So Many Choices

by Patrick Appel

Jonah Lehrer takes on choice blindness:

we are completely ignorant of how fallible our perceptions are. In thisstudy, for instance, the consumers were convinced that it was extremelyeasy to distinguish between these pairs of jam and tea. They insistedthat they would always be able to tell grapefruit jam andcinnamon-apple jam apart. But they were wrong, just as I'm wrong tobelieve that I would be able to reliably pick out the differencebetween all these different coffee beans...