Choice overload and the cost of deciding

The research behind The to-pack-or-not-to-pack debate.

What the essay claims

"Decisions cost something. For most people the cost of 'two pairs of jeans or three?' is negligible; with ADHD, each small decision draws from the same depleted account as the big ones, and the account empties fast."

This is the claim on the site that the research supported least well, and it has been rewritten as a result. What follows is why. The correction is recorded in full on Why the app is built this way.

The construct

Two separate ideas are folded into that paragraph, and they have to be pulled apart before either can be checked.

Choice overload is the proposal that increasing the number of options can make choosing worse — less satisfying, more often deferred, more often regretted. It is studied in consumer psychology, by varying assortment size and measuring what people do.

The depleted account is a metaphor for the resource, or strength, model of self-control: the idea that self-control draws on a limited store that a period of exertion depletes, producing worse performance on whatever comes next. The laboratory name for that state is ego depletion.

The essay asserted both, and additionally asserted an ADHD-specific version of the second — that the account empties faster with ADHD. Each of the three needs its own evidence. Only the first has any, and it is contested.

What the research says

• A meta-analysis of 63 conditions from 50 published and unpublished experiments (N = 5,036) found "a mean effect size of virtually zero but considerable variance between studies," and identified no sufficient conditions for choice overload to occur. (Scheibehenne, Greifeneder & Todd, 2010)
• A later meta-analysis of 99 observations (N = 7,202) found that once four moderators — choice set complexity, decision task difficulty, preference uncertainty and decision goal — are taken into account, the overall effect of assortment size on choice overload is significant, a finding its authors describe as "counter to the data reported by prior meta-analytic research." (Chernev, Böckenholt & Goodman, 2015)
• In that analysis, choice deferral — declining to decide — is one of four measures of choice overload found to be equally powerful and interchangeable. (Chernev, Böckenholt & Goodman, 2015)
• A preregistered replication of the ego-depletion effect across 23 laboratories (N = 2,141) found an effect of d = 0.04, with a 95% confidence interval of [−0.07, 0.15] — encompassing zero. (Hagger et al., 2016)
• A second preregistered multi-laboratory replication, across 12 labs (N = 1,775), found a small but significant effect of d = 0.10, rising to d = 0.16 after excluding participants who may have responded randomly. (Dang et al., 2021)
• Across 38 studies (496 participants with ADHD, 1,493 without), a consistent propensity for riskier decision-making was found in ADHD, correlating with attention, cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control, time perception and working memory. (Nejati et al., 2025)

What it doesn't say

"The account empties fast" describes an effect whose two best tests found almost nothing. The resource model of self-control is not settled science being simplified for a general audience; it is a contested model whose two large preregistered multi-laboratory replications produced effects of d = 0.04 and d = 0.10. Stating it as the mechanism behind packing decisions would have been the site's weakest claim, and it has been removed from the essay.

There is no ADHD-specific decision-depletion research at all. I could find no study testing whether decisions are more costly, or more depleting, for people with ADHD than for anyone else. That was the essay's actual claim, and nothing supports it. It is now stated as experience.

Choice overload is genuinely contested, and the disagreement is not a detail: two meta-analyses of overlapping literatures reached opposite headline conclusions five years apart, and the later one says so explicitly. What survives both is narrower and more useful than "more options are bad" — it is that assortment size matters conditionally, and that difficulty, complexity and preference uncertainty are among the conditions.

None of the choice research involves ADHD, and none of it involves packing. These are consumer-choice experiments — assortments of products, chosen once, in a lab or a shop. Generalizing them to a person deciding about three hundred of their own possessions over an evening is an extrapolation, not a citation.

The one ADHD-specific finding here is about risk, not paralysis. Nejati et al. report riskier decision-making and its cognitive correlates; correlates are not causes, the samples span children and adults, and riskier choosing is a different phenomenon from being unable to choose.

How this shaped the app

The design response does not depend on the mechanism being settled, which is part of why it survived the correction. Relevance tagging means most items are never presented at all, so the question is never asked; quantities arrive pre-computed, so "how many?" is a question you adjust rather than answer from nothing; and outfit planning replaces a combinatorial question with a bounded one. Everything stays overridable.

The decisions this shaped — relevance filtering, quantity rules, pre-selected essentials and outfit counting — are on Why the app is built this way.

The honest summary of the connection: shrinking the number of decisions an app hands you is a design position, taken because it matches lived experience and because the conditional version of choice overload makes it plausible. It is not a research-derived feature, and it is no longer described as one.

Sources

• Scheibehenne B, Greifeneder R, Todd PM (2010). Can there ever be too many options? A meta-analytic review of choice overload. Journal of Consumer Research 37(3):409–425. doi:10.1086/651235
• Chernev A, Böckenholt U, Goodman J (2015). Choice overload: a conceptual review and meta-analysis. Journal of Consumer Psychology 25(2):333–358. doi:10.1016/j.jcps.2014.08.002
• Hagger MS, Chatzisarantis NLD, et al. (2016). A multilab preregistered replication of the ego-depletion effect. Perspectives on Psychological Science 11(4):546–573. doi:10.1177/1745691616652873
• Dang J, Barker P, et al. (2021). A multilab replication of the ego depletion effect. Social Psychological and Personality Science 12(1):14–24. Open access. doi:10.1177/1948550619887702
• Nejati V, Peyvandi A, Nazari N, Dehghan M (2025). Cognitive correlates of risky decision-making in individuals with and without ADHD: a meta-analysis. Neuropsychology Review 35(3):535–551. doi:10.1007/s11065-024-09646-2