Editor’s Note: Springfield-area native Tara Burghart is a former Urbana resident and University of Illinois graduate. She’s the editor of Go West Young Mom, a blog for families in the far western suburbs of Chicago. If you’re up that way, definitely check it out!
By Tara Burghart
Confession time: It took me nearly six months to buy a new hair dryer. My previous dryer was a gift and worked great for years. But eventually it just lost its oomph, and it took longer and longer to dry my hair.
Yet when I thought of buying a new one, I was overwhelmed by the choices. And then one of my best friends confessed to me exactly the same thing.
We both spent hours on Amazon reading reviews of hair dryers. On my hair stylist’s recommendation, I visited a beauty supply store and considered buying a professional-grade dryer for more than $100, only to be flummoxed that none of the dryer’s descriptions seemed “best” for my hair type. My friend thought of buying an expensive dryer too, but thought they were too heavy.
On a whim, I bought a dryer at Target – it had one of those great retractable cords! – only to return home and find that it had received abysmal online reviews. I returned it the next day.
The only reason I finally bought a hair dryer was that I was scheduled to get my photos taken for this website, and my old one was so useless that I just was letting my hair air dry. Oh, and air drying your hair doesn’t really work once the temperatures dip below 50 degrees. Anyway, under the gun time-wise, I was able to look at a few reviews, made a quick decision and purchased a $25 model by Revlon that I’m very pleased with. I just wish I had bought it six months earlier!
If it had only been me who had struggled with such a seemingly mundane purchase, I would have just chalked it up to some kind of personal quirk. But my friend had the same problem, and she’s a very intelligent woman who worked in hospital emergency room for years –- making multiple important judgment calls every day.
So she and I talked over dinner one night about how it just seems like we have not only too many choices but too much input. The web makes it easy to locate a restaurant by cuisine or location or average entrée price – but it’s also easy to stumble upon the one person who says he would absolutely never return – even if the rest of the reviews you read are generally positive.
The same for hotels. While you might use a service like Hotwire or Priceline to grab a room at a more affordable price, once you learn the hotel’s name and location, it’s easy to find a reviewer who either paid less – or wasn’t happy with her stay.
It turns out that there is lots of research to back up my belief that sometimes having tons of choices isn’t exactly a good thing.
In a now-famous study conducted in a grocery store in 1995, Columbia University business professor Sheena Iyengar set up a food booth with samples of gourmet jams. Sometimes, the researcher and her assistant set out six jams for customers to try, sometimes they set out 24 jams. All customers received a coupon for $1 off a jar. While the larger assortment caused more customers to stop at the tasting station, only three percent of the customers confronted with the 24 jams bought a jar. Yet 30 percent of the customers who stopped at the smaller display bought a jar.
That study “raised the hypothesis that the presence of choice might be appealing as a theory,” Professor Iyengar said last year, “but in reality, people might find more and more choice to actually be debilitating.”
That’s certainly my experience in the grocery store’s bread aisle, where I often feel like a zombie, staring blankly at the shelves, trying to force my reluctant arm to just reach out for something. White bread, wheat bread, light bread, rye bread, multigrain bread. Bread that looks like white bread but that’s made with whole grains. Bread that doesn’t have high fructose corn syrup. Too. Many. Choices.
About a month ago, an elderly customer at Blue Goose asked if I “knew much about bread” because his wife had sent him to the store with strict instructions to only return with bread that had “twice the fiber.” Thank goodness that grocery store is smaller than most – I found two loaves that seemed to meet her criteria, and assured him that the one he chose would be just fine.
My friend and I talked about some of the suspected reasons behind our paralysis. We’re not cheapskates, but we want to get the most value for our money. We don’t want to later regret feeling like we made the “wrong” choice. And especially when it comes to something like a present for a friend’s birthday or a newborn baby, we want to make sure it’s the “perfect” gift.
That’s not at all unusual, according to a story in the Los Angeles Times last year that featured Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College and author of the book “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less.” From the LA Times:
Schwartz says that one of three things is likely to occur when people have too many decisions to make — consumers end up making poor decisions, are more dissatisfied with their choices or become paralyzed and don’t choose at all.
And as the complexity of a decision increases, a person is more likely to look for ways — often erroneous — to simplify the choosing process. If there are 100 kinds of cereal, instead of looking at all of the characteristics, people will evaluate a product based on something familiar, such as brand name, or easy, such as price.
Even when we choose well, we are often less satisfied because, with so many choices, consumers are certain that somewhere out there was something better. “They think about attractive things they’ve passed up and missed opportunities,” Schwartz says.
The main problem for me is that spending hours online reading hair dryer reviews, or shopping for weeks for the “perfect” gift, takes away valuable time I could be spending with my daughter and husband, doing something personally rewarding like reading or taking a walk, or chatting on the phone with a friend.
The LA Times spoke to experts who offered some recommendations when dealing with too many choices. I’m going to be trying these over the next few months, and I’ll write a follow-up column letting you know how I did:
- Sometimes it’s good to rely on habit — “put the blinders on and get the same toothpaste you always get,” says Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College.
- If you want to purchase something new, call a friend who has one already and get his or her recommendation.
- You can sometimes delegate decision making to others; for example, if you are going to dinner, let your spouse decide where to eat.
- Accept that a good option is almost always good enough. When you find something that meets your standards, stop looking, buy it and be happy.
- People can also learn to make decisions by understanding their own preferences and creating a structure for decision making, says Sheena Iyengar, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. For example, instead of taking your 4-year-old to a grocery store and asking which of the myriad kinds of cereal she wants, give her some structure. Break them into smaller categories — such as chocolate, whole grain or ones with fruit added — and take the rest out of consideration. By putting them into a couple of categories, and then determining from there which she would like best, you simplify her decision.