Do you think the number of options you have influences your decision?Do you think your brain also responds to all the options presented to you?Do you think you can choose better if you have more options or is it the other way around?In this article, we’ll try to answer these questions and understand the importance of narrowing down options to improve the way we make decisions.
Imagine going to a restaurant and you can choose from a hundred dishes, or you go to the movies and the movies in the cinemas have more than fifty How long would it take you to decide?Do you think you’d be satisfied with your choice? In most cases, having fewer options facilitates the decision itself, especially when it is a decision we must make with a high degree of awareness. In fact, fewer options also mean fewer plausible scenarios that we need to analyze.
- New technologies focus on this goal.
- On reducing the information that comes to us.
- Filtering it to make it more in line with our tastes.
- They allow you to see simpler options to choose from.
- Or also allow you to narrow down options by grouping them into categories.
- All this so the brain doesn’t need much time to choose from.
In addition, fewer options help us, among these options, to choose the one that we think is the best right now, partly because it fits very well with the interests of our consumer society, in which you do not want to get stuck in a decision-making process. We see this, for example, in? Special offers? X first commands.
The FOBO phenomenon takes its name from the expression Fear of the best options (fear of having better options) and refers to the delay in decision-making in order to choose the best, to continue exploring new possibilities; In short, to seek and find the perfect alternative, in many cases all this phenomenon brings is to continue to leave for tomorrow the decisions that we could make today.
On the other hand, in addition to the fear of losing the best option, what makes us repeat this strategy is the fact that it is reinforced in various ways, that is, it is a strategy in which a price is rarely found. On the other hand, we often turn around a decision we already make (we keep thinking about cars or washing machines, although we have already decided), and that is when a better option (technological advances) appears and we are sorry.
“The key to decision management in the world of hyperselection is to look for what is good enough, not the best. On the other hand, if you wait to find the best, the search never stops. -Schwartz-
In the 1950s, Herbert Simon, the Nobel Prize in Economics, distinguished two types of people when it came to making decisions, at one end would be the people who maximize, that is, those who continually seek until they find the best option and those who are obsessed. with momentary satisfaction.
Maximizing people would be closer to making the best decision, but also falling into the trap of the FOBO phenomenon, so decision-making can be a complex process, but the mistake will be to make it an eternal process. exist, just the decision we make.
The FOBO effect can cause stress, depression, dissatisfaction and lack of well-being, because it does not allow us to decide, and always makes us continue to choose new possibilities, new options, and does not allow the brain to rest and take advantage of the chosen option. Therefore, more options do not guarantee better decisions or greater satisfaction.
A recent study (2012) found that those who maximized felt more dissatisfied after making a decision, as they constantly questioned what they had chosen and continued to feel unsafe.
When making decisions, we can simplify the process with three basic steps that lead us to restrict options to make better decisions:
With these simple steps we can optimize the decision-making process, clarify the brain’s view of the real choices we have and help us make the decision that brings us closer to what we want, that is, the decision that makes us feel satisfied and realized, because knowing what we knew and being where we were, we can say that we take advantage of the best options.