How does closure affect choice overload?
In last week's behavioral economics class, we were discussing choice overload effect. It is well-established that having too many options to choose from affects how happy we are with our choice negatively. This means we are less happy with our choice when we have more options to choose from, potentially because of cognitive load for comparison, regret escalation etc. But moving this forward, in class, we discussed an interesting experiment on how closure effects happiness with choices made.
In this experiment, two groups of people were asked to pick a chocolate from a box with 6 types of chocolates or 24 types of chocolates. In the earlier version, people who picked from the 6 chocolates were happier with their choice than the ones who picked from 24. This is due to choice overload.
Now the twist.. In this variation, people were asked to close the lid of the box after they pick the chocolate. This time, both the groups of people were equally happy with their choices. That was my 'epiphany moment' on handling choice overload. Sometimes we need to 'close the lid' on the other options to be happy with our decision and avoid regret.
So that's one non-academic take-away for me: To close the lid on the options which I need to leave behind :)
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