Choice Overload
Does it get overwhelming? UT faculty team investigates how animals react to overwhelming options.
Humans can have a lot to consider when working out the best choices for their needs: buying a car, choosing a home, or just shopping for groceries. An overwhelming number of options can give a person pause. Animals experience this same phenomenon in their decision making: choice overload.
Assistant Professors Claire Hemingway and Jessie Tanner, both in Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Department of Psychology, recently published about this effect and its consequences for animal decision making in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences. The publishing represents the launch of an ongoing collaboration between their labs to study these questions across various animal systems and in several ecological contexts.
“Jessie Tanner’s lab studies mating decisions in crickets and frogs and my lab studies foraging decisions in bats and bees,” said Hemingway. “One of the reasons that these decisions are important is that they can drive evolution—the flowers visited by bees and the male frogs chosen by females are more likely to pass their genes onto the next generation, so these short-term decisions have evolutionary consequences.”
Shared Contexts
Prior to this collaboration, both separately investigated the ways that the contexts of these choices influenced decision outcomes. Their work comes together within the college’s recently launched Collaborative for Animal Behavior (CoLAB).
“We realized we were both thinking about choice overload, or the tendency to make poor decisions when overwhelmed by too many options,” said Tanner. “We have since become really interested in understanding how widespread choice overload is.”
Overwhelming options is a problem people can experience daily, whether shopping for groceries or scrolling through Netflix. Animals may experience that same choice overload in their daily lives.
“Choice overload has been well studied in the context of behavioral economics, a field that seeks to explain the psychological factors affecting economic decision-making in people, but almost entirely absent in the literature about behavioral ecology, a field that seeks to explain how behavior evolves in response to ecological pressures,” said Hemingway. “Through this collaboration and our future work, we hope to generate conversation between the two fields.”
Teaching Techniques
Both Tanner and Hemingway teach courses on animal behavior and communication, including classes within the college’s new interdisciplinary animal behavior program. Their work in the new article highlights the importance of capturing the complexity of real-world decision-making. Hemingway will offer a fall 2026 course integrating concepts from behavioral economics with animal behavior—ideas central to understanding whether non-human animals exhibit similar behavioral biases to those seen in humans.
“By integrating these ideas into our courses, we can challenge students to consider how choice overload may shape behavior in ways that traditional experiments might overlook,” said Hemingway. “It will help us to encourage students to think critically about experimental design.”
By Randall Brown