Is more choice always desirable? Evidence and arguments from leks, food selection, and environmental enrichment

Abstract

Recent studies on humans show that too much choice can make subjects less likely to choose any item. I consider general adaptive and non-adaptive explanations of why such choice aversion, or its converse, might occur in animals. There are three questions: is more choice always preferred, does it ever lead to less consumption (or a lower probability of consumption), and may it result in worse items being selected ? A preference for choice is one of the main explanations for lek formation and I draw attention to previously unrecognised parallels with models of human shopping behaviour. There is indeed evidence of female preference for larger leks, although much of the observational data are open to other interpretations. Unfortunately nobody has looked for choice aversion where it is most to be expected, in leks larger than normally occur. Evidence that too much choice of males confuses females is strongest in acoustically advertising frogs, but the widespread decrease of mating skew in larger leks might also have this explanation. A model reanalyses data on skew in black grouse Tetrao tetrix and suggests that considering only a random subset of a large lek may increase the chances of selecting the better males: larger leks are more likely to include better males, but these are less likely to be selected. These opposing effects may lead to an optimum lek size, but only with a sufficient decline in choice accuracy with size. With food choice, very few studies have avoided confounding choice with food quality, by manipulating only flavour. The widespread phenomena of stimulus-specific satiety and novelty seeking imply that monotonous diets are aversive, but no studies test whether animals choose sites where they know food diversity to be greater. Operant experiments that demonstrate mild preferences for free choice concern choice about the means to get food rather than the food itself. In some insect species even moderate choice of diet can be deleterious, and studies on search images and the confusion effect may be evidence of this in vertebrates. Environmental enrichment of captive animals often relies on increasing the options available, but it need not be the choice itself that is beneficial. I consider briefly further areas in biology where choice preference or aversion are potentially important.

Can There Ever Be Too Many Options? A Meta-Analytic Review of Choice Overload

“…Iyengar and Lepper (2000, 996) described it as a "reasonably large, but not ecologically unusual, number of options." In contrast, Hutchinson (2005) argued that at least for nonhuman animals, choice overload effects are seldom found because organisms are adapted to assortment sizes that naturally occur in their environment. If this holds true for humans as well, choice overload may be most likely to loom in novel situations with an excessive number of options such that the assortment exceeds ecologically usual sizes.…”

“…These factors can lead to better-informed, more confident choices (Eaton and Lipsey 1979;Hutchinson 2005). Choosing from a variety of options also meets a desire for change and novelty and provides insurance against uncertainty or miscalculation of one's own future preferences (Ariely and Levav 2000;Kahn 1995;Simonson 1990).…”

“…Because the presence of an extensive choice assortment could also indicate the availability of good or even better options in the future, what looks like choice omission might sometimes be an adaptive deferral strategy for the time being (Hutchinson 2005), which current short-term experimental designs do not capture. Little is known about the specific reasons why participants in choice overload experiments sometimes refrain from making a choice, but further exploring these reasons, including via longer-term studies that allow deferral and future choice, is another pathway to a better understanding of when and why choice overload can reliably be expected to occur.…”

Effects of food diversity on diatom selection by harpacticoid copepods

“…In some animals, however, there is evidence of cognitive overload even with very few options, with the consequence of decreased consumption and performance. Problems may arise in recalling how to deal quickly with each option or in making good decisions based on identity or quality of the options (Hutchinson, 2005).…”

Imitation in Location Choice

“…Instead, the decision processes of most firms' location decisions appear to rely heavily on imitation heuristics and threshold rules (i.e., satisficing) that quickly narrow down the consideration set to a handful of candidates, in line with the ideas of Simon (1954Simon ( , 1955, Cyert andMarch (1963), andMarch (1988). Indeed, the biology literature shows imitation to be an adaptive strategy for animals in a number of environments (Noble, Todd and Tuci, 2001;Hutchinson, 2005), just as the social science literature identifies environments where imitation leads to success (Gigerenzer and Selten, 2002;Bosch-Domnech and Vriend, 2003) Concerning the normative focus of this paper, it is useful to recall that spatial agglomeration, or clustering, in the classic Hotelling (1929) model is wasteful, as firms locate in the center to split the market rather than at locations minimizing transportation costs. Hotelling, and later Boulding (1996), generalized the idea of socially wasteful agglomerations to a broad range of social settings.…”