The Dilemma of Too Many Doors

About 6 months ago, I’ve written a post called “Making a Choice, Any Choice” which covered some some of the problems associated with indecisiveness. Getting stuck in a “limbo” between multiple options, unable to commit to any specific one, can end up being even more damaging that making a wrong choice.

A few weeks ago, I’ve read a book called “Predictably Irrational”, by Dan Ariely, which goes into some of the irrational, yet expected and predictable behaviors that people seem to repeat again and again. One of the behaviors covered was the the difficulties we face when minimizing or removing choices.

In general, we all feel that having no choice is a bad thing. Especially in the Western world, we grow up feeling that the more we have to choose from, the better our odds are at selecting the right choice. However, as counterintuitive as it may be, it turns out that having too many choices ends up being bad for us just as well. Not only it makes it more difficult to make a commitment, but it also ends up wasting our time as we contemplate each of the possibilities.

The Effect of Too Many Doors

A great example of this was shown in an experiment conducted by Dan Ariely. In the experiment, he selected 3 groups of MIT students and asked them to play a simple computer game.

In the game, they saw 3 doors on the screen. The first click on any of the doors would open it, and any subsequent click on the open door would earn them a random amount of money. At any point, they could “spend a click” on opening another door, which would also close the previous one (these clicks would not earn them cash).

The objective was to earn as much money as possible with a limit of 50 clicks. Since the amounts were random, the best strategy was to waste as little clicks as possible on opening doors and instead use them within a single door as “money-generating” clicks. Most people figured it out relatively quickly. Simple enough, yes?

The second group of people had a similar task. The difference was that with every click they would make within 1 door, the other doors would begin to diminish by 1/8th. In other words, if a door wouldn’t get any “attention” within 8 clicks, it would disappear completely off the screen. However, clicking on a disappearing door during that time would bring it back to full size and allow you to generate money within it.

This twist doesn’t change the strategy people should pursue. It’s still more profitable to use up your clicks within a single door rather than try to resurrect disappearing ones. Did the students get that? The results are shocking — most people had such an aversion to “losing” the doors, that they would jump from one to the other throughout the entire game. End result? Much poorer performance than the first group.

Final group had a similar experience, except that they were told that even if a door disappears completely off the screen, they can always bring it back by clicking once in its space. In other words, it was only an illusion of disappearing and the students knew it. How did they perform? As poorly as group #2. Even though they knew that the door can be brought back at any moment, they simply could not bear to see even the illusion of losing the door.

The Downside of Choice

As the experiment shows, there are a few issues that are surprising and worrying.

First, having more choices does not always yield us better results. Having 5 vacation destinations to choose from instead of a single 1 may actually diminish our enjoyment of any of them because we are always concerned about what we “could” be missing out on. It’s also been said that it’s more difficult to find and form relationships in a busy urban area than a smaller, more compact town precisely because of a dizzying array of choice. Having more options keeps us from committing to any single one and giving it our all.

Second issue is our aversion to loss. Even if we rationally understand that we don’t need to have a dozen options to choose from when it comes down to selecting a vacation destination or a brand of batteries, it is very difficult to willingly remove a choice. We see this behavior reoccur in many other scenarios — for example, finding $100 on the street will make us a bit happy. However, losing your wallet with $100 will make us feel worse by an order of magnitude. There is certainly a reason why people say that we often don’t know exactly what we have until we lose it.

Now What?

If we have unlimited energy and unlimited time, perhaps we could keep as many “doors” as we want open. However, given our limitations, there is a cost associated with spreading yourself thin, trying to do it all, and not giving your full commitment to any one thing. As the doors experiment clearly showed, we can often come out at a loss when we try to do it all at once.

As Dan Ariely highlights, perhaps that once we become better aware of our emotions when it comes down to options and aversion to loss, we end up in a position to make better judgments.

I think so.

Originally published at www.quarterlifemusings.com on September 10, 2010.