The Internet offers us an abundance of options when selecting
everything from bicycles to mates that is unprecedented in human history.
Although we may think that the extra options are good, new research has shown
that we may be more satisfied when choosing from fewer options – and we may not
even be cognitively equipped to correct this misconception. Throughout most of
human history, we’ve had significantly fewer options for choosing a mate, and
so we would strongly welcome any additional options when they came along.
For instance, when our neocortex was developing, in part to
deal with social networks, the average human group consisted of roughly 150
individuals. Healthy group members of reproductive age of the opposite sex
would total about 35 – slim pickings, by the Internet’s standards. Because we
developed in this kind of social environment, we have a tendency to desire ever
more options. That’s why, for example, people are enticed by dating Web site
Match. Com’s offer of “millions of possibilities.”
But, as a team of researchers has shown in a recent study,
this abundance of options may not make the chooser feel or choose any better
than a pool of just a half dozen or so options. Psychologist Alison Lenton from
the University of Edinburgh, Barbara Fasolo from the London School of Economics
and Political Science, and cognitive scientist Peter Todd from Indiana
University have presented their findings on this subject in a recent issue of
IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. As the researchers explain,
people tend to anticipate that they’ll feel better about “shopping for a mate”
when there is a large number of options. However, in actuality, people feel
equally good when faced with few as opposed to many options. The scientists
performed two experiments demonstrating this clash between anticipation and
experience.
