Hick-Hyman Law
The Hick-Hyman Law predicts that human decision time increases logarithmically with the number of equally likely choices. Independently formulated by William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman in the early 1950s, this law describes how long it takes a person to make a choice among alternatives. In human-computer interaction, the law is widely applied to menu design, navigation hierarchies, and command selection, showing that users take longer to select from larger sets of options, but the relationship is logarithmic, not linear.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Hick, W. E. (1952). On the rate of gain of information. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 4(1), 11–26. · DOI 10.1080/17470215208416600
- Hyman, R. (1953). Stimulus information as a determinant of reaction time. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 45(3), 188–196. · DOI 10.1037/h0056940
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.