Too many choices?  The New York Times has an article by John Tierney, “The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors.”<span>  Tierney discusses Dan Ariely’s new book, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions: “an entertaining look at human foibles like the penchant for keeping too many options open.” 

Here’s one section about an experiment to look for cash behind one of three doors, with each door having a set pay-off and the other doors slowly disappearing over time unless one used a click to help keep it open (thus wasting a click that could provide more money): 

[The researchers] plumbed the players’ motivations by introducing yet another twist. This time, even if a door vanished from the screen, players could make it reappear whenever they wanted. But even when they knew it would not cost anything to make the door reappear, they still kept frantically trying to prevent doors from vanishing. Apparently they did not care so much about maintaining flexibility in the future. What really motivated them was the desire to avoid the immediate pain of watching a door close. “Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Dr. Ariely says.

That paragraph strikes me as in need of some good ethnography—that “apparently” looms too large in my imagination. 

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