Hick's Law
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
About the Author
Samantha Lau
Samantha graduated from the University of Toronto, majoring in psychology and criminology. During her undergraduate degree, she studied how mindfulness meditation impacted human memory which sparked her interest in cognition. Samantha is curious about the way behavioural science impacts design, particularly in the UX field. As she works to make behavioural science more accessible with The Decision Lab, she is preparing to start her Master of Behavioural and Decision Sciences degree at the University of Pennsylvania. In her free time, you can catch her at a concert or in a dance studio.
