Choice Overload

anywhere food. He's love New Haven. It's a town filled with gourmet restaurants, funky hipster bars, world famous pizza joints, and even food trucks. Whatever you're in the mood for, it's usually just a few blocks away. Pizza too cheesy, cheesy, Mexican food to spicy. My mom's a picky eater, and we don't always have the same preferences, but in New Hay we're usually okay sushi, no sushi, carrean fried chicken, no. I don't really like Asian food regularly, chicken would be good.

Fifteen minutes and about one hundred options later, we finally find a place that works, a restaurant that does great salads made to order, beta tofu, olives, bacon, archokarts, gorgonzola, avocado, walnuts, crazins, Crazins dressing on the side. Yep, I usually feel really blessed to have such a variety of tasty cuisine on my doorstep, and having the ability to customize all the ingredients in our order usually feels empowering, like we're in control,

white fish. But as I scrolled through restaurant after restaurant, menu after menu with my mom, I started to feel a bit drained, a bit depleted, maybe even a bit defeated. All right, that's what you want, Okay, great ordered. Yeah, it's your birthday, you get to get what you need. So what if our obsession with choice isn't all that it's cracked up to be. What if all this choice is making us less satisfied and more unhappy than we think. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to

be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy. The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santans. I'm sitting in Louise Lunch, which is said to be the birthplace of an American classic. It's just down the street from my house.

Around nineteen hundred, Louie Lasson, Danish immigrant and lunch wagon proprietor, was dealing with the difficult customer. According to family legend, a regular named Gary Woodmore hurried in and shouted, slap a meat puck between two planks and step on it. But Louie was out of whole stakes. Trying to placate the man, Louie quickly grilled up some ground beef trimmings, stuck it between two slices of toast, and handed it off With that hurried act. It said that the first

American hamburger was invented. There's still some controversy about this origin story, but what makes Louise Lunch different from the other alleged hamburger creators is the fact that they've doubled down on the very sandwich that people loved a hundred years ago. When you walk into Louise Lunch today, you can order the same burger that Woodmore enjoyed, but pretty much nothing else. You can add cheese, tomato, and onion, but that's it. No bacon, no lettuce, just a straight

up burger. And never ever ask the staff for ketchup. If somebody came in and ask you, guys for ketchup, what would you say? We politely decline it most of the time. That's Jeff Lassen, Louie's great grandson and the current owner. One of the cooks gave us a slightly more nuanced reply, what we really do, get the hell out of here. It don't come back. Louise unique selling point is the fact that you don't have to choose.

In fact, you can't, which makes walking into Louise Lunch a very different experience than entering any other New Haven restaurant. Their menus feel like a small book. A lot of people and restaurants do have a lot of options and they try to cater everybody. But we stick to what we do best and what we've been doing for a hundred twenty four years, and that's keeping it himple and making it easy for not only ourselves but everybody else. And when you do that and do what you do best,

I think you have a better product. But as Jeff right do you really have a better product when you limit your customers choices. Wouldn't having more options actually make our experience better? That's what psychologists Shena Hyangar and Mark Lepper set out to test in a famous study. They headed to one of Ayangar's favorite shops, the famous Drager's Market, a high end store in Menlo Park, California, for two

Saturday afternoons in a row. A. Yongar and Lepper had research assistance dress up Lake store employees near a table at the entrance. Customers who stopped by were promised a dollar off their purchase of high end Wilkin and Son's jam if they tried some free samples. What the researchers varied was how many jams people had a chance to taste. Some customers could sample six different kinds of jam Kiwi, peach, black cherry, three fruits, marmalade, lemon, curd red current, which

you might think already sounds like a lot. But at other times, the researchers increased that jam selection fourfold. People had a chance to sample a whopping twenty four different kinds of jam. Did the difference in the number of jams of the affect people's behaviors. While twenty percent more people stopped at the table when twenty four jams were on offer, which makes sense, right, more jams to sample, more people show up to check them out. But did

the number of people who bought something increase? After all, those customers had a chance to sample nearly all the available Wilkins and sun jams in existence, so they surely found one they liked. But surprisingly that's not what happened. With six jams to taste. About thirty percent of people ended up using their coupon, but when shoppers were faced with twenty four jams, only three percent made a purchase. Ten times more customers bought something when they were given

fewer options. Paradoxically, giving people more choice made people buy less stuff. Everyone has had the experience of walking into a store and just wanting to turn around and walk out. This is Verry Schortz, a professor at the Host School of Business, UC Berkeley. He has written an entire book drawing on experiments like that jam study. They pretty much all show the same thing. When we're faced with lots of options, we become paralyzed by them. So he called

his book The Paradox of choice. There's a set of beliefs that are so deeply embedded in us that I don't even think we realized we hold them, and that is that if you want to enhance people's wellbeing, you want to enhance their freedom. And if you want to enhance their freedom, you have to enhance their choice. And that seems so obviously true that it didn't occur to anyone to investigate it. It occurred to Barry, though, he spent decades figuring out how this explosion of choice is

affecting our well being. He started simply. He just walked the aisles of his local supermarket and began counting. There were two hundred and seventy five different kinds of cookies and one hundred and fifty salad dressings, thirty different kinds of aspirin. The only way we get through a trip to the supermarket is that ninety of what we buy is the same stuff we bought last week, and everything else is invisible to us. And if we actually started

paying attention to everything, we've starved to death. Before we finished our weekly shopping trip. Barry got me thinking about the seemingly minor choices I face on a daily basis, it's dizzy ing take blopping down to watch something on Netflix. Even if I just look at what Netflix recommends for me personally, it's overwhelming. It can feel like hundreds of options. There's some little bit of evidence that what happens when you do that is people end up just throwing up

their hands and watching a movie they've already seen. They go for the familiar because they can't figure out how to choose among the unfamiliar. I started to do the math on just how overwhelming some of these choices are. Take a visit to one well known coffee shop, it's Starbucks. How many different drink options does that company offer? It

turns out over eighty eighty thousand. To put that in perspective, if I went to that coffee shop with Starbucks three times a day, every single day for the rest of my life, I'd need to live to one hundred and fifteen years old just to try all those permutations. And that's not even including the seasonal pumpkin spice drinks. Do we seriously need that many choices? And say you do discover that perfect coffee and that huge haystack of choice, the tragic thing is you won't actually enjoy it all

that much. Our minds might tell us that finding the best of eighty thousand options will feel like an achievement, but that's simply not the case. One study had people imagine trying to find a greeting card for a coworker, either picking from shelf after shelf of cards or just a limited selection, who turned out to be the least

satisfied with their purchase. You guessed it. The shoppers with a gazillion choices, it's so easy to imagine that one of the options they rejected would have been better than the one they chose. The more you compare, the more the thing you've chosen suffers. So you end up making a good decision and feeling bad about it. And that is the cruel irony of all these choices. When lots of options are present, Even if we do well, we still feel worse. But lack of satisfaction isn't the only

issue with all these choices. There's a bigger problem. Our poor minds just can't handle comparing one hundred greeting cards or eighty thousand coffee drinks all at once. Human brains simply don't have the capacity to accurately decide whether a Ventisoi latte with caramel is tastier than seventy nine, nine hundred and ninety nine other options, at least not in real time. So we just filter most of the other options out. But all that filtering still comes at a

serious cost to our well being. Just seeing all those choices above the counter is cognitively draining, so draining that it leads to worst decisions later on, a phenomenon the behavioral scientists call decision fatigue. We all suffer from this phenomenon to a certain degree, but only some of us realize it. Take Barack Obama for example. He clearly got it. I don't know if you've noticed it. He always wore a white shirt, and he kind of cycled through his suits.

When asked about his repetitive wardrobe, the President summed up decision fatigue perfectly. Obama said, have you got any idea how many decisions I have to make in a day? Do you think I want to spend time to side where forget the important stuff like whether it were a blue suit or a gray suit, and worry about the trivial things like making sure everyone has healthcare. Obama is right about this. We only have a certain amount of

mental effort to put towards the hard decisions. If we waste that effort on, say, ordering coffee or picking out a tie, we won't have the mental wherewithal needed for the important choices. There's a study shows that when you have people make a hundred hypothetical decisions, all trivial, and then you give them a task that challenges their self control, they give up easily. So choosing is exhausting, even when

it's about trivial stuff. It just wears you out. But it gets worse because it turns out all those decidedly non trivial choices in life, they're also set up in ways that overload us. We're given too many options there as well to raise the stakes. The same thing happens with four oh one K retirement participation, and they found that the more options you offered, the less likely people were to choose any You lost about two percent for

every ten options. And in many cases, workers were passing up matching money from the employer by not signing up, So the single worst thing they could do was choose none of the above. When people are faced with too many retirement plans, they don't know how to make the decision, and so they put it off. There had to be a decision about which fund. I don't know how to make that decision. I'll decide tomorrow. But tomorrow isn't any

different from today. So it just keeps getting postponed and postponed. And I'm sure that everyone thought they were doing employees a favor by offering all these options. We'll just lay them all out there and you can get exactly the set of investments that you want. What a gift, Well, no, a curse actually, So why do companies keep cursing us like this, especially when people would buy more things if

there were fewer choices. There's a reason for this. I think somebody walks into your store and says, do you have Royal Crown Cola? You just have Coco and pepsi, And so this person walks out empty handed. Well, that's a smack in your face. That's a sale you would have made if only you'd had Royal Crown Cola. Someone else comes into a store and buys five dollars worth of stuff instead of fifteen dollars because you've tortured them

with so many options. It's invisible to you. You don't know the price you're paying by making it more complicated than it needs to be. So the crazy thing with the choice overload is that I know this work like a senior Ted talk write your book, But even I, you know, would I rather have a Netflix with ten films or ten million films? I still have the intuition that I want more choice. I know everybody does. When Barry lectures about this work, he gets a lot of pushback,

especially from his students. I can see they're kind of smirking, and I think that what they think is he's old. He doesn't know how to take advantage of what the modern world offers. And sometimes one of them will actually have the nerve to say that, And when they do, I'm delighted because I say, you know, I think that's really what it is. That must explain why it is that eighty five percent of you are clinically depressed and nine of you are going to see a shrink because

you handle this all oh well. Choosing between jams is a pain, and picking a good four one K plan can have big financial consequences. When I first started thinking about this episode, I was focused on these kinds of decisions, ones that are having a huge impact on our well being, but are largely run of the mill. Personal preference is stuff cases where there's no real right decision to be made.

But as I read more and more of the work on Choice Overload, I realized that we're now being asked to make decisions and domains that go way beyond shopping. The buck also stops with us for decisions that can have critical moral consequences, ones that literally involve life and death.

Maybe you got admitted to the hospital because you felt like you felt terrible for a while, and then they told you had leukemia and that you could have a really aggressive chemotherapy that might kill you and might save your life, or chantler chemotherapy that's going to slow down this leukemia but never cure you of it. And you have to figure out that night which type of chemotherapy to start. Hard to think of a harder decision to make.

The Happiness Lab will be right back. It was spring and twenty one year old Karen Anne Quinlin had just moved away from home. For the last few days, she'd been on a crash diet, hoping to fit into a new dress for an upcoming party. After a couple of drinks and some valium. Karen felt dizzy, so her friends took her home and put her to bed, But then Karen stopped breathing in a few minutes. It took her housemates to notice her brain suffered huge and irreparable damage.

Karen wasn't dead, there were tiny signs of brain activity, but her doctors were gloomy about the prospect that she would ever recover. Karen's play dramatically pitted her parents, Joseph and Julia Quinlan, against the medical profession in a way never seen before. Karen's parents were devout Catholics. They thought the machine that was helping her to breathe should be shut off the family. The parents decided it was morally acceptable.

In fact, the best thing to do would be to take the ventilator away, let their daughter die so she could be with God. This is Peter Ubel, a physician and behavioral scientist at Duke University. And the doctors refused. They said that would be killing her, and they didn't do that, and it wasn't The parents decision to make the argument soon made it to core were the judge rule that the treating physician had to make the call.

Legally speaking, the Quinlan's were not allowed to govern what treatment their daughter received, but the couple didn't give up. They soon appealed. The New Jersey State Supreme Court said, yeah, no, the parents do have the right here. It is their daughter, and it's not a medical decision here, it's a moral decision and the doctors aren't the ones to decide what's right or wrong in that case. Peter thinks this was a pivotal moment in a wider generational movement demanding more

choice in our lives. Around the same time, this is around the seventies, you're seeing a lot of people in the United States in particular, who are kind of standing up to the power, the power that's got people in a war they don't want to be in, that's trying to keep people from voting that want to vote. And I think the patient empowerment movement kind of fit into that narrative. And you saw people not only lawyers, but theologians and philosophers and enlightened physicians saying we need to

give patients a bigger role in their decisions. It's their bodies, after all, they have a right to know what we're doing to them and why. But this level of patient choice in medicine was totally new for all of human history. Before this, it was doctor knows best. You as a patient just trusted this person to tell you what to do.

Going back to the time of Hippocrity, the physicians were told not to burden people with knowledge that wouldn't help them, and he typically he might or might not tell you what's even wrong with you. Maybe you just were told you had a shadow on your X ray, but it was really a cancer that doctor knew it but didn't want to worry you. In his work, Peter records real interactions between physicians and patients, playing them back. It's clear to Peter that things have changed a lot. Oh now

it's a mess. It's pretty common to run into a patient who says, well, okay, doctor, what should I do? And then the doctor says, well, it's for you to decide. I can't tell you what to do. It's your choice. That can drive patients crazy. I don't think doctors know what we're supposed to do anymore. It's gone from doctor knows best to patient knows best. But do patients really

know best? After all, they don't have decades of medical training, constant refresher courses, and new medical journals dropping on their doorstep every month. The modern revolution of patient choice has given decision power to people who don't often have the information they need, and Peter's research shows that doctors try to help, but they often do it badly. They know one thing, we need to inform the hell out of

this patient. That's the one thing that doctors have pretty universally taken as the lesson from this patient empowerment revolution of the seventies and eighties. Patients deserve information. Rarely do they know the best way to give them that information, how much to give them, And even more rarely do they assess patient understanding in a really good way before they then work to make a decision with the patient.

So we have more information, maybe even more options on the table, but it's not clear that patients know how to make the best choice that's right, or that doctors know how to partner with them to make those choices. Peters no stranger to these kinds of awful situations. In fact, he's faced them in his own family. My wife had early stage breast cancer diagnosed about seven years ago. She was in her forties, still that's a bad aged. Well, there's no good age to be diagnosed with breastcancer, but

it's especially serious when you're younger. Like that, Peter's wife was offered many choices about her treatment, the first being whether she wanted her whole breast removed or just the tumor. Being a physician, Peter dug into the data on all of these options. To his horror, he found out the way the choices were being framed didn't accurately reflect the

risks or rewards of each of the options. Studying the figures, Peter found that extending his wife's treatment by a week only slightly decreased the chance of her tumor returning, but massively increased the chances of his wife's suffering painful and disfiguring side effects. And that to me feels like a choice that a patient ought to be able to make.

And yet almost any woman would have walked into that situation and just be told that she had a sixth week of treatment coming, and not told what the pros and cons of that choice are. So, while the doctors were placing the weight of the decision making onto the couple's shoulders, they seem to have no system in place to give Peter and his wife the information they needed

to make an informed choice. That either means they overinform you often about things irrelevant to the decision, to where you're so confused you don't know what to do, or they selectively inform you, thinking they're telling you what you need to know, and maybe they're making the wrong assumption. It's a really tough place to make a decision, but it got worse. Having made a series of choices, Peter's wife finally had an operation, a lumpectomy to remove the cancer.

As part of the procedure, the team inspected nearby tissue to see if her disease had spread, and they found one lymphanode that was a centimeter large that was basically tumor. And the surgeon calls calls me up. My wife is still under anesthesia. They're part way through the operation, and so he poses me how many of these lymphnodes you want me to go after? And then I'm just like, Okay, so my wife's under anesthesia. I have to decide how many of our lymphnotes remove and one possibility is I

say don't remove anymore. And then she wakes up and then decides, boy, I wish we'd had and removed and do they have to go back into a second surgeon or I remove them? And then she's going to wake up later and say you had them remove all those lymph nodes and I'm going to have all that swelling. That was my choice. The surreal exchange went back and forth with a heavy heart and fearing the awful side effects.

Peter said, the lymph nodes should come out. How did the doctor not anticipate that this was a possible branch point? How did that surgeon not talk to both of us beforehand? And now, look there's a possibility. You know they always go in and look at lymph nodes. Why didn't he tell us, you know, we're going to have to figure out what to do if any of them show cancer in them, and you face this burden. I mean, it would be awful for your wife to face this burden

because it's a hard choice. But it's not your body. It's her body that's right, and to her credit, she didn't ever make me feel like it made the wrong choice. But it's to never a position I should have been put in. Yeah, yeah, very preventable. Working on this episode, I've now started noticing all the decisions I'm faced with on a daily basis. Luckily I haven't recently faced thing as hard as Peter and his wife had to deal with.

But it still feels like there's no escape from all these decisions and that nagging feeling that I'm making the wrong choices all the time. And so I started to look for some role models, people who had found a way out of the trap of too much choice. A typical day for me would involve, you know, just so many questions, and each answer to those questions was a decision that I was making. This is writer and blogger

Courtney Carver. Back in two thousand and six, she received some life shattering news, and she reacted in exactly the way that the science of psychology recommends. She stopped treating lots of choices as a good thing. Let's get rid of these decisions that we make every day that don't have a whole lot of impact on our lives. The

Happiness Lab will be right back. This is clearly a very very popular session, So once again, while you are welcome to stand along the sides of the room and then back, please know that I met Courtney Carver last winter, well, we did a panel discussion together at the Massachusetts Conference for Women. The main room was completely packed if you also want to be, as Hamilton the musical would say, in the room where it happened, we certainly welcome you to come in and cozy up. The clamor for seats

didn't surprise me. The topic we were set to discuss was burnout and how to avoid it. All right, clearly, we have nothing to talk about here, right and burnout is not a common problem for any of us, as I conceived by the packed house we have here. The panel was promoting a really positive goal, but it centered on an idea that all of us have to say no a little bit more for the sake of our happiness. And Courtney Carver is a bit of a rock star

in the saying no movement. Even on a good day, most of us have more decisions than we want to deal with to make, like what we're going to wear in the morning. That for sure, always seemed to overwhelm me as an advertising exect. Having lots of fashion choices was important to Courtney, but choosing something cool to wear every morning was exhausting, so she made a radical decision.

I had been simplifying other areas of my life for years, but I never considered the closet or shopping because I just thought that was an essential part of my life. But the simpler the rest of my life got, the more chaotic my closet felt, and I thought, I wonder

what it would be like to dress with less. She decided to reduce her wardrobe choices, just like Obama did, and so I created a challenge, a minimalist fashion challenge that I named Project three thirty three, where I would dress with thirty three items for three months, including clothes, jewelry, accessories, and shoes, not counting underwear, sleepware like at home loungewear or workout clothes. I didn't get rid of everything right away. I just boxed it up and got it out of

sight for three months. I just thought there might be a lot to learn from that. So what did you learn? Well? So much. The first thing I learned is that my clothes and my closet was stressful, and that it sent me into the day feeling a bit frazzled, And it was just so relieving for me. I felt so good that I didn't have to look at all of my bad purchase decisions, the clothes that didn't fit me, the clothes I didn't enjoy or like, the clothes with tags

still hanging. You know, I would buy something thinking it was such a great deal, and then I would never even cut the tags off and wear it. But not everyone takes to Project three thirty three straight away. Some people are even horrified by the idea. I definitely get some pushback from people wondering or challenging. You know, isn't that so boring, That's so uncreative. I could never do that.

I remember the first day before I opened my closet, thinking I'm not going to have enough people are going to notice. But I remember when I opened the closet, all I felt was calm and peace, and here are my choices. You know, I don't have to express my creativity by what I wear. There wasn't anything I was ever really excited about. It was something that I felt compelled to do to fit in, and in reality I

didn't have to work as hard as I did. Courtney's realization that she was a slave to her extensive wardrobe strikes a chord with many other women, and her Project three thirty three idea is catching on. I don't know officially how many people have done it, but I suspect

it's in the tens of thousands. And it's so wonderful to see people sharing a lot of the same benefits in terms of less stress and anxiety, getting ready on time, more peaceful mournings, saving money, saving energy, being more creative

in other areas of their life. It's fascinating. Courtney is a thoughtful and articulate advocate for simplifying our daily routines, and her book, Soulful Simplicity provides a lot of helpful advice, But it's Courtney's personal story that makes her argument all the more compelling, because Courtney was on the same choice treadmill as the rest of us until two thousand and six, when things started to really go wrong for her. I didn't feel well. I had vertigo and some tingling in

my face. I was very tired, extremely fatigued. As a busy professional in mother, Courtney just assumed these unnerving feelings were nothing more than the side effects of stress. I was behind on a lot of work deadlines, I was volunteering at my daughter's school, I was traveling, and just trying to do all the things that most of us try to fit into a normal day, and it was overwhelming. On top of all of this, Courtney was also in training for a charity cycling of it in fifty mile

race to support the Multiple Sclerosis Society. My boss at the time had MS and I was riding for him, but because I wasn't feeling well, I was in between doctor's appointments and tests and so dizzy that I really couldn't even ride my bike. I couldn't even walk a straight line most of the time. Eventually, she had to give up on the race. Her doctors had finally figured out what was wrong MS. The very disease that had struck her boss's nervous system was also at the root

of courtney symptoms too. On top of really feeling crappy, to get this diagnosis that was terrible. I had nothing but fear initially, and in my case, I was diagnosed over the phone while I was at work. I said, what's next? What should I do? It was just the sort of awful phone call that Peter Eubull was telling us about. Courtney was immediately asked to make choices. She was totally unprepared for She said, why don't you come in and pick up some marketing kits for the drugs

that are available and pick one? Oh my gosh, and I just thought, I mean, what's nuts? When I look back on it is I just thought, Okay, that's what you do, So that's what I did. The entire situation was overwhelming, and it forced Courtney to ask a lot of hard questions, what are you doing with your life? Is this how you want to live? Are these the

choices that you want to make? I don't, by any means think that I caused this disease, but I know that the stress in my life contributed to exacerbations and relapses. And I started to see all of the things that I had built my life around and added to my life over the years that were stressful, and so I set out to eliminate as much of that stress as possible. What's most fascinating is that Project three thirty three hasn't

just improved Courtney's mood and her bank account. Courtney also attributes reducing her choices with making her feel better physically. Since reducing her closet choices, Courtney's MS has improved. So now I am symptom free. For the most part. I feel better than I did even prior to my diagnosis because I'm taking so much better care of myself. Courtney's

story isn't just about fitting out her wardrobe. Courtney's mind had lied to her for years and years, but she woke up to it and it's made her so much happier than she ever expected. I think that we're conditioned to believe that more is always the answer, and that will be happier with more. Things will be better with more, will be more loved if we prove ourselves more. But as it turns out, less, at least for me, is

the answer. You know, less choosing, less doing. I'm much happier with doing less making this episode has that a real impact on me. Reducing the choice overload in our daily lives. It's no easy feat, but I'm trying. I recently decided to start my day with the exact same breakfast every morning. It's not much, but it's one less decision to contend with before I get to the real

choices that face me in the grind ahead. So look for your own little strategies to reduce choices and apply them whenever you can and steal some hints from the masters, like research or berry shorts. He shared a great tip that I'll try next time I sit down at a restaurant. I don't even look at the menu. I don't care how many options there are. I wait for everyone else to order, and then I choose whichever of those dishes sounds best to me. So, in effect, I'm choosing from

three or from five, and not from fifteen. And so I'll leave this episode with a final thought, which is, don't get bogged down by all the big menus in life. Ask yourself, how can I cut down on some of the decision in my own life? And how can I help my friends get happier doing the same. Here's one easy first step. If a friend is looking for a new podcast among the seven hundred thousand available, you can just tell them, Hey, you should try The Happiness Lab

with doctor Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley. The show is mixed and mastered by Evan Viola and edited by Julia Barton, fact checking by Joseph Friedman, and our original music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Mila Belle, Carl mcgliori, Heather Faine, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, and Jacob Weisberg. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me Doctor Laurie Santos