Jam

I'm still on my quest to find out more about how we make career decisions, and to this end I'm reading a lot about decision making theory, and trying to work out how or whether it can be applied to career decisions.
I've read a couple of papers recently that have focused on jam!
The first one (Iyengar and Lepper 2000) questions the widespread acceptance of the idea that more choice is better. There have been plenty of studies that show the benefits of choice, improving one's perception of control, life satisfaction, task performance and intrinsic motivation. But these researchers point out that the studies compare having no choice, with having around 6 choices, and we just extrapolate from this that the more choice the better. Iyengar and Lepper asked people to consider buying expensive jam. In one context they had 6 different brands of jam to choose from, and in the other they had up to 30. They found that those with only 6 options were more likely to decide to buy something and were happier with their purchases than those who had more options.
So, the link to careers is in the number of different occupational choices available. Young people have around 3000 options to choose between in year 11. If people struggle to choose a jam to buy when they have more than 6 options to choose from, how on earth do we expect them to navigate through that number of potential routes?

The second jam experiment (Wilson and Schooler 1991) I came across looked at whether thinking and analysing decisions helps in the decision making process. Again it is generally thought that analysing a decision is a good way to help ensure that it's the right decision, but this experiment provides some contradictory evidence. In this experiment one group of participants were asked to taste 5 different strawberry jams, and to rank them in order of taste. The other group was asked to rank them in order of taste but also to write down their reasoning - which factors they considered and what their thoughts were. Those who make the instant and non-analysed decisions tended to reflect the jam-experts' views, suggesting that their decisions about the jam were pretty good. Those who had to stop and analyse their decisions ended up with views that were far less similar to the experts' views, suggesting that thinking about the process led to worse decisions.

Now this kind of information disturbs me. I have spent a lot of time trying to get clients to consider a wider range of options, and to really think about the decisions they're making. Is it possible that these two approaches actually make it harder for people to make good decisions?