Am I allowed to say this? (Destiny)

by Kermit , Raleigh, NC, Wednesday, November 08, 2017, 07:01 (2361 days ago) @ Cody Miller
edited by Kermit, Wednesday, November 08, 2017, 07:06

https://destiny.bungie.org/forum/index.php?id=138271

"I'm nervous that the burn out factor in D2 may happen." - ManKitten

Hashtag ManKitten is canon? Did I do that right?

I think the problem of choice is only a problem to the new or the uninformed. In your example you use Pop from the supermarket. If you've never had any in your life, yeah, you'd be overwhelmed with the variety. But if you are familiar with it, the choice doesn't bother you at all; you just go for Vanilla Coke.

You are 100% wrong about this.

Then our life experiences are simply 100% different! :-)

But is what you are writing about really the problem of choice? It seems like your problem isn't the choosing, but the environment itself and your readjustment to it.

Where did you get this phrase "problem of choice"? Mankitten and Claude were talking about the paradox of choice, which is a real phenomenon that has been studied in great detail.

So am I. Same thing. We are talking about the same issue.

But tell me, have they run experiments on people who are EXPERTS? Like, send someone who's played guitar for 50 years into a store to buy one. Would they feel the same about their purchase as a teenager looking to start a band? I'm guessing no, but then again I haven't run any experiments to prove that. Has anybody else?

Oh wait, they have. It turns out the paradox of choice is bullshit:

Attempts to duplicate the paradox of choice in other studies have had mixed success. A meta-analysis incorporating research from 50 independent studies found no meaningful connection between choice and anxiety

http://www.scheibehenne.de/ScheibehenneGreifenederTodd2010.pdf

Don't believe everything you see in a TED talk dude.

Thanks for the link, but I think you're cherry picking what you want out of that paper. Choice overload is a phenomenon but much depends on context. You describe only scenarios where people can quickly and readily limit their choices, thereby making the preponderance of choice moot.

You have extremely strong personal preferences (this is not wholly a compliment--it affects your ability to give any credence to alternative preferences). It makes sense that you would discredit an experience you don't have. I can easily imagine you in the grocery. "There's only two decent cereals, and this is the best one." Well, bully for you.

Dude, this is the exact opposite of what you describe. I give you a link to a scientific review of 50 such studies, and it concludes the link is either not meaningful, or it is due to other factors. That's hardly discrediting an experience I don't have. It's literally examining a wide variety of experiences and coming to an evidence drawn conclusion.

I mean, it directly supports my original hypothesis:

One important such precondition is lack of familiarity with, or prior pref- erences for, the items in the choice assortment so that choos- ers will not be able to rely merely on selecting something that matches their own preferences (Iyengar and Lepper 2000). Chernev (2003a, 2003b) showed that people with clear prior preferences prefer to choose from larger assort- ments and that, for those people, choice probability and satisfaction increased with the number of options to choose from, the opposite of choice overload.

DUDE. I don't think we're understanding each other. I don't think that many choices necessarily leads to dissatisfaction, and to the extent that the paradox of choice theory is invoked as some sort of law, we're probably in agreement. A preponderance of choices in itself isn't a predictor of dissatisfaction. I don't think it's bullshit, as you so delicately put it, because it's useful to describe the experience of having many choices that aren't distinctive and can't be easily chosen among. More importantly, it's a useful concept for creators to think about, in that they can ensure that the choices they offer are meaningful to their audience, and they can be cautious about not overwhelming their audience. I mean, ask Steve Jobs (if only we could). There was a man who understood the paradox of choice. Expert PC users spent decades lording their expertise over the rubes who didn't necessarily want to have to learn how to build a PC in order to use one. Steve Jobs sided with the rubes, and computing became ubiquitous in no small part because of him. There's a famous book about usability called Don't Make Me Think. A big part of usability is about avoiding the paradox of choice.