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CHOICES ARE RUINING YOUR LIFE 🚨⚠️😱 - The Paradox of Choice - FutureIQ

4,102 views Wait, is this logic right? • Feb 14, 2025
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Slog Reference: Reducing Choices

Description

Imagine you go to Subway, and instead of picking your own sandwich fillings and toppings, they just pick them for you. That's what Subway is doing in a big ad with a famous chess player, Vishwanathan Anand. They think you’ll be happy with having fewer choices. But does that make sense?

Some studies show that when people have too many choices, they can feel overwhelmed and unsure. For example, in a supermarket, when there were 24 different jams, more people looked at them, but when there were only 6 jams, more people bought one! It turns out, too many choices can make it harder for people to make a decision.

This idea is also seen in things like retirement savings plans. In the US, when people could pick any investment they wanted, many didn’t choose anything at all because there were too many options. To fix this, experts suggested giving people a simple default option.

In our world, sometimes, having too many choices can give us stress. This is called "choice overload." It's like when you have too many toys to choose from, and you can't pick which one to play with. It happens when there’s no perfect option, or you don’t know enough to make a good choice.

Even in dating apps like Tinder, with so many people to choose from, it can feel confusing. But, sometimes, it might be easier to let someone else make a choice for you, like a parent or a friend.

So, when do we reduce choices? When it’s really important, or when it’s a big decision, like buying a house or choosing a career. But for small decisions, it’s okay to have fewer choices.

More Videos For You:
Why Surge Pricing Feels Wrong: https://youtu.be/IsHPxh-C0Sw
You're A Part of A Cult: https://youtu.be/eEfmHpstjSg
Maximizing vs Satisficing: https://youtu.be/wUG-ya3CIs0

Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS

Sources:
Tim Harford: Given the Choice, How Much Choice Would You Like?
https://timharford.com/2009/11/given-the-choice-how-much-choice-would-you-like/
Decision Lab's Guide to the Paradox of Choice:
https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/economics/the-paradox-of-choice
Subway reduces choices: https://econforeverybody.com/2023/07/13/move-over-401k-and-richard-thaler/
Analysis, YouTube ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jobqk7z6CHc

00:00 More choice is good?
01:14 Marketing Experiment
03:44 Subway Ad Campaign
04:34 Android Vs iPhone
05:55 Paradox Of Choice
07:55 Is it always true?
09:25 Unclear on choices
11:00 Regretting your decisions/ Bias Remorse
13:27 Making decisions for others
14:00 More Vs Less Choice
15:15 Steve Jobs Example
15:30 Shortcut on making choices

#futureiq #choices

Related Slog Matches

Reducing Choices

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Transcript

Valentine's Day brings up some interesting questions for example in our time finding a partner there wasn't really much choice either your parents did it for you or you found someone from your college or your work that's pretty much it yeah but now there is Tinder and hinge and Bumble and so many possibilities yeah do you think this is an improvement yeah it's definitely giving people more choice to choose their life Partners from or whatever number of Partners from so I think it's it's better right yeah I mean that is the default assumption that more choice is always better right mathematically that has to be true yeah and yet in real life it turns out to be different right
so that is what today's episode is about how many choices is enough and actually the importance of reducing choices so we are going to take a look look at a lot of examples from different fields like marketing and so on and then we'll come back to Tinder in the end okay okay I mean what applies to marketing also applies to Tinder we'll see okay okay so let's start with marketing there is a famous psychological experiment called the jam testing experiment this happened in a supermarket in California okay there the experimenters set up two tables okay one table had 24 four varieties of jam for customers to taste and then if they like something they will buy a different
table had only six varieties the results were surprising okay okay the number of customers who stopped at a table was much higher for the table with 24 varieties of jam fewer customers stopped at the table with six varieties but when they looked at how many customers actually bought Jam at the end of the testing that number was higher for the six variety table than the other table okay 30% sale versus 3% that much of a difference wow that's a 10x difference so 10 times the number of people prefer to buy from the table that had fewer varieties of jam yes not just that but most likely they don't realize this themselves right clearly customers seemed to think that they would prefer
the higher variety people stopped by but in reality it was different okay let's take a different example from retirement Savings in the US there is an account called 401K retirement savings account like a ppf yes like a ppf but the customer gets to choose where to invest that money how to allocate it across stocks and mutual funds and so on right so kind of like an NPS yeah but what they found was that the number of customers using a 401k remained pretty low okay okay and only in 2004 behavioral economists fixed this by doing a simple tweak when people signed up for a 401k they gave a default okay okay and that just took away Choice like a default selection of
stocks to put their money into yeah and that took away the choice and the number of customers who signed up went up significantly kind of makes sense because not everybody is financially Savvy not everybody tracks the stock market so give me a default option I'll assume that it is curated by experts and I'll just put money into it right yes and this thing plays out again and again okay about a year ago the subway chain of restaurants in India they had a big ad campaign with vishwanathan Anand and the ad campaign was primarily about how if you now go to a Subway you are not bombard with choices so do you want this do you want that do you want this and so
on it was like you know they significantly reduced the choices gave a bunch of default options for Subs clearly Subway realized that people were getting overwhelmed by the choices at Subway and that reducing the choices would increase the sales yeah and not just sales it also quickened the sandwich making time because one of my big questions every time I go into a Subway is which bread do I choose and which sauce do I go go with at the end and that takes up a lot of time because I can never choose quickly and another thing yeah is Android versus iPhone right the advantage of Android is that there is so much variety there is so
much Choice yeah right and obviously you would think choice is good and you know people will choose what makes most sense to them and yet if you ever look at customer satisfaction you will find that iPhone users are always much more satisfied because they have less Choice somebody else made the choice for them yeah when you when you go for an iPhone you either go for an iPhone 16 a pro or a pro Max those are the three choices available to you or whatever number of iPhone is currently uh in and in fact recently I think Dell is moving in that direction right they have instead of just you being able to customize your laptop any which way you want they are
saying oh here are three choices just pick one of them which is very interesting because Dell started as a company to enable you to choose your configuration of your computer and now they're like no there is only Dell there is Del Pro and D Max we are not being paid by any of these companies that we are talking about we are just using them as examples I mean how far Dell has come from the days where they were like you can choose the processor you want you can choose the ram you want you can choose the hard disk you want you're not getting a like a black box of configuration inside look where they've come now right so keep this in mind
right that reducing choices actually increases sales so what is going on here yeah what is going on here this is the Paradox of choice barish Wars has written a book called The Paradox of choice why more is less ah basic idea is that more choices gives customers anxiety right because it's like oh my God if I choose the wrong one then I will have made a wrong choice and I have to live with that for the rest of my life there is like you know four more yeah people will always remember all the choices they didn't make right the other problem is that there is Choice overload which results in analysis paralysis right and your brain which can think up
to some level and then beyond that as the number of choices increases your brain starts giving up because it is no longer able to do all those calculations right I am slowly beginning to connect this to the tender thing he talked about but I'll wait for him to come to that point we will come right so let's talk about simpler things like chess okay one of the strategies used by top level Grand Masters is that when let's say you have two different moves available to you one of them is a slightly stronger move but the continuation for the opponent is fairly clear what she is supposed to do and the other one is a slightly weaker move but
it gives the opponent a choice the opponent has to make a choice and Grand Masters will often choose the second one because they want to give the opponent a choice they want to force the opponent to think about their choice and then spend the rest of the game in foro oh I should have chosen that oh I should have chosen that this is an actual Grandmaster strategy wow I didn't think of Chess as a game of that kind of strategy I mean I know it's a game of strategy but still this is a very interesting strategy on top of a strategy but having said that it intuitively feels wrong yes the reason is that this isn't always true there are
only specific circumstances where having too much choice is a problem right it doesn't always happen so one is that if you look at Choice versus satisfaction and if you plot a graph right as you increase the choices on the x-axis your satisfaction actually it's an inverted U curve initially from 0 to 1 1 to two your choices will increase your satisf action more choices more satisfaction yeah only after a little while does it starts falling when the overload sets in which means there's a Sweet Spot somewhere in the middle where the number of choices gives you the maximum satisfaction correct right where basically the number of choices is actually giving you a choice but also it
is not so high so your brain can still see the differences and see that one of them is the clearly better choice right ah also you know when there are many choices and one of them is clearly a better choice then that's actually a good thing yeah but what happens in many cases is that as the number of choices increases you end up with a bunch of choices which are like similar to each other and then you know this one has this is a little cheaper but this one has a little this feature is good and that one has usability and things like that and then now you no longer know how to choose and then there is a problem
okay until the point you said usability I'm 100% sure that everybody in the audience was thinking about Tinder one more situation where things can be different right when you have a very clear idea of what is best for you then more choices is good because you know you just go yeah this is not the best this is not the best this is the best but when you yourself are a little unclear on what you are looking for right when I'm buying a new phone I'm not entirely sure there's just so many different features and which one is the most important for me there is no such thing right then it becomes a problem right so when there is a very clear
Criterion for what is best then more choic is good but when it is all fuzzy then more choic is not good this is especially true when the user does not have the expertise to know what is the best choice for them right Mak sense I don't understand cars so choosing a car is like a problem for me yeah and one one more thing is are the stakes High okay in the sense when the stakes are high then you feel that you need to be much more careful about your choice right like choosing a college after your 12th standard whereas if it is just a matter of choosing which restaurant to go to today big deal that way yeah makes
sense because when I'm choosing a restaurant I don't have to worry about long-term effects of choosing a bad restaurant it's at most one day of trouble but when I'm choosing a college and I choose the wrong College it's a lifetime of regret and you know troubles and whatnot yeah so this regret also known as buyer remorse right is one of the most important things in understanding the psychology of choices right okay because when there are more choices there is more responsibility on you when you made a choice because there were more things you rejected so there are more chances of regretting your decision right true what again psychological experiments have shown is that before you make a choice you
have lots of positive emotions right you have desire you have anticipation all these possibilities exist and then after the purchase all the possibilities are gone you have one thing and now your emotions are primarily about regret oh I should have taken that oh I don't have that anymore right did I make the right choice what if there was a better model a better thing out there yes now what does this buyer remorse do right as soon as you get close to making a choice your brain starts anticipating the regrets and the remorse right and that results in the brain saying you know what it is easier to just not make a choice okay so even though random choice would have
been better than not choosing at all there are people who will just back away from the decision so for example there is data showing that seniors in the US using Medical drug plans right they end up not picking at all and then they do without drugs whereas just picking randomly they're all roughly equivalent would have been better right yeah I mean it's a matter of life and death at that point yeah but that's not how our brain works right because our brain can only understand about five to seven choices anything beyond that is too much for our brain right then you just have to come up with some coping strategy only five to seven choices yes
that's called working memory of the brain we have some previous episodes on this but also just look it up it is working memory five plus or minus two is the maximum your brain can handle at any moment other beyond that you have to have coping strategies so people swiping on Tinder don't have more than five to seven dates at a time yeah that's the working memory of your brain beyond that is analysis paralysis okay but one very interesting twist to all of this uhhuh is that it's easier to make choices for others rather than yourself because the regret isn't there I know what I'm going to do when I'm going to buy something new uh next time
I'm just going to bring na in and say na choose for me oh that's a good idea yes we call it but hey if it resolves me of my analysis paralysis why not if it if it prevents me from going into the choice Paradox why not so putting it all together right there are some times when you do want more choice and sometimes when you want less corre right uh like we already said if the criteria are clear up front then more choic is better right correct also is it a one-way door or a two-way door ah yes right because if it is easy to undo what you did then if you have buyers remorse if you have regret you
can just undo and do the next thing right whereas if it is a one-way door then you want to be much more uh careful and related to this oneway door two-way door thing right is that decision fatigue is a thing for our brain right what is decision fatigue if you have to take a decision it tires your brain if you have to take two decisions in a row it's more tiring right and so if you're taking decisions all the time it is very tiring so what you want to do is that leave leave your decision making only for important decisions right so increasing the number of choices do that only for a few important long-term
decisions everywhere else just reduce your choices right which is why Steve Jobs used to wear the same turtleneck every day one less decision to take yeah okay and Mark zukerberg as well up to a point but now he's of course revamped his avar and whatnot uh that actually brings me to a question which I know it might be slightly not quite right but I'm thinking of whether there is a shortcut a shorthand a way to sort of uh make a choice when you know that there is a long list of options available to you and you have to go through all of them well so you know mathematicians have uh analyzed this problem it is called The Secret
problem but you know it used to be called the arranged marriage problem earlier and I will not go into that in too much detail listen we are talking about Tinder so please go into arranged marriage it is going to be helpful to a lot of people who are swiping Left Right hard so the optimal stopping algorithm says that spend the first 37% of your time or your number of choices just looking okay and after that you switch to choosing mode and pick the first one that is better than anybody in the first 37% Ah that's it simple explore the first 37% and then exploit the one that is better than the 37 person that comes
along yeah I want to give a more serious answer for how people should tackle this problem of choice okay okay and it boils down to two important techniques okay one is maximizing versus satisfying we have done an entire episode on that but the basic idea is this don't try to have the best for every choice in your life okay that way lies unhappiness that's way lies stress that way lies regret okay yes what you want to do is have some criteria saying you know this is my minimum requirement anything about this is good enough okay and then pick the first thing that satisfies your criteria okay there should be a very tiny number of things in your life where you actually
trying to maximize okay that is one second is that you know you don't have to make all the choices yourself okay you come up with your criteria and sometimes you are not even good enough to make the criteria you find someone else an expert to come up with the criteria for you but in either case you either choose an expert who will make the choice for you or a friend who will make the choice for you right that sort of similar yeah and that choice should happen beforehand that okay this is my champion this is the person who will make the choice and then you turn it over to them and then just trust their decision okay and most
important sort of related to all of this is to try to become a positive person right because the biggest problem with all of these choices thing was post Choice regret correct right but there are people who have the exact opposite they are people who after they have chosen they're like oh yes I always make the right choice so whatever they have chosen is the best and whatever they didn't choose is obviously bad right so if you just twist your psychology that way you can start doing post Choice rationalization right the kind of person who just convinces yourself well if I chose it then it is the best one whatever happens is good right and that's a great way to be happy in life
yeah and by the way these three ideas that he gave or these three uh uh keys that he gave can actually be used for your Tinder life as well the first one that he said was actually how to use Tinder the second one that he said was actually what arranged marriage is all about and the third one that he just explained is what marriage is all about absolutely shant naven future IQ