When Does Having a Choice Matter?
Having choice creates cognitive load. Making decisions can take a lot of mental energy. Having many options that are roughly similar or many that are wildly different can lead to choice overload.
As cognitive designers we need to understand how to engineer choice-making and more basically when offering a choice creates value. So I am always on the lookout for new scientific studies that might help us understand when choice is important. An upcoming article in the Journal of Consumer Research, Why Making Our Own Choice is More Satisfying When Pleasure is The Goal, offers some designable insights:
“Results consistently show that the outcome of a self-made choice is more satisfying than the outcome of an externally made choice when the goal is hedonic, but when the goal is utilitarian there is no difference in satisfaction between choosers and non-choosers,” the authors write. “A lack of choice feels less like a deprivation of the capacity to determine one’s own fate when the goal choice is utilitarian than when it is hedonic.”
To over simplify, we get more value from choice when pleasure is involved. Having pleasurable choices gives us the opportunity to savior which offsets the energy required to do the mental work of making the choice.
As is always the case, satisfaction or cognitive performance improves when the mental energy you get out of an interaction is more than you have to put into it.
