Where does information overload collide?

In management and information systems, information overload names the state where the information a person receives grows beyond the amount they can use, so that adding more begins to lower the quality of their decisions. Eppler and Mengis's 2004 review, The Concept of Information Overload, gathered how the term had been used across organization science, accounting, marketing, and MIS, and found the same broad idea running through all of them: performance rises with information up to a point and then falls, an inverted U. Their paper matters here precisely because it documents the label traveling from field to field, each one borrowing the phrase while studying a different cause. Some studied too many messages, some too many product facts, some the limits of the mind itself. The review shows a single name stretched across problems that do not share a mechanism.[1]

Unit

The point where added information starts to lower decision quality

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Reviewed across fields by relating information load to decision quality, and summarised as an inverted-U curve

In consumer research, information overload is the finding that giving shoppers more facts about the products they are comparing can make their choices worse rather than better. Jacoby, Speller, and Kohn's 1974 study, Brand Choice Behavior as a Function of Information Load, varied how many brands and how many attributes per brand people saw, and reported that past a point buyers picked the brand that best matched their stated preferences less often, even while feeling more satisfied and more certain. The overload here is the volume of facts packed into a single decision, measured by how well the choice matched what the person said they wanted. It is a claim about the structure of a choice task, not about message volume or the raw capacity of memory. The result has been re-analysed and disputed since, but the construct it named is specific: attribute and alternative load inside one purchase.[2]

Unit

The number of brands and attributes shown in a purchase task

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Manipulated load in the display and scored the choice against the buyer's stated ideal brand

In the psychology of choice, overload takes a narrower form: not too many facts about one option, but too many options to choose among. Iyengar and Lepper's 2000 paper, When Choice Is Demotivating, found that shoppers offered a display of twenty-four jams were less likely to buy than those offered six, and that people given more choices later reported less satisfaction with what they picked. The construct here is the number of alternatives on offer, and its effect falls on motivation and regret rather than on the accuracy of a single decision. This choice-overload effect has proved fragile in later meta-analysis, which is part of why it sits on its own spoke: it is a different claim from Jacoby's attribute overload, even though both travel under the word overload. Too many options is not the same problem as too much information about one option.[3]

Unit

The number of alternatives offered in a choice set

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Compared purchase, motivation, and satisfaction between small and large choice sets

In cognitive psychology, the root of every overload claim is that the mind can hold and process only a limited amount at once. Miller's 1956 paper, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two, gathered evidence that people can reliably tell apart and hold in mind only about seven items at a time across very different tasks, a ceiling on immediate processing. This is a claim about capacity, a fixed property of the person, rather than about the quantity of information the world happens to send. Overload in the other fields is really that capacity meeting a load that exceeds it, but the capacity itself is what this field measures. Reading the limit as if it were the load, or as the felt strain of a hard task, is the same slip that the neighbouring cognitive load page traces in more detail.[4]

Unit

The number of items the mind can hold and tell apart at once

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Estimated from absolute-judgement and immediate-memory tasks as a span of about seven items

In organizational communication, information overload appears as the daily flood of messages, above all email, that workers must read, sort, and answer. Barley, Meyerson, and Grodal's 2011 study, E-mail as a Source and Symbol of Stress, found that the more time employees spent on email the more overloaded and stressed they felt, and that email had also become a symbol people blamed for their loss of control over the workday. The overload here is a property of a communication channel and a workload, counted in messages and hours, not in product attributes or memory slots. It is close kin to technostress, the strain of coping with workplace technology. What this meaning shares with the other fields is only the meaning of too much; what it points at is a stream of interruptions, which no study of jam displays or memory span was ever about.[5]

Unit

The volume of messages and time a channel demands of a worker

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Related email time to felt overload and stress in a workplace field study