Cognitive Lunch Abstract for May 6

The next Cognitive Lunch will be held Wednesday, May 6.
12:10-1:10 p.m.
Psychology Conference Room (room 128)

"Can there ever be too many flowers blooming? Re-visiting the effect of choice overload" will be presented by Benjamin Scheibehenne, Cognitive Science Program, Indiana University.

Abstract:
The choice overload- or too-much-choice effect states that having too many options to choose from may lead to negative consequences such as a decreases the motivation to choose and/or a lower satisfaction with the finally chosen option. A number of studies in the past found strong instances of this effect in the lab and in the field that raised a lot of attention in the scientific community as well as in the media. In my talk I will lay out that the theoretical explanations of the effect are somewhat sparse. I will further present a series of experiments that could not replicate the effect. Based on a meta-analysis on published and unpublished experiments on choice overload I will then show that its mean effect size is zero with hardly any effective moderators. Together these results seem to suggest that choice overload is not a reliable psychological phenomenon. However, I will also review some moderators that might still explain the diverging results between those studies that found the result and those that did not, some of which might be worth testing in the future.