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The other day I watched a movie I’ve enjoyed several times before, Say Anything, starring a very young John Cuszak.
At its heart it’s a romantic comedy about an unlikely coupling, but it also dabbles with the issue of choice. One lead character knows what she wants out of life; the other (played by Cuszak) is quite clear what he doesn’t want by way of a career:
“I've thought about this quite a bit sir and I would have to say considering what's waiting out there for me, I don't want to sell anything, buy anything or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed or buy anything sold or processed or repair anything sold, bought or processed as a career. I don’t want to do that. My father's in the army. He wants me to join, but I can't work for that corporation.”
There’s no getting away from the fact that it’s nice to have a choice; but faced with an infinite number of alternatives and no easy way to navigate through them, that choice soon turns into a major headache.
For some time now social psychologists have been interested in the phenomenon of “too much choice”. A decade or so ago, one study compared stalls selling jam in a supermarket: the stall offering 24 alternative flavours attracted more attention. But the stall with just six ended up selling seven times as much jam.
More recently other studies have explored what causes this slightly counter-intuitive response to a large choice in customers’ minds, and what they’ve discovered is incredibly important.
Read on to find out what we now know about choice †††
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© 2009 Philip Graves Consumer Behaviour Research Resource. All rights reserved.
