choice

Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice (he gives a good TED Talk of the same name), brought to light a study of consumers in a grocery store. It was Jam Day, and one sample table had six varieties; the other, twenty-four. While the table with twenty-four types of jam was more popular, consumers sampling from the table of six flavours were ten times more likely to actually buy jam. The overwhelm of twenty-four flavours created decision-making paralysis.

Neuroscience has something useful to add to this conversation. The starting point for it was a 1956 paper by George A. Miller whose title tells you exactly what its conclusion was: “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.” Science has whittled that number down over time, so now it’s generally assumed that four is actually the ideal number at which we can chunk information. In some ways, it’s as if our unconscious brain counts like this: one, two, three, four… lots. That probably explains why we can remember the names of people in four-person bands, but not of those in bands of five or more.

The Coaching Habit