# Hick's Law: Why More Choices Slow Your Decisions

*Society, Psychology & Life · Daniel Foss · 2026-08-21*

## TL;DR

Hick's Law is a psychological principle established by William Hick in 1952. It demonstrates that adding more choices increases the time required to make a decision. While simple choices show a predictable slowdown, the effect is most noticeable in everyday situations where we face a moderate number of options, which often leads to feeling overwhelmed.

## Key facts

- William Edmund Hick, a British psychologist, published his foundational paper on reaction time and choice in 1952.
- The principle is often tested using reaction time experiments, where participants choose between a set of lights or buttons.
- Hick's Law is closely related to the concept of choice overload, a psychological phenomenon made famous by a later study involving jam tasting.
- The law is widely applied in user interface design to streamline navigation and improve user experience.
- Despite its age, the principle remains a key factor in understanding how we handle modern information density.

## The Friday Night Movie Trap: A Taste of Hick's Law

It's Friday evening. The work week is finally behind you, and all you want is to sink into the couch with a great film. You open your streaming platform, ready for that perfect escape.

Then it happens. Comedies, dramas, thrillers, documentaries, foreign films, classics, new releases. The rows stretch endlessly, and every swipe of the remote brings more titles into view. The list grows with each movement, and somewhere around the fifth category, a faint sense of frustration starts to creep in.

"Which one should I watch?" The question loops in your head. You scroll back up. You scroll back down. You pause on something promising, then second-guess yourself and keep browsing. Minutes tick by. The couch feels less comfortable. The excitement of movie night fades into something closer to exhaustion.

Eventually, you close the app entirely. No film tonight. Maybe next week.

This scene plays out in living rooms everywhere, and it has a name. It's a direct, everyday experience of Hick's Law, the psychological principle that says the more choices you face, the longer it takes to make a decision. And crucially, that extra time isn't linear. It grows logarithmically, which means each additional option adds less time than the one before it, but the cumulative weight of endless options can still grind your decision-making to a halt.

In 1952, British psychologist William Edmund Hick published a paper titled "On the Rate of Gain of Information" in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. He set up a simple experiment: participants faced a row of lamps, each paired with a key under their fingers. When a light turned on, they had to press the matching key as quickly as possible. Hick found that as the number of lamps increased, reaction time grew in a predictable logarithmic pattern. Three options were manageable. Ten options slowed people down noticeably.

That Friday night scroll through your streaming catalog is the same phenomenon playing out in your living room. Three films to choose from feels like a pleasant decision. Three hundred films feels like a burden. The math behind Hick's Law explains why: decision time follows the formula RT = a + b log₂(n), where n represents the number of equally likely choices. The more options you stack up, the more mental energy each one demands, even if the individual cost seems tiny.

So the next time you find yourself paralyzed in front of your TV, staring at a catalog that never ends, you're not being indecisive. You're experiencing a well-documented quirk of human cognition, one that has been shaping our choices for decades, whether we're picking a movie, choosing jam, or deciding which phone case to buy.

## What Is Hick's Law? The 1952 Lamp Experiment

In 1952, a British psychologist named William Edmund Hick published a paper called "On the Rate of Gain of Information" that would forever change how we understand decision-making. His central finding was elegantly simple: the more choices you face, the longer it takes to pick one, and this relationship follows a predictable logarithmic curve. That insight became known as Hick's Law, and it explains everything from why you freeze at a restaurant menu to why streaming services leave you scrolling for twenty minutes.

Hick set up a deceptively straightforward experiment. He placed ten lamps around each participant, and every lamp was wired to a key resting under the person's fingers. When a light switched on, the participant had to press the matching key as quickly as possible. Hick ran the trials in phases: in the first two rounds, participants were told to prioritize accuracy above all else. In the final round, the instruction flipped, and speed became the only thing that mattered.

The results cut through both conditions. Whether people were aiming for perfect precision or raw velocity, their reaction time climbed logarithmically as the number of lamps increased. It wasn't a straight line going up; it was a curve that rose steeply at first and then leveled off. Going from two options to four slowed people down noticeably, but jumping from eight options to ten barely registered. The brain pays a heavy toll for the first few extra choices, then starts to cope.

Hick distilled this into a formula: **RT = a + b log₂(N)**. Here, N represents the number of equally likely choices in front of you. The variable "a" is the fixed time your brain spends on things unrelated to the decision itself, like recognizing that a stimulus happened at all. The variable "b" is the processing cost per individual option. Some experimental estimates place "b" around 0.155 seconds per option, though the exact value varies across studies and should be treated with caution.

Let's make this concrete. Imagine your phone emits a tone, and it takes you three seconds to realize it's your alarm going off. That gives you a = 3. Now suppose the alarm has four buttons you could press to silence it, so N = 4. Plug those numbers in: RT = 3 + 0.155 × log₂(4). Since log₂(4) equals 2, the math gives you 3.31 seconds. Double the buttons to eight, and log₂(8) becomes 3, pushing your reaction time to 4.31 seconds. One extra second, just from adding four more buttons. That's the quiet cost of choice, hiding inside everyday objects.

## The Jam Study: When More Options Mean Fewer Sales

In 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set up a tasting stand inside a busy grocery store in Menlo Park, California, and posed as store employees. They wanted to see what would happen when shoppers faced either 6 varieties of jam or 24 varieties of jam. The results surprised everyone and gave Hick's Law one of its most famous real-world confirmations.

The setup was simple. For half the time, the table displayed six different jam flavors. For the other half, the same table held 24 flavors. Everything else stayed the same, same store, same location, same jams. Only the number of choices changed.

Here is where things get interesting. When 24 jams sat on the table, 60 percent of shoppers stopped to taste. That sounds like a win for variety. But when only 6 jams were offered, just 40 percent stopped. The bigger display clearly pulled more attention, which seemed to support the "more is better" view.

Then came the purchasing numbers, and they flipped everything upside down. Of the people who stopped at the 24-jam table, only 3 percent actually bought a jar. At the 6-jam table, 30 percent of those who stopped made a purchase. Think about that for a second. Among those who stopped, the purchase rate was ten times higher at the 6-jam table.

Run the numbers with 100 visitors and the picture gets even clearer. At the 24-jam table, 60 people stopped to taste, but only 2 walked away with a purchase. At the 6-jam table, 40 people stopped and 12 bought jam. More attention, dramatically fewer sales.

What about the tasting itself? You might guess that people with 24 options would sample more jams before deciding. They did not. On average, tasters tried only one or two jams, regardless of whether the table held 6 or 24 varieties. The abundance of options did not encourage exploration. If anything, it seemed to freeze people.

This is Hick's Law showing up in the grocery aisle. More options meant more hesitation, and hesitation often ended with shoppers walking away empty-handed. The big display attracted a crowd, but the crowd could not commit. The smaller display drew fewer people, yet those who stopped felt confident enough to choose.

Iyengar and Lepper published their findings in the *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology*, and the study became a cornerstone of choice overload research. It matched what Hick had measured decades earlier with lamps and keys, decision time climbs as options multiply. In the real world, that extra decision time does not just delay a purchase. It can kill it entirely.

## Why Your Brain Gets Overwhelmed by Too Many Choices

Your brain is the most energy-hungry organ in your body, burning through about 20% of your total oxygen and energy while making up only 2% of your body weight. That constant demand for fuel explains why your mind takes shortcuts whenever it can, and why staring at endless options feels so exhausting. The brain simply cannot afford to give every single choice its full attention.

Think about what happens when you open a streaming service on a Friday night. Comedies, dramas, thrillers, documentaries, they all line up in front of you. Every swipe makes the list longer. After a few minutes of scrolling, the question "what should I watch?" starts to feel heavy. Your brain, designed to focus on only one or two things at a time, struggles to compare dozens of plots, actors, and ratings all at once. Eventually, many of us just close the app and give up on the movie night altogether.

This is where mental shortcuts, or heuristics, come into play. Your brain uses these energy-saving tricks constantly to avoid burning through its limited fuel supply. When faced with tens of thousands of phone cases on Amazon, for instance, you rarely evaluate each one carefully. Instead, you read reviews, ask friends for opinions, or trust an expert's recommendation. You are essentially outsourcing the filtering process because your own brain cannot handle the load.

The phenomenon has a name: **Hick's Law**. In 1952, British psychologist William Edmund Hick published a paper called "On the Rate of Gain of Information" in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. He set up an experiment where participants pressed keys corresponding to lamps that lit up in front of them. As the number of lamps increased, reaction time grew, but not in a straight line. The increase was logarithmic, meaning each additional option added less time than the one before, yet the total decision time kept climbing.

The math behind Hick's Law is elegantly simple. Decision time equals a constant plus a factor multiplied by the base-2 logarithm of the number of choices. Each extra option adds a small amount of time, roughly 0.155 seconds according to some experimental estimates, though the exact figure varies across studies and should be taken with a grain of salt. That might not sound like much, but multiply it across hundreds of options and the seconds pile up quickly.

Consider a practical example. If you have four buttons to press to turn off an alarm, and it takes you three seconds to recognize the sound, your reaction time would be about 3.31 seconds. Double the buttons to eight, and the reaction time jumps to 4.31 seconds. The difference feels small in isolation, but it compounds when you are choosing between hundreds of movies, thousands of products, or dozens of life decisions.

French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre saw this struggle as deeply human. According to the existentialist view, freedom to choose can be frightening and mentally exhausting. The weight of possibility sometimes leads to decision paralysis, where we freeze because we cannot bear to close off any option. Yet Sartre also recognized the opposite trap: a life without choice feels suffocating. We are caught between these two poles, complaining about both too many options and too few.

The next time you find yourself scrolling endlessly through a catalog, remember that your brain is not malfunctioning. It is conserving energy, trying to protect you from cognitive overload. The solution is not to eliminate choice entirely, but to find ways to narrow the field before your brain has to do all the heavy lifting on its own.


## Frequently asked questions

**What is Hick's Law and how does it affect decision making?**

Hick's Law states that the time it takes to make a decision increases logarithmically with the number of choices available. This means that as your options grow, your decision time grows too, but at a decreasing rate. In practical terms, choosing between three movies is much faster than choosing between three hundred, even though both feel like simple tasks at first.

**Who discovered Hick's Law and when?**

British psychologist William Edmund Hick published the paper "On the Rate of Gain of Information" in 1952 in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. His work on reaction times and choice laid the foundation for what we now call Hick's Law. Hick was active in experimental psychology and ergonomics during the mid-20th century.

**How does Hick's Law apply to everyday choices like picking a movie?**

When you open a streaming platform on a Friday night, you face hundreds of titles. Comedies, dramas, thrillers, and documentaries all compete for your attention. Each scroll adds more options to your mental load. After several minutes of browsing, the endless catalog wears you down, and you often close the app without watching anything at all. The sheer number of choices makes the decision harder, and eventually you give up entirely.

**Did the jam study prove that more options reduce purchases?**

Yes. In 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set up a tasting stand at a busy grocery store in Menlo Park, California. They alternated between offering six and twenty-four varieties of jam. The display with 24 jams attracted 60 percent of customers, but only 3 percent made a purchase. The display with 6 jams drew 40 percent of customers, yet 30 percent bought a jar. More attention did not translate into more sales.

**Why do more choices often lead to decision paralysis?**

Your brain is an energy-hungry organ. It makes up only about 2 percent of your body weight, yet it consumes roughly 20 percent of your oxygen and energy. When you face too many options, your brain gets overwhelmed trying to process them all, leading to mental fatigue. That fatigue can leave you unable to decide at all, which is why you sometimes walk away from a decision entirely.

**How can I use Hick's Law to make better decisions faster?**

Consciously limit your options. Instead of scrolling endlessly through a streaming catalog, pick a shortlist of three movies and choose from those. The same trick works for shopping, planning meals, or even picking a route to work. By reducing your choices, you cut down the mental effort required and make a decision more quickly. A small shortlist beats a massive menu every time.

**What was the original experiment behind Hick's Law?**

In 1952, Hick designed an experiment where participants sat facing ten lamps, each paired with a key under their fingers. When a lamp lit up, they had to press the matching key as quickly as possible. Hick measured their reaction times with precision. He found that as the number of possible lamps increased, reaction time grew logarithmically. The more lamps, the slower the response, but the slowdown diminished with each additional lamp. Editorial note: Any facts which remain unconfirmed are presented as such, with hedging used where historical details are not fully verified.

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