Here’s how people make a decision when faced with tons of options

When faced with tons of options, like a restaurant menu that resembles a textbook or a vending machine offering 30+ snack varieties, how do people come to a decision? That was the question researchers from Ohio State University set out to investigate in a new study.

Working in collaboration with a team of German scientists, they collected significant evidence that indicates much of decision-making comes down to eye movements and the amount of time an individual spends looking at each option. After being presented with a large number of different snacks, study participants generally chose options they spent more time looking at. 

Notably, sometimes subjects even went for a snack they had rated as less favorable than other options. This suggests eye movements and visual attention may supersede preferences in some cases.

“We could do pretty well predicting what people would choose based just on their ratings of the snacks available to them. But we could do an even better job by accounting for how much they looked at each item,” says study co-author Ian Krajbich, an associate professor of psychology and economics at The Ohio State University.

All that being said, this study’s findings aren’t quite as simple as “you pick whatever you’re looking at.” Before we dive into the more nuanced results of this project, let’s get into the methodology. 

In all, 49 participants took part in this study. Each person told the study authors they were a “fan of snacks.” To start, all subjects were instructed to fast for four full hours so they would be feeling hungry. Then, everyone was shown sets of 9, 16, 25, or 36 different snack foods and asked to name which snack they’d like to eat the most. This was repeated a few times for each person, with a tracker recording eye movements as they deliberated. Finally, as a final task, each subject rated how much they liked all 80 included snacks.

Most participants didn’t even look at all of the options put before their eyes. According to researchers, eye movements, in general, were very unpredictable or at least appeared to be unpredictable.

“There is this peripheral screening process where people learn to avoid even looking directly at the snacks they don’t really like,” Krajbich explains. “This is not something that we see in studies where participants only have two alternatives. It only occurs when they have lots of options.”

Now, many believe that when faced with tons of choices, people tend to jump at the first option deemed “good enough.” It makes a certain amount of sense. When we’re overwhelmed, a familiar option can feel like a life preserver amidst a shipwreck.

These findings don’t support the “good enough” theory, though, according to researchers. Study subjects only chose the last snack they looked at roughly 45% of the time. If the good enough theory was accurate, that would have happened much more often if not constantly.

Alternatively, most participants glanced back and forth between a few different snacks before ultimately coming to a decision. Most of the time, their choice turned out to be the snack they had looked at most often while deliberating.

“People made a choice when they concluded the best option was sufficiently better than the next-best option,” Krajbich concludes. “Pretty quickly their attention gets drawn to their higher-value options. That influences their search process and their gaze starts to jump around less predictably.” 

The neural processes and visual cues that go into making a decision are incredibly complex, making it all the more impressive that this all goes in on our heads within a matter of seconds as we browse a take-out menu or deliberate between chips or candy. There is still more to uncover, but this work is yet another chapter in modern science’s never-ending quest to better understand human behavior.

Researchers from Technische Universität Berlin and Freie Universität Berlin contributed to this project as well.

The full study can be found here, published in the scientific journal eLife.