Using apps and online dating sites can be both an exciting and daunting experience. The next swipe or profile you look at might be just the person for you! But looking through so many profiles can also be overwhelming.
It seems counterintuitive, but too many choices may leave us less satisfied with the choices we make. We may feel that having more options means that we are eventually bound to find the “perfect” person. Ultimately, we should be feeling more confident about the decisions we make and the person we end up with since we will have seen and interacted with more “less-than-perfect” people. However, having more options may actually be more cognitively and emotionally taxing, leaving us unsatisfied in the end.
This phenomenon is what researchers call the choice overload effect. This is when people feel less satisfied with the choices they ultimately make when presented with too many options up front. Originally, work on the choice overload effect was done in marketing and consumer behavior. For example, showing options for consumer products like jam or other things you can buy at a grocery store. They found that people are more satisfied with their choice when they have fewer options, when they saw 6 types of jam instead of 25 types of jam.
Researchers thought a similar phenomenon might happen in online dating. In the world of online dating, swiping on an app has made it so that we treat potential dating partners like an item on the shelf. They have a personalized ad, with a few taglines about who they are, and a few pictures of what they have to offer you. In light of all of my options today, which ad meets my needs? This commodification of people has been called “relationshopping” and it can be problematic.
Problems with “relationshopping”
Researchers have found that individuals who are presented with more options:
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Are more willing to change their mind. When people are just one...
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