The new restaurant has a menu with 47 dishes. Every one was added for a good reason: a regular asked for it, a supplier offered a great deal, the chef wanted to show off. Diners spend ten minutes reading, ask the waiter for recommendations, and then most of them order one of the same four things.
Across town, a café offers three sandwiches, two soups and a cake of the day. People decide in seconds and often say how easy it is to eat there.
If you’ve read anything about business psychology, you’ll know which one is supposed to win. There’s a famous study about jam that seems to settle the matter: give people too many choices and they’re less likely to choose anything at all. It has been repeated in countless presentations and articles as a simple rule. Fewer options, more sales.
The real story turns out to be more interesting, and more useful. Because when researchers went back to check, the simple rule didn’t quite hold.
One Like insight: The problem is rarely how many options you offer. It’s how hard you make it to choose between them.
The jam study everyone quotes
In the late 1990s, the psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set up a tasting stall in an upmarket supermarket in California. Some of the time the table displayed six varieties of jam; at other times it displayed 24. Shoppers who stopped could taste the jams and receive a discount voucher.
The larger display attracted more people. But very few of them bought anything. As the economist Tim Harford summarised it, only 3 per cent of jam tasters at the 24-flavour stand used their voucher, compared with 30 per cent at the six-flavour stand. Published in 2000 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, alongside studies using chocolates and essay topics, the research suggested that too much choice can make people less likely to choose at all.
The finding was dramatic, memorable and counterintuitive, which made it perfect for business books and presentations. The psychologist Barry Schwartz built on it in his 2004 bestseller The Paradox of Choice. Over the following years, “fewer options, more sales” became something close to received wisdom in marketing, retail and web design.
Highlight: The jam study became famous because it was surprising. That’s also a good reason to check it.
What happened when researchers checked
The trouble began when other researchers tried to build on the finding. The psychologist Benjamin Scheibehenne and his colleagues set out to discover exactly when choice demotivates people. But when they tried to replicate classic experiments, including the jam study and a similar one with chocolates, they couldn’t find the effect. In 2010 they published a review combining 50 published and unpublished experiments. On average, the effect of offering more options was close to zero. Some studies found choice overload, some found nothing, and some found that more choice helped. Scheibehenne told Harford: “If you did one of these studies tomorrow, the most probable result would be no effect.”
A second major review, by Alexander Chernev, Ulf Böckenholt and Joseph Goodman in 2015, asked a more useful question: under what conditions does choice overload appear? Their answer pointed to four factors. Overload was more likely when the options were complex and hard to compare, when the decision itself was difficult, when people were unsure what they wanted, and when they were mainly trying to minimise effort. When those conditions were absent, more options didn’t hurt and sometimes helped.
That explains the jam study rather neatly. Specialty jams are hard to compare, most shoppers don’t have strong preferences about them, and nobody wants to spend twenty minutes deciding. In that situation, too much choice can indeed paralyse people. In other situations, it doesn’t.
[Infographic placement] When too much choice becomes a problem. A simple checklist with four rows, each with a tick box: Are the options complex or hard to compare? Is the decision difficult? Are customers unsure what they want? Are they trying to decide quickly, with little effort? A gauge below moves from green (“More options are fine”) to red (“Simplify or guide the choice”) as more boxes are ticked. Caption: Based on Chernev, Böckenholt and Goodman’s 2015 review of choice overload research.
Highlight: Too much choice isn’t a universal problem. It’s a problem when options are hard to compare and customers don’t know what they want.
Making choice easier rather than smaller
This more careful picture changes the practical question. Instead of asking “How many options should we cut?”, ask “How easy have we made it to choose?” Often the better fix isn’t to remove options but to help people navigate them.
There are several ways to do that, and most cost nothing:
- Group the options. A long menu feels manageable when it’s split into clear sections, such as “light lunches”, “mains” and “to share”. A service list becomes easier when it’s grouped by the customer’s situation rather than by your internal categories.
- Make comparison easy. If customers have to choose between packages, show them side by side with the same few features listed in the same order. Hard-to-compare options are one of the main triggers of overload.
- Offer a recommendation. A “most popular” label, a “chef’s choice” or a simple “not sure? start here” option gives uncertain customers a safe default. It helps people who don’t know what they want without restricting people who do.
- Ask before you show. A couple of quick questions, such as “Is this for home or business?”, can narrow a long list to the three options that matter.
The last two techniques matter most for customers who feel uncertain, which is precisely when the research suggests choice overload is most likely. Experts and regulars rarely need help. Newcomers often do.
Highlight: Don’t cut choices first. Make the right choice easier to find.
What this means for a small business
Start with your own version of the jam table: the place where customers most often hesitate, ask for help or leave without deciding. It might be your menu, your pricing page, your product range or your list of services. Run through the four questions. Are the options hard to compare? Is the decision genuinely difficult? Are most customers new to this? Do they want to decide quickly?
If the answer to several is yes, you have a choice problem, and the solution may be structure rather than subtraction. Group things clearly, make comparisons easy and offer a confident recommendation. If the answer is mostly no, a wide range may be one of your strengths. Regulars who know exactly what they want often appreciate having plenty to choose from.
A few questions can help:
- Where do customers most often say “What do you recommend?”
- Could a newcomer compare our options in under a minute?
- Do we offer a clear default for people who don’t know where to start?
- Which options almost nobody chooses, and are they actually helping anyone?
Which brings us back to the restaurant with 47 dishes, where most diners end up ordering the same four. The owner doesn’t necessarily need to cut the menu by half. Highlighting a few house favourites, grouping dishes more clearly and training staff to recommend confidently might help more. The regulars keep their variety, and the newcomers get a way in. That’s the real lesson of the jam study once you read past the headline.
Sources
- Tim Harford, “Given the choice, how much choice would you like?”, 14 November 2009 (also published in the Financial Times). Source of the jam study figures and the Benjamin Scheibehenne quote.
- Sheena S. Iyengar and Mark R. Lepper, “When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing?”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79(6), 2000 (DOI 10.1037/0022-3514.79.6.995).
- Benjamin Scheibehenne, Rainer Greifeneder and Peter M. Todd, “Can there ever be too many options? A meta-analytic review of choice overload”, Journal of Consumer Research 37(3), 2010 (DOI 10.1086/651235).
- Alexander Chernev, Ulf Böckenholt and Joseph Goodman, “Choice overload: A conceptual review and meta-analysis”, Journal of Consumer Psychology 25(2), 2015 (DOI 10.1016/j.jcps.2014.08.002). Its four moderating factors were checked against a detailed secondary summary.
