Is more choice always better?

The best is the enemy of the good.

— Voltaire

A table with twenty-four kinds of jam stopped more shoppers; a table with six ended in a purchase more often. The experiment quickly became the emblem of the “paradox of choice”. Later the effect did not always replicate, and meta-analyses showed it depends heavily on conditions. That loss of universality is useful for a conversation about dating. What we need to find is the moment when an extra option stops widening access and starts taking information away from the ones already chosen.

Two meta-analytic results matter, for different reasons. An early review found a mean effect close to zero; a later analysis showed where overload appears more often: with complex sets, a hard task, uncertain preferences and the goal of making a final choice. In an online dating experiment, choosing from 24 profiles produced less satisfaction and more second-guessing a week later than choosing from six; across runs of swipes the probability of accepting the next profile gradually declined. These designs measure decisions about profiles, not the quality of future unions.

The app has driven the cost of the next profile appearing almost to zero, but not the cost of getting to know someone. Understanding a person still takes conversations, meetings and time. The flow of options has become wide; the bandwidth of attention has barely changed. For someone in a small town, a rare milieu or a narrow band of preferences, widening the pool is a direct gain. Past the point of saturation, the bottleneck is no longer access but the ability to find out.

When there are already more available profiles than can be meaningfully considered, a new unit of choice has a different price. It is not simply added to the previous ones: it is paid for with attention taken away from the ones already chosen.

The opportunity cost of a person

Economists call the best of what you have to give up the opportunity cost. In an app that cost is permanently present on the screen. While a conversation with one person is going on, hundreds of possible next ones lie beneath it. This changes how the current acquaintance is perceived. Any awkwardness is compared not with being alone and not with a real alternative partner, but with an imagined better version of the next profile. A real person always contains flaws. An unopened one does not yet. As the number of unopened options grows, stopping becomes more expensive. In choosing one person you lose not the specific people you know but a whole cloud of possibilities. A cloud cannot be checked and is therefore easy to idealise.

Under these conditions increasing the number of options can reduce the probability of choosing. Abundance did not spoil people; it made the cost of stopping psychologically more visible and the cost of searching on less visible.

A large catalogue demands quick rules. Age, height, profession, photographs and the wit of a description are available before you meet; reliability, behaviour in conflict and day-to-day compatibility come later. When time is short, unmeasured qualities get a weight of zero. The interface thereby trains evaluative thinking: rank people by visible attributes and undervalue the experience of interacting, which cannot be laid out side by side on a screen.

The catalogue is good as a map of access. It gets worse when it stays the main instrument after contact has begun.

Six profiles have none of the magic of six jars of jam. What is more useful to limit is the number of parallel acquaintances a person tries to give real attention to. Searching alternates between two modes. Surveying widens the choice and calibrates expectations; going deeper produces data about a few options. Constant surveying acquaints you with the market but with almost nobody personally. Going deep too early, on the other hand, locks in the first random option.

The useful balance depends on which constraint is currently the binding one. With a small pool you need to widen access. Under overload you need to cut the number of parallel conversations. With shallow screening you need to move faster from a profile to a short meeting, because a meeting produces information of a different quality.

When it is time to close the catalogue

Once contact begins, the task itself changes. The catalogue compared ready-made attributes; now two people produce new data and part of the union’s future value. This does not mean any union can be “built”: incompatible goals and bad treatment are not fixed by investment. But an endless return to the catalogue makes it impossible to test what only appears once the search stops.

More choice helps as long as the constraint is a shortage of suitable people. Once the constraint becomes attention, further widening reduces the depth of information and raises the imagined cost of stopping. The time to close the catalogue is not after some magic number of profiles, but when new options have almost stopped changing your picture of the available pool while the acquaintances already begun have not yet had enough attention to be tested. The next profile really might turn out to be better. It will almost always turn out to be less known.

Main sources

Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. R. (2000). When choice is demotivating. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(6), 995–1006.

Scheibehenne, B., Greifeneder, R., & Todd, P. M. (2010). Can there ever be too many options? A meta-analytic review of choice overload. Journal of Consumer Research, 37(3), 409–425.

Finkel, E. J., Eastwick, P. W., Karney, B. R., Reis, H. T., & Sprecher, S. (2012). Online dating: A critical analysis from the perspective of psychological science. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 13(1), 3–66.

Chernev, A., Böckenholt, U., & Goodman, J. (2015). Choice overload: A conceptual review and meta-analysis. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 25(2), 333–358.

D’Angelo, J. D., & Toma, C. L. (2017). There are plenty of fish in the sea: The effects of choice overload and reversibility on online daters’ satisfaction with selected partners. Media Psychology, 20(1), 1–27; Pronk, T. M., & Denissen, J. J. A. (2020). A rejection mind-set: Choice overload in online dating. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 11(3), 388–396.