Development and Validation of an Evaluation Difficulty Scale

Nowadays, people are confronted with an overload of choice alternatives. However, having a lot of options does not necessarily increase consumer satisfaction (e.g., Iyengar and Lepper 2000). Especially people who are motivated to make the best possible choice (i.e., maximizers), can experience feelings of stress when they have a lot of alternatives, and are more likely to regret their choice afterwards (Schwartz et al. 2002). We suggest that difficulties to choose a product might arise from difficulties to form one’s opinion about products. When people have a hard time to know how much they like something, they might consequently encounter difficulties to choose the product they would like best. Current research suggests that people can have a hard time to form their opinion in general. Whether they have to evaluate a new product, a new neighbor or a new taste, some people find it hard to make up their mind. In current paper, we develop a scale to measure individual differences in the extent to which people have difficulties to evaluate. Moreover, we demonstrate that current evaluation difficulty scale is able to predict several personality measures and behavioral outcomes, including actual taste evaluations.