Ditherer's Dilemma

By PETER AYTON

THE gravity of the problem hit me in a bar in New Mexico. On offer were no fewer than 24 beers, all described in glowing terms, all bewilderingly unfamiliar.

So there I was, fresh from the annual meeting of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, and behaving like Buridan's Ass-the imaginary creature which starved midway between two troughs of hay because it couldn't decide which to go for. Then, a reprieve. At the bottom of the menu was an invitation to try a "sampler tray"-24 whisky glasses, each with a splash of one of the beers. Perfect. But as I worked through them, tension mounted, which would I choose for the next round?

Everywhere you look, choice is on the increase and getting more complex. We spend hours surveying ever-expanding ranges of pensions, mortgages and mobile phones, fearful that if we don't make the effort we will live to regret it. And worst of all, this form of low-grade torture is, according to the politicians, supposed to make us happy.

What the politicians overlook, however, is that with increasing choice comes an increase in the number of potentially alluring options that must be forsaken-and no-one wants to forsake alluring things. Take people with cable TV who spend all evening channel-hopping. Having more choice hasn't made them content, it's made them frightened that they might be missing something.

Clearly, we need help. We need to be taught at a young age how to narrow the options down rationally, eliminating those we are prepared to forgo. That way we're bound to end up choosing the products whose qualities we like best. Aren't we?

Sadly, it's not that simple-as Princeton University psychologist Eldar Shafir discovered when he offered people pairs of options. One of each pair always had both good and bad points, for example an ice cream with a delicious flavor and lots of cholesterol (call it X). The other option was always middling on all measures-a pleasant though unspectacular ice cream lower in cholesterol (Y). When asked which one they preferred, most people selected X, they seemed to focus on the flavor. Bizarrely, however, people also nominated X when asked which ice cream they didn't want.

The upshot? Although you might think that asking what you want should be the flip-side of asking what you don't want, it isn't? When you reject something you focus more on the negative features; when you select something you're focusing on the positive. So, whether it's an ice cream or a prospective employee, deciding what (or who) you want by a process of rational elimination may not actually give you what you want. There is no simple panacea to ease the pain of choice other than passing the buck, of course (hence the irksome cliche: "No, you decide").

As for you sadistic purveyors of all this choice, don't get too smug. When Sheena Sethi-Iyengar, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, set up a tasting counter for exotic jams in a grocery, she found that too much choice can be bad for business. More customers stopped to sample from a 24-jam counter than from a 6-jam counter. But only 3 per cent bought any jam when 24 were on offer, compared with 30 per cent when there were 6 to choose from. So what happened in New Mexico?

Easy-I ordered another sampler tray of 24 beers. Bottoms up!