We live in societies where abundance is presented as a promise. More varieties of yogurt, more streaming platforms, more pricing plans, more candidates on dating apps. Liberation through choice is one of the founding stories of our modern economies. Yet a well-documented phenomenon in psychology disrupts this picture: the more options we have, the less satisfied we are with our decisions, and sometimes we simply stop deciding at all.

The jam experiment that changed everything

In 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar (Columbia University) and Mark Lepper (Stanford) conducted an experiment that has become a classic in consumer psychology textbooks. In a California supermarket, they set up a tasting booth for artisanal jams. On the first day, the booth offered 24 different varieties. On the second, only 6.

The result was surprising: 60% of customers stopped in front of the large display, compared with 40% in front of the small one. Up to that point, abundance seemed to be winning. But when it came time to buy, the numbers reversed dramatically: 30% of visitors to the 6-jam booth bought a jar, compared with only 3% of those facing 24 options. In other words, too much choice attracts attention but breaks the intention to act.

This study opened a crack in the ideological edifice of the free market: more choice is not always better. The idea was theorized and popularized by American psychologist Barry Schwartz in his book The Paradox of Choice : Why More Is Less, published in 2004.

Why the brain capitulates in the face of abundance

The mechanism is linked to the cognitive cost of decision-making. Each additional option is a piece of information to process, a comparison to make, a trade-off to evaluate. This mental work is not free: it mobilizes attentional energy, what researchers call “cognitive load.” Beyond a certain threshold, the brain prefers to postpone or abandon the decision rather than continue comparing.

This phenomenon has a name: decision paralysis, or “analysis paralysis.” We recognize it in ordinary everyday situations: spending forty minutes on Netflix without choosing anything, abandoning an online cart after comparing twenty products, or putting off a professional decision until tomorrow because all the options seem valid.

The problem does not stop at the difficulty of deciding. It continues after the decision. The higher the number of options, the more intense post-purchase regret tends to be. The reason is simple: with 6 possibilities, there are not many reasons to dwell on the alternatives. With 24, the path not taken remains clearly visible, and the imagination runs wild over what could have been chosen instead.

Maximizers and satisficers: two ways of inhabiting the world

Schwartz distinguishes between two profiles of decision-makers. Maximizers systematically look for the best possible option: they compare, track, evaluate and revisit. Satisficers (a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice) stop as soon as an option meets their essential criteria, without trying to find out whether something better existed.

Studies by Schwartz and his colleagues show that maximizers objectively obtain better results at the end of their searches — they find better-paid jobs, for example. But they are less satisfied with them. They are more prone to depressive states, feel more regret and compare themselves with others more easily. Being demanding has a real psychological cost.

“The secret to happiness is low expectations.” — Barry Schwartz, a provocative but illuminating summary of his own work.

When platforms amplify the problem

What used to be a phenomenon found in supermarket aisles has become, with digital technology, a permanent experience. Netflix has thousands of titles depending on regional catalogs. Spotify offers more than 100 million tracks. Dating apps present a theoretically unlimited number of profiles. Amazon often offers dozens of versions of the same product, differentiated by minor parameters.

Platforms know this. That is precisely why recommendation algorithms were developed: to artificially reduce the field of possibilities and reintroduce the friction that pushes people to choose. Algorithmic curation is a technical response to the paradox of choice. It is also, it must be said, a way of controlling what we see — with the biases and blind spots that this implies.

What this changes in real life

Understanding the paradox of choice is not just an intellectual exercise. It is a practical key to better organizing our decisions. A few principles follow from this research:

• Voluntarily reduce options. When facing a difficult decision, start by eliminating rather than adding. Set firm criteria before comparing.
• Accept “good enough.” In most everyday decisions, the difference between the best option and a good option is tiny compared with the cognitive and emotional cost of exhaustive searching.
• Limit comparison after the fact. Once a decision has been made, avoid continuing to explore alternatives. Regret is often less linked to the real quality of the choice than to the idealization of what was not chosen.
• Distinguish reversible from irreversible. Save decision-making energy for the choices that truly matter, and treat ordinary decisions as adjustable.

A paradox that says something about us

The paradox of choice reveals something deep about our relationship to freedom. We want to have choices, and we need them in order to feel autonomous. But the freedom to choose between a thousand options is not the same thing as the freedom to live well. One is quantitative, the other qualitative.

Consumer societies have spent decades building the equivalence between the two. Psychology now spends its time demonstrating that they are sometimes opposed. Having fewer options can, in some contexts, produce more satisfaction, more commitment, and perhaps also more real happiness. It is an uncomfortable observation for our time — and perhaps that is why it remains underestimated.