Why "ask me anything" gets fewer questions: the paradox of choice

What the jam experiment teaches us

A supermarket experiment reported by Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University in a paper she published with Mark Lepper in 2000 overturned common sense about how people make decisions. When they compared a day with 24 kinds of jam at a tasting table and a day with only 6 kinds, the share of people who actually bought jam was higher with 6 kinds.

When there are too many options, people are overwhelmed by the cost of comparing them, and in the end they choose not to choose. This is the phenomenon called the paradox of choice.

Calling out "Ask me anything!" on your question box is the same as setting out 24 kinds of jam. The moment senders start thinking "What should I ask?", they face unlimited options: hobbies, work, love, the past, the future. With too much freedom, they end up closing the screen without asking anything. Freedom can sometimes make people less free.

Limits set creativity free

Just as poets sometimes create masterpieces in haiku or tanka (a classic Japanese poem with a fixed 5-7-5-7-7 syllable pattern) rather than in free verse, limits are not the enemy of creativity but its ally. It's often explained that Twitter spread explosively with its 140-character limit because the limit lowered the decision cost of "What should I write?"

The same principle works on question boxes. If you narrow the range from "Ask me anything" to "Ask me about something I've been into lately," senders' thinking comes into focus all at once. Thinking "What should I ask?" within the frame of "something I've been into" is far easier than thinking from a blank page.

This state is sometimes called structured freedom. It isn't complete freedom or complete restriction. When freedom comes within a reasonable framework, people tend to find it easier to act comfortably. Setting a theme for your question box is exactly the act of offering this structured freedom.

Practical techniques for setting a theme

There are a few patterns for setting an effective theme.

The first is narrowing by time. Just by setting a time range, as in "Ask me anything about what happened this week" or "Taking questions about my goals for next year," you give questions a direction.

The second is narrowing by feeling. When you set an emotional tone, as in "Ask me about something that made me happy lately" or "I'm actually dealing with a problem, so I'd like some advice," senders find it easier to think of questions that match that tone.

The third is offering an either-or choice. When you offer an axis for discussion, as in "Ask me whether I'm an indoor or outdoor person, and why," senders can send a question in the form of stating their own side. This is one of the best ways to lower the hurdle for sending a question.

With any of these methods, what matters is to set a theme while keeping the content of the question itself free. The right level of detail is "Ask me about things around this topic," not "Please ask this question."

The paradox of satisfaction: regret after choosing

The paradox of choice has another important side. When there are many options, satisfaction after choosing also drops. People who chose 1 jam out of 24 think "Maybe another jam would have tasted better." People who chose from 6 are thought to be less likely to feel that regret.

This also applies to the person answering on a question box. When a large number of questions arrives, choosing which ones to answer becomes stressful in itself. You get the feeling "While I'm answering this question, I might be missing a more interesting one."

The fix is simple: deliberately limit the period or the number of questions you accept. If you announce "I'll answer only 5 today," you just need to choose from those 5. And since you can put all your effort into answering those 5, the quality of your answers goes up too. Limits make it easier to raise both the satisfaction of the person answering and the quality of the answers.

Fewer, deeper, and with care

What the paradox of choice teaches us is that the gut feeling of "the more, the better" is wrong. Rather than chasing a larger number of questions, answering fewer questions deeply and with care tends to leave both the sender and the person answering more satisfied.

If you get stuck running your question box, try subtracting instead of adding. Narrow your theme, limit how many questions you accept, or set the days you answer. Limits like these can actually bring your question box to life.

In a place with too much freedom, people don't know what to do. A few limits get people moving. This is a principle that applies not only to question boxes but to the design of all kinds of communication.