Sheena Iyengar, a professor at Columbia Business School, is best-known for a study she did in graduate school. When shoppers in a Menlo Park food store were offered much more choice of jams (24 rather than 6), they were less likely to buy one. In The Art of Choosing (2010), Iyengar wrote (p. 190):
Since publication of the jam study, I and other researchers have conducted more experiments on the effect of assortment size. These studies, many of which were designed to replicate real-world choosing contexts, have found fairly consistently that when people are given a moderate number of options (4 to 6) rather than a large number (20 to 30), they are more likely to make a choice, are more confident in their decisions, and are happier in what they choose.
In contrast, Benjamin Scheibehenne, a research scientist at the University of Basel, and two co-authors, who surveyed the literature, found the effect was hard to replicate:
The choice overload hypothesis states that an increase in the number of options to choose from may lead to adverse consequences such as a decrease in the motivation to choose or the satisfaction with the finally chosen option. A number of studies found strong instances of choice overload in the lab and in the field, but others found no such effects or found that more choices may instead facilitate choice and increase satisfaction. In a meta-analysis of 63 conditions from 50 published and unpublished experiments (N = 5,036), we found a mean effect size of virtually zero but considerable variance between studies
This reminds me of the learned-helplessness effect. When Martin Seligman, a psychology professor at Penn and recent president of the American Psychological Association, was a graduate student, he and his advisor reported that when you give dogs inescapable shock, they stop trying to escape or avoid the shock: learned helplessness. The effect turned out to be extremely hard to replicate, but this did not stop Seligman from having a brilliant career.
This reminds me of a friend who wasted several years of a PhD meticulously trying and failing to replicate an effect upon which a famous Professor had built their reputation – he concluded that the whole thing was probably due to a small but significant sloppiness or dishonesty in the conduct of the experiments – a matter of recording observations about a second later than was supposed to be the case according to the stated methodology – and this delay meant that a different (old-hat, mundane, obvious, uninteresting) psychological mechanism would explain everything without recourse to the new reputation-building theory.
Examples of this are still happening – I have seen with my own eyes a rapid build-up of an international research program and hasty public policy implementation based upon a really simple error in matching control with stimulus.
I don’t know about choice overload in general, but I’ve found it harder to make choices at the Strand (a humongeous used bookstore in New York) than in smaller bookstores.
Has learned helplessness been replicated at all?
I feel sorry for all those dogs that Martin Seligman tortured. And speaking of torture, Seligman has been criticized for his role in the US government’s interrogation programs:
” ‘War on terror’ psychologist gets giant no-bid contract ”
Having said that, I do admire Seligman for his role in promoting positive psychology.
Regarding the choice studies: I find Iyengar’s results to be plausible. When I eat in a restaurant that has a huge menu, I find myself overwhelmed with the number of choices and start to worry that I won’t order the optimal dish.
With regard to prominent authorities being wrong, I’m about two-thirds of the way through an excellent and entertaining book called, Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us — And How to Know When Not to Trust Them, by David H. Freedman. The book reiterates what I more or less knew already, but I enjoy learning about the many examples that Freedman uses to back up his points.
and a response to that meta-analysis:
https://www.chernev.com/research/articles/ChoiceOverload_JCR_2010.pdf
Wow! I’d assumed that both the Seligman and Iyengar were robust findings. I think one reason they have become “important” apparently despite replicability is that they have the feel of “insight” that we can relate to. I find it easy to feel overwhelmed by too many options and to thus lose any subjective sense that I am making a choice. And it’s easy to relate to the idea that after being in situations where one is objectively helpless, one can carry over the assumption of helplessness to contexts where one is no longer helpless, and get depressed. It’s all very accessible. We can have an “aha!” experience when we learn about the findings.
I wonder if when something feels intuitive and has resonance in one’s experience, it is likely to have staying power in psychology, even when there is little scientific basis for it. Someone should study this more systematically.
You’ve got me wondering what other famous findings in psychology are weakly founded….
I’ll be surprised if anyone figures out why Iyengar’s finding is hard to repeat. It’s hard enough to repeat the stuff that is repeatable. After it turned out that learned helplessness was difficult to repeat, the subject was dropped. Learned helplessness was not important for central ideas about learning; nobody would build a theory upon it.
Sorry if I am missing something obvious, but why is it that are you a biological psychologist? I am not seeing it from the post. Maybe the problem is that I don’t know what it means to be a biological psychologist.
I’ve heard stereotype threat also fails to replicate, same with locus of control studies (including versions of the famous one conducted by Judith Rodin, who then became president of Penn).
Justin, by the title (Why I am a Biological Psychologist) I meant that this sort of failure to replicate is a nightmare but is not easily avoidable outside biological psychology. (At least, I don’t know how to avoid it. The cost of doing widely-varying replications before you publish is too high.) Apparently the choice overload effect depends on details of the experimental procedure that researchers in that field have no idea about. Whereas if I study the effect of omega-3 and other nutrients on brain function (an example of biological psychology) the results are more likely to be easy to replicate. For example, when I found that breakfast caused me to wake up too early I was repeating an effect that had been found in several other species, where it was called anticipatory activity. Another example is that my ideas about weight control are supported by rat research. If they are true for some humans and some rats, they are likely to be true for all humans.
What studies tried to replicate learned helplessness and failed? And, from my understanding, Seligman’s work into learned helplessness fueled his subsequent research into optimism as a cure/prevention to learned helplessness (effectively a proxy for depression…)
Lisa, the experiments that failed to replicate learned helplessness weren’t published. Steve Maier published a paper showing how hard it was to repeat in rats.
I thought the model built off LH related to depression was significant (as opposed to using the findings in learning) — and wouldn’t Harry Harlow’s prior work with helplessness in monkeys (the notorious “pit of despair”) be supportive of the model?