Understanding media literacy and paradox of choice

BY DYLAN JAEKEL Feature Editor

Ifyou have ever sat down to watch a movie, but after 15 minutes of scrolling through Netflix, you still haven’t made a decision, you have probably come face to face with the paradox of choice.

The paradox of choice describes the idea that an ample amount of choice can lead to unresearched decision-making and stress. This paradox can be applied to nearly any situation we come in contact with in a firstworld nation in the 21st century but is especially prevalent in media.

Whether it be television, social media, books, or news, we are overwhelmed by the amount of information being given to us. We have what seems like unlimited access to media all day, every day. Though this may seem like a marvel of technology, this endless amount of choice we are given may be more of a negative than we may think.

“These proposed effects of extensive assortments include a decrease in the motivation to choose, to commit to a choice, or to make any choice at all,” says the research paper “Can There Ever Be Too Many Options? A Meta-Analytic Review of Choice Overload” by researchers Benjamin Scheibehenne, Rainer Greifeneder, and Peter M. Todd. Excessive choice can lead to an overload of information, which can then lead to panic in an individual. This panic can cause a person to avoid decision-making or let another person make the decision-making for them.

Numerous studies have been conducted to better illustrate this “overload of choice,” including one of the first major studies on the topic by Sheena S. Iyengar and Mark R. Lepper in 2000. The study gave one group of participants a choice of six different chocolates to choose from, while a second group had a choice of 30. By the end of the study, it was clear that the group with the choice of 30 was much less satisfied with the chocolates they chose compared to the first group. This can be translated to the overload of choices we see in media as well, as it