Choice Paralysis Quotes

About 60% of the people stopped when we had 24 jams on display and then at the times when we had 6 different flavors of jam out on display only 40% of the people actually stopped, so more people were clearly attracted to the larger varieties of options, but then when it came down to buying, so the second thing we looked at is in what case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam. What we found was that of the people who stopped when there were 24 different flavors of jam out on display only 3% of them actually bought a jar of jam whereas of the people who stopped when there were 6 different flavors of jam 30% of them actually bought a jar of jam.

When you give people too many choices it makes them hesitate and not buy stuff.

They [people] start asking themselves "Well which one is the best? Which one would be good for me?" And all those questions are much easier to ask if you're choosing from six than when you're choosing from 24 and if you look at the marketplace today most often we have a lot more than 24 of things to choose from.

People of the future may suffer not from an absence of choice but from a paralysing surfeit of it. They may turn out to be victims of that peculiarly super-industrial dilemma: overchoice.

I'm the type of guy where, if I see, like, 20 songs, I don't even wanna listen to one of 'em 'cause it's too much.

We began to look at "Why is that?" And a large part of that has to do with the fact that when people have a lot of options to choose from they don't know how to tell them apart. They don't know how to keep track of them.

My problem is not that there are too few ideas out there. It's that there are too many.

I'd like to be more decisive. I can take an hour to choose between two brands of washing powder in the supermarket.

Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented with not two or even three but dozens of choices, and you can begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order.

I'm plagued with indecision in my life. I can't figure out what to order in a restaurant.

And in a world where we have too many choices and too little time, the obvious thing to do is just ignore stuff. And my parable here is, you're driving down the road and you see a cow, and you keep driving 'cause you've seen cows before. Cows are invisible. Cows are boring. Who's going to stop and pull over and say, oh, look, a cow? Nobody.

Shopping can be a nightmare - first finding something to wear and then finding something to go with it, it's so difficult when there's so much choice. It can feel like entering a battleground.

My washing machine overwhelms me with its options and its sophistication.

People aren't able to make decisions anymore because there's too many choices within that decision.

There is a different attitude about, you know, how much differentiation there needs to be between our options and how many choices do I need to have in order to make a choice.

What leads us astray is confusing more choices with more control. Because it is not clear that the more choices you have the more in control you feel. We have more choices than we've ever had before.

When people have too many choices, they make bad choices.

The more there is on offer, the more you don't want. Fifty options of cereal does not hone an epicurean expertise in the finer points of puffed rice, it murders appetite.

Under our present enormous accumulation of books, I do affirm that a most miserable distraction of choice must be very generally incident to the times; that the symptoms of it are in fact very prevalent, and that one of the chief symptoms is an enormous 'gluttonism' for books.

We also don't always know what we want. And in those cases it can actually make us worse off because it's actually easier to figure out what you want and to figure out how the options differ if you have about a handful of them than if you have a hundred of them.