Since there are so many possible outcomes from this, this becomes increasingly difficult to deal with.Ĭhoose Your Own Adventure books teach children how to face the problem of choosing but leave us asking the question: “What if…?”Īs Iyengar points out in the epilogue of her book, all of us who had read the Choose Your Own Adventure books as a child knew that part of the thrill of going through the narrative was to be able to cheat a little bit. This has a psychological cost, and by increasing the number of choices, we thereby increase the cost. Iyengar’s argument is that having so many choices requires that we give up far more than we gain. The consulting group, McKinsey, thought the experiment to be so serious that they introduced the 3 by 3 rule, which means that clients first choose from 3 choices, which then lead to another 3 choices, which then lead to another 3 choices. Procter & Gamble, for example, having studied this experiment, reduced its varieties of Head & Shoulder shampoo, from 26 to 15, and saw sales increase by 10%. This has been proved in numerous experiments, from buying insurance, retirement plans, to the famous jam experiment we’ve just described.

When we get too much choice, we get overwhelmed and then we tend not to choose at all.

When we get too much choice, we get overwhelmed and we tend not to choose at all.įollowing on to Miller’s 1956 seminal paper, “ The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” Iyengar considers that we can only deal with a limited amount of choice.

The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar