Illusion of Variety: Poor Readability Enhances Perceived Variety

Experiencing variety is central to our well-being (Morales et al. 2005; Rolls et al. 1981; Schwartz 2004). Given its central role, how accurate can we tell whether there is greater or smaller variety in different assortments? Would superficial and obviously irrelevant factors such as the font readability of the printed assortment information influence our perceptions of variety? If yes, in which direction does it influence our variety perceptions? On the perceptual level, a list of items printed in different font styles are essentially presenting the same number of options and thus should not alter our variety perceptions. Yet, at a metacognitive level, font styles that differ in readability will affect the ease in processing the information. It has been documented that people often rely on feeling as information when making judgments (Schwarz 2004). Likewise, it is possible for the feeling of ease in reading to affect our variety judgments. While there are reasons to believe that readability will affect our variety perceptions, it may alter perceived variety in opposite ways depending on how people use the feeling as information. Readability may decrease perceived variety. In other words, people see an assortment as more various when the information is less readable. For years, research has repeatedly demonstrated a correlation between great variety in an assortment and subjective difficulty in making choices from the assortment (Chernev 2006; Chernev and Hamilton 2009; Iyengar and Leppers 2000). With repeated experiences of subjective choice difficulty in face of an assortment with great variety, people may form a lay belief linking variety to choice difficulty such that ‘the more variety there is in an assortment, the more difficult it is for me to make choices from the assortment’ (i.e., a difficulty-variety naive belief). As an association gets strengthened over time, it is possible that thoughts about either component will automatically activate the other component (Wyer 2004, 2007), such that feeling of choice difficulty will trigger the feeling of ‘high variety’.