In either case, the entire set of 24 varieties was available for purchase. In one condition of the study, 6 varieties of the jam were available for tasting. When researchers set up a display featuring a line of exotic, high-quality jams, customers who came by could taste samples, and they were given a coupon for a dollar off if they bought a jar. Here’s how Schwartz describes the very memorable jam study, by the psychologists Mark Lepper and Sheena Iyengar: That’s a simplistic rendering of Schwartz’s argument - there’s an obvious difference between having a lot of political candidates to choose from in an election and having a lot of flavors of jam to choose from in a supermarket - but that’s the gist. It made a compelling if counterintuitive argument: even though many people ( economists especially) argue that more choice is almost always a good thing, Schwartz argued that too much choice is actually a bad thing, causing decision paralysis and unhappiness. The psychologist Barry Schwartz‘s book The Paradox of Choice (here’s his TED talk on the topic) was, for me at least, very persuasive.
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