Do we read with a rejection mentality?

A few years ago, researchers Pronk and Denissen, from Tilburg University, studied decision-making in dating apps. They discovered that as participants swiped through profiles, they rejected more and more of them (between the first and the last, the probability of acceptance dropped by 27%). It is not that the profiles were getting worse, but that the gaze was worsening. They called it rejection mindset: instead of looking for reasons to choose someone, they ended up looking for reasons to discard them, because the promise of someone better is always just one profile away.This is not a situation exclusive to the digital romantic world. In a now-classic experiment, Iyengar and Lepper showed supermarket customers six or twenty-four varieties of jam. The large display attracted more people, but those who could only choose between six products ended up buying much more. That is to say, abundance was attractive until the moment came to decide.Similarly, in the literary sector we had never had so many different published books at our disposal. Hundreds of thousands of titles coexist in physical and virtual catalogs, and each passing year thousands more are added. A book no longer competes with the four we have on the bedside table, but with a potentially infinite library. Is it possible that, with so much on offer, we end up reading with a rejection mentality as well?The data shows that, in fact, we do not read less. According to the 2025 barometer from the Federation of Publishers' Guilds (a survey by the sector's employers' association), 66.2% of the Spanish population read books in their free time, the highest figure to date. This tells us that people read, but not which books. The relevant question would be, then, how we decide what deserves to be read in the face of millions of possibilities.In practice, we do not decide alone and we often rely on someone to narrow down our options. That is to say: booksellers, reading friends, critics, awards, booktokers or, without us realizing it, the platforms' algorithm. What starts as a convenience can end up being a dependency.Knowing who we trust

This outsourcing, moreover, is not neutral. An independent publisher, for example, publishes little and has a declared editorial line and identifiable criteria. In a large group, on the other hand, what hardly ever fails is the economic performance. It may have imprints with their own quality and personality, but they are maintained or emptied of content as it suits them without the readers ever knowing who makes the decisions or why. To this is added the ability to place titles on new release tables, in supplements and, often, in the media that the group itself controls. Thus, the supposed infinite and diverse catalog that we have within reach ends up being reduced by an increasingly concentrated and directed visibility.This is the great paradox: the greater our apparent freedom to choose, the more we depend on those who have chosen before us. Faced with this panorama, the freedom that remains for us perhaps is no longer just choosing the next book, but knowing whom we trust to choose it and why.