As a psychologist, I have always found the concept of speed dating fascinating. In fact, some years ago, I decided to try it myself. At the time, I had just moved to Boston and didn’t know that many people yet, so I figured I would give the speed-dating scene a go. As it turns out, I like to talk – so much, in fact, that I have a tendency to talk people’s ears off. When the little buzzer went off after three minutes, I was (typically) still in the process of trying to explain to my bedazzled dating partner why my last name has three syllables (it’s Dutch). As you can imagine, I did not find the love of my life.

Fortunately, the majority of people do not seem to share my particular troubles with speed dating. Yet new research does point out a different dating problem: being confronted with a large number of choices can make it harder to make a good decision. In fact, it can even prevent you from a making a decision in the first place.  You might assume that when trying to find a good dating partner, having a large, varied pool of potential candidates available to you is a good thing, but new research indicates that it is not. Alison Lenton and Marco Francesconi recently published an article in the Biology Letters in which they analyzed over 3,700 human dating decisions across 84 speed-dating events. The authors found that when the available dates varied more in attributes such as age, height, occupation and educational background, people made fewer dating proposals. This effect was particularly strong when people were faced with a large number of potential partners. In fact, when both conditions were present, participants were more likely to make no decision at all.

Similarly, research on online dating performed by Alison Lenton and Barbara Fasolo indicated that participants presented with more potential partners did not experience any greater emotional satisfaction than participants presented with fewer options. (They were, if anything, more confused about their choices.) These findings do not only pertain to the world of dating. Other research has shown that more choices can cause people to avoid decisions and generally lead them to be less satisfied. Have you ever had trouble trying to decide what brand of candy to buy in the supermarket? Well, several experiments have shown that when shoppers are presented with either an extensive or limited amount of potential consumer choices (e.g. chocolates, jam flavors) more people actually end up making purchases, and are happier, when the choice environment only offers a limited set of options.

It is not that surprising that our decision making system breaks down when the human brain is confronted with too many options. Similar evidence is found in other non-human animals. In an attempt to cope with the large amount of information and potential choices that we are presented with on a daily basis, we tend to rely on so-called “heuristics” (rules of thumb) that help guide our decision making. In essence, heuristics are decision-making tools that save effort by ignoring some information; and thus, their essential function is to reduce and simplify the processing of cues and information from our environment. In other words, less is more.

In particular, prior research by Lenton and Francesconi suggests that when the number of potential speed-dating partners goes up, people tend to increasingly rely on heuristics in their decision making strategies. For example, the authors found that in speed-dating events where the amount of potential partners to choose from is relatively large, people predominantly pay attention to information that is easily accessible, such as age, height, body mass index, etc., rather than information that is harder to observe, such as occupation and education.

2 Comments

1. 1. BipinDesai 09:47 PM 7/18/11

   This is really surprising. Though not related to dating - in Marathi (one of the languages in India (Maharastra) the same thing is as a proverb :" Thodkyat Jast" i.e. "consider Less as much."

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2. 2. loureiro 09:57 PM 5/8/12

   The decision making is something that is more intuitive. And so I don't think that matters, the number of options. When you make a decision what really matters is the need you have of something. This need, equips you with unpredictable inside search, with no regular parameter to something that suddenly could suit you. The need is proportional to the promptness to taking measures that are sought through fast equations, simple day to day considerations, that nurse better ways to get through new things that may be brought to you unexpectedly as better answers.

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