"I should look at all the options"

You had the sofa down to two. Then a colleague mentioned a shop you hadn't tried, and for a week there were four. The college across town led you to a distance-learning course, and then to a one-year certificate that might be a better first step. Looking at more options felt thorough each time, and afterwards you were further from choosing than before.

Amos Tversky and Eldar Shafir studied this in the early 1990s. Standard theory says an extra option can only help, since you can always ignore it. They predicted the opposite for cases where the options conflict. When it's hard to say which is better, people become more likely to put the decision off, to go looking for still more options, or to fall back on the default. That's what their studies showed. Adding a good option to the set, or improving one that was already there, made people more likely to choose nothing.

It happens to experts as well. Donald Redelmeier and Shafir posted medical scenarios to family doctors in Ontario, and 287 replied. One scenario concerned a patient with osteoarthritis. In one version the doctor had a single medication to consider. In the other version there were two. With one, 72 per cent of the doctors prescribed it. With two, only 53 per cent prescribed either. The authors' reading was that the difficulty of choosing between two drugs led some doctors to start neither.

Those who didn't prescribe presumably felt they'd made a cautious choice. But the extra drug had made the decision harder for them, and they took the default.

You may have heard of a study with jam, and I should be straight about it. Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set up a tasting table in a food shop. Shoppers who were offered six jams were more likely to buy one than shoppers offered twenty-four. It became one of the best-known findings in psychology. Ten years later, Benjamin Scheibehenne and colleagues pooled fifty experiments of this kind and found an average effect of almost exactly zero. In some studies more choice hurt, in others it helped, and the results varied a great deal. A later analysis by Alexander Chernev and colleagues, covering ninety-nine results, looked at when more choice does harm. They found it happens when the decision is difficult, when the options are complicated to compare, and when people aren't sure what they want.

That third condition is the one that matters for you. Having many options doesn't hurt someone who knows what they're after. It hurts someone who's unsure, and being unsure is why you're in the loop. For you, each new option adds comparisons to make and brings the choice no closer.

The fix is a cap. Once you have three real candidates, a new one can only come in if one goes out. If the certificate course really is better than the diploma, it replaces it, and the diploma tab gets deleted. If you can't bring yourself to delete anything, the new option wasn't better. It was somewhere else to go instead of choosing.