Perceived busyness shapes assortment size preferences via distinct thinking styles

Why Feeling Busy Matters for Everyday Choices

Many people wear busyness like a badge of honor, racing between work, family, and errands. Yet that same busyness can also feel draining and overwhelming. This study asks a simple but powerful question: when we feel busy, do we want more choices or fewer? The answer turns out to depend less on how busy we actually are and more on what that busyness means to us. By looking at both lab experiments and real shopping data, the authors show that “good” busyness and “bad” busyness quietly nudge us toward different kinds of product selections, with important lessons for how stores and websites should present options.

Two Very Different Kinds of Busy

The researchers distinguish between positive and negative busyness. Positive busyness is when a packed schedule feels meaningful and signals competence and control—think of someone who feels energized by juggling projects. Negative busyness, by contrast, feels like overload: too many demands, too little control, and mounting strain. Importantly, both states can involve the same amount of work and time pressure. What differs is the interpretation. The authors argue that this interpretation shifts how willing people are to mentally engage with decisions, especially when faced with many options.

How Busy Feelings Shape Our Thinking

To explain this, the paper draws on the idea that we use two broad styles of thinking. One style is more methodical and reflective, weighing pros and cons in a step-by-step way. The other is more intuitive and fast, relying on gut feeling and simple shortcuts. When people view their busyness positively, they tend to feel capable and in control, which encourages the more deliberate style. When busyness feels negative, people are motivated to conserve mental energy and lean more on quick, intuitive choices. This shift in thinking style acts as a bridge between how we feel about being busy and the kinds of assortments we find appealing.

What Happens When Shoppers Choose

Across several experiments with Chinese consumers, participants first wrote about busy periods that felt either rewarding or stressful, or completed a neutral task. Then they made choices in realistic shopping scenarios, such as selecting how many curtain colors to view or choosing between a small and large box of assorted chocolates. The results were clear: people in a positive busyness mindset tended to ask for more options or pick the larger assortment, while those in a negative busyness mindset gravitated toward fewer options. Measures of how carefully versus intuitively they said they were thinking showed that deliberate thinking pulled people toward larger assortments, and intuitive thinking pulled them toward smaller ones.

Evidence from Real-World Buying

The authors went beyond the lab by analyzing survey data from more than 3,600 households in China about recent refrigerator purchases. Respondents reported how busy and how financially stressed they felt, how much product information they typically sought out, and how many brands they considered before buying. The pattern matched the experiments: people who experienced busyness more as meaningful activity than as stress tended to research more and consider a wider range of brands. Those who felt busyness mainly as strain looked at fewer brands. A measure of how much they typically read and compare products helped explain this link, pointing again to differences in mental engagement.

What This Means for Shoppers and Stores

Overall, the paper concludes that busyness does not simply drain our mental resources in a uniform way. Instead, the emotional tone of busyness—whether it feels like a challenge or a burden—guides how deeply we are willing to think and how much choice we want. When busyness feels like a sign of productivity and control, people stay engaged and welcome larger assortments that allow fine-tuned decisions. When it feels overwhelming, they prefer simpler, smaller sets of options that make choosing easier. For retailers and designers of online platforms, this suggests that “one-size-fits-all” assortments are inefficient: the ideal number of options depends on how customers are likely to feel about their crowded lives at the moment they decide.

Citation: Zhang, H., Zhu, L. Perceived busyness shapes assortment size preferences via distinct thinking styles. Sci Rep 16, 13577 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-41877-6

Keywords: consumer choice, busyness, assortment size, decision making, thinking styles