7. Who Is in Your Shopping Cart? Expected and Experienced Effects of Choice Abundance in the Online Dating Context

The advent of the Internet has led to a sizeable increase in the number of options from which humans can choose, in such evolutionarily important domains as housing, food and mates. The level of choice and the amount of information seen on the Internet are well beyond that which would have been found in our ancestral choice environment; so how does it impact our decisions? We describe the results of two experiments in which we examine the influence of increasing online mate choice on expected and experienced choice-related affect and cognitions. In Study 1, participants merely expecting an increasing choice of mates believed they would enjoy choosing more from these sets and would have greater satisfaction and less regret with their chosen partner (vs. when they expected to face limited choice), but only up to a point. On the other hand, participants in Study 2 who experienced a supposedly ideal number of potential mates from whom to choose did not have enhanced feelings about the choice process and person selected than did participants experiencing a more limited number of options. Furthermore, the results indicated that having more choice may lead to memory confusion. Together, these studies suggest that while participants anticipate that increasing choice may ultimately yield more downsides than upsides, they underestimate how quickly increasing choice can become overwhelming. We propose that these results may be understood best within the context of an evolutionary–cognitive framework. The chapter concludes by discussing why the error in anticipation may be difficult to overcome and, further, how the design of dating Web sites could be improved, given people’s expectations.