Hick’s Law (Wikipedia)
A dedicated encyclopedia article on Hick’s Law, the relationship between the number of choices available and the time it takes to decide among them. Wikipedia articles are continuously edited, so year above reflects the access date (2026-06-24), not a fixed publication year.
License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Key points
- William Edmund Hick published the original 1952 study; Ray Hyman’s 1953 work is closely related, so the law is sometimes called the Hick–Hyman law.
- Decision time grows logarithmically with the number of choices: T = b·log₂(n+1) for equally-probable choices. Doubling the options does not double the time.
- The logarithmic benefit depends on the choice set being organized — an alphabetized or categorized menu lets people subdivide it efficiently; an unstructured list of the same length forces linear scanning, and the article states plainly that the law “does not apply” in that case.
- Documented limitations: doesn’t hold for verbal responses to very familiar stimuli, can show no effect or a reversed effect for reflexive eye-movement (saccade) responses, and unequal-probability choice sets need an information-theoretic (entropy-based) adjustment to the formula.
- E. Roth (1964) found a correlation between an individual’s Hick’s-Law processing-speed slope and IQ.