The Basic Idea
It’s Friday night. All you want to do after a long week of work is to watch a movie. You browse through a streaming site, scrolling through comedies, dramas, and thrillers. But with each flick of your thumb, the list grows longer. The seemingly endless catalog overwhelms you as the struggle to find the perfect movie intensifies. Minutes turn into tens of minutes and you are still nowhere close to picking a movie. With all the choices in front of you, the decision-making process becomes a burden and you give up with the movie night idea.
This is Hick’s Law in a nutshell. It describes the psychological phenomenon where the time it takes to make a decision increases in the face of multiple choices.1 In short, the more options people have, the longer it takes to choose.
It seems that being given the option of 3 movies is more appealing than having to scroll through pages of movies on the streaming site. In this situation, Hick’s Law demonstrates how an abundance of choices can lead to decision fatigue, leaving you stuck in a cycle of indecision and endless scrolling.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
- Leonardo Da Vinci
