Week 3

This week I was reading the "When Choice is De motivating: Can One Desire Too Much
of a Good Thing?" by Sheena S. Iyengar and Mark R. Lepper. The main idea of this article is talking about people have common supposition in modern society that the more choices, the better. But the participants actually reported greater subsequent satisfaction with their selections and wrote better essays when their original set of options had been limited.

The study using 3 different cases to establish the theory, they are:

1. Exotic jams
2. The extra credit assignment
3. Chocolate

The cases are all set to 2 different method, one is allow the participants have around 6 choices (limited-Choice), another is allow them have 24-30 choices (extensive-choice). Base on the results of the 3 studies, the researcher found that people seem to enjoy extensive-choice contexts more than limited-choice contexts, they may sometimes prefer to make available to themselves many more choices than they can possibly handle. although having more choices might appear desirable, it may sometimes have detrimental consequences for human motivation. Choosers in extensive-choice contexts enjoy the choice-making process more—presumably because of the opportunities it affords—but also feel more responsible for the choices they make, resulting in frustration with the choice-making process and dissatisfaction with their choices.

Therefore, it is worth considering attributes of contexts in which the provision of extensive choices does not lead to choice overload. such a finding may seem counterintuitive to social psychologists long schooled in research on the benefits of choice, the commercial world seems already to know what experimental psychologists are just now discovering. Several major manufacturers of a variety of consumer products have been streamlining the number of options they provide customers.