Peculiar ways number three fits into our funny little brains

Recently I had made a digital painting on Procreate, this was describing the Hindu deities in the Kerala mural art style. What I painted doesn’t matter much for this story, but what I wanted to share was the way in which this digital painting was printed and framed. Naturally, I was interested to get a quote from multiple printing vendors in my hometown, Thrissur, to compare the prices and see which one offers the best price at the best quality of service.

I instinctively went for three quotes from different vendors for comparison, and I asked myself why did I settle for three? Couldn’t I have picked four? Or why not just one, or two, or seven, for that matter.

Another thought which stuck me here was the analogies the three-quote selection process was similar to the teachings I had had during my design studies at Delft University. The professors always used to point out that while hunting for solutions it’s always best to choose three solutions of equal fidelity, navigate the tradeoffs and constraints through user testing and then arrive at the final solution. And this was similar to the vendor selection process, which intrigued me about the unique nature of the three options.

What kind of psychological window does it offer to help take better decisions? With just a single option to choose from, you’re not thinking about alternatives, so it might mostly be a wrong decision with a huge sunk cost attached to it. With two options, my suspicion is that you are too focussed on steelmanning and straw manning both the sides engaged in a Hegelian dialectic, that you don’t really think outside this context window.

In the design process, when you have to arrive at three options which are more of less similar, you would also have to do a lot more preparatory work to make them more or less similar, and also harder to make a quicker decision on which is a best option. In an ideal world, the options available have all their own unique advantages, and while evaluating, we start thinking hard about the tradeoffs, the constraints, and by the merit of thinking hard about the constraints, we might arrive at a unique solution. With three options, you can still hold the solution space entirely in your head.

With four, it might probably be too exhaustive that you end up losing the sight of the forest over the trees.

If we look closely, the rule of three manifests everywhere, and I now think it has to do with the ability to hold the three options properly in our head. Take storytelling, and you see this as “beginning —> middle —> end”. Or the three click-rule in UX, or even in religion where you see the trinity in Christianity, and trimurthi in Hindu traditions. My theory here is that the comfort of using three has a lot to do with the way it sits neatly into our funny little brains, and less with how the numerologists or the astrologer soothsayers would like to point out..