Can't decide which brand of Brie is better? Which soda? Which toothpaste? You're not alone. That's why as our choices grow we tend to bring home what's familiar.

By JANET K. KEELER

© St. Petersburg Times, published January 31, 2001

Let's take a walk through the grocery store. Not a 5:15 p.m.-just-got-off-work-and-need-to-find-something-for-dinner quick hit, but a slow, methodical walk up and down the aisles, carefully examining the inventory.

Oh my, who knew there were 15 flavors of Pringles potato chips? When did the cereal aisle become Valley of the Doomed, with boxes of low-fat flakes, high-sugar crunchies and Chex mixes threatening to bury us in rice, wheat and freeze dried marshmallows? Over in the dairy case are sour cream, milk, yogurt and cottage cheese in non-fat, 2 percent, 4 percent and regular varieties. Medium, large, extra large and jumbo eggs come in brown or white. There is shampoo for regular hair, for oily hair, for fine hair, for dry hair, for sun-damaged hair, for color-treated hair. Chips, soda and toothpaste, more choices, choices, choices.

For Americans, who seem to love consuming, above almost all else, variety is seemingly a good thing, a birthright to some. After all, shouldn't we, as free and evolved people, be able to pick our ice cream from among 31 flavors? (Never mind that the majority of people prefer either chocolate or vanilla.)

Well, hold onto your carts, shoppers. A new study from two university professors indicates that there can be too much of a good thing. This is something you may have already suspected as you pondered the dizzying array of products.

In their study, Mark R. Lepper, chairman of Stanford University's psychology department, and Sheena S. Iyengar, an assistant professor at New York's Columbia University, found that too many choices can actually stymie shoppers rather than satisfy them. The results of their research, entitled "When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?" were published in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

According to the study, having a lot of choices, be they at the grocery store or in 401(K) plans, makes us feel good. However, we are often feel less satisfied with our choices when we have so much to choose from. In other words, Lepper explained in a phone interview from his campus office in Palo Alto, Calif., the nagging feeling that we didn't pick the right thing from the many options available dampens the excitement the array of choices initially created.

A grocery store taste test helped Lepper and Iyengar come to this conclusion. At an upscale Northern California market, shoppers were offered samples of six jams. Each sampler was given a coupon for a $1 off a jar. The same test was conducted another day, but in that test, tasters were presented with 24 jams. Of the people who walked by the displays, 60 percent stopped at the 24-flavor test while only 40 percent sampled from the fewer choices. However, when it came to using the coupons, 30 percent of those who tasted from the six flavors bought a jar of jam compared with only 3 percent of the other group.

This dramatic difference in buying spurred on the researchers, and their subsequent findings backed up these initial results.

What does this mean to us when we are negotiating the grocery store aisles, one eye on the wall of peanut butter, the other on the kids in the cart?

"The first thing to know is that when you are faced with too many choices, you are likely to fall back on what you know and look for some simpler way to make the decision, like what you bought before," Lepper explained.

We also often base our decisions, Lepper said, on price or on someone else's recommendation.

"My sense is that when a restaurant menu is too full, people are more likely to go for the special because, in a way, it is being recommended by someone," Lepper said.

Lepper said that the only time we are completely satisfied by a wide array of choices is when we know exactly what we want. Somehow, this seems absurd. If we know what we want, why do we care if there are choices?

"If you walk into a store wanting to get a very particular imported cheese, and they have it, you may walk out thinking "It's great that the store has 150 varieties of cheese,' " Lepper said. "If you just want a Cheddar and they have 39 kinds, then you want someone to pick it for you. In this case, having choices doesn't seem as great."

Then why so many types of dishwasher liquid and boxed cake mixes? Because we think more is better, Lepper said.

In reality, the professor said, most of us can handle about seven choices, plus or minus two. There are manufacturers, such as Procter & Gamble, who have scaled back offerings in certain markets. Even Ben & Jerry's, which has 34 flavors of ice cream, frozen yogurt and sorbets, doesn't put all its offerings in every store.

The interesting paradox here, Lepper said, is that the multitude of choices, despite attracting shoppers, actually narrows what people buy.

That doesn't surprise University of Florida English professor James B. Twitchell, who says each of us has a set list of about 300 things we buy from the 40,000 items found in most grocery stores.

Twitchell, author of the just published Twenty Ads That Shook the World: The Century's Most Groundbreaking Advertising and How It Changed Us All (Crown Pub., $25), says that advertising plays a big role in helping us decide what to pull off the burgeoning shelves.

"But the advertising is not selling the product, it is selling a story," Twitchell said.

If food shopping was just about nutrition, Twitchell said, there would be only one aisle where we could get everything we needed for a balanced diet, minus the frills. Rather than sustenance for the body, food is often considered sustenance for the soul, providing love, comfort and other emotions we attach to meatloaf and mashed potatoes.

"You have to wonder what is going on in the human brain," Twitchell said. "(The way we shop) proves, yet again, the fundamental irrationality of consumption. If we were logical we would look at Consumer Reports to find the best things to buy. That is not a difficult process."

Instead, we walk the aisles, seeking familiarity, bargains and validation. Sometimes we are exhausted from considering our options, and at other times we hear Faith Hill's "ba-ba-bop-bop-bop" in our heads as we reach for the Pepsi.

"The truth is," Twitchell said, "that 80 percent of the new products that go into a grocery store go out in four months." Perhaps that's because the advertisements for these items couldn't sell a story that people wanted to buy.

Regardless of how all these choices make us ultimately feel, there is no going back, Lepper said.

"If Starbucks said tomorrow they were going back to serving just caf/decaf, milk/no milk, people would be upset," Lepper said. "We have our own levels of what we expect."

The competition also sets expectations, Lepper said, and if Yoplait comes out with yogurt in a soft plastic tube, then Dannon and Breyer's won't be that far behind.

Where does that leave shoppers with sweaty palms at the frozen food cases? For one thing, the "choices" study should reassure us that it is normal to feel overwhelmed by the mountain of merchandise.

We should also feel okay about buying the same things time after time, especially if that's our choice.

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