let the decision go. KTT counts it as a thought, noticed or not, even when it arrives as a loop of scrolling. Research calls the stuck state choice overload, and the studies read for this article did not test whether a thought comes first.

The claim

A popular claim says that more options paralyse. A 2000 field experiment at an upscale grocery store is often cited for it. A tasting table showed either 6 or 24 jams. More shoppers stopped at the larger display. Among those who stopped, about 3 percent bought a jam after the 24-jam table and about 30 percent after the 6-jam table, according to one of the authors. An attempt to repeat the study in a German supermarket in 2008 is reported, in a secondary summary, to have found no effect. The claim became a rule of thumb. It sounds like a fact about people, and the thought uses it as one.

The finding

A 2010 meta-analysis put the claim to a test. It combined 63 conditions from 50 experiments with 5,036 participants. The average effect of having more options was virtually zero. The differences between studies were large. Some found overload, others found that more options helped. A 2015 meta-analysis found that overload depends on conditions: how complex the set of options is, how hard the decision is, how unsure the person is about what they want, and what the goal of the choice is. So the claim is partly true, and only sometimes.

The thought at the tabs does not know which situation it is in. That is part of why it keeps looking.

The thought about owning the choice

A second thought sits underneath the first. It says: if this goes wrong, it will be mine alone. Studies of choice assume that choosing is good for motivation. In 1999, Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper tested that with children. In two studies, personal choice raised motivation more for Anglo American children than for Asian American children. Asian American children were most motivated when a trusted person, such as their mother or a classmate, made the choice for them. In the first study, 52 Asian American and 53 Anglo American children took part.

A later study with Chinese children found that motivation depended on how close the child felt to the person making the choice. The cultural reading of Iyengar and Lepper’s results is debated.

What is not known

Whether the thought comes before the stuck feeling or after it is not known.

Whether a person who feels stuck is in one of the conditions where overload happens is open, since the meta-analyses describe averages.

Whether the second thought is cultural or personal is also open. The studies read here compared groups of children on small tasks. Adult decisions about homes and work were not tested.

Signs of the stuck thoughts

One repeats the same sentence about more options.
One ties the outcome to a single owner.
Neither adds a new fact.