It enables us to go from who we are today to whom we want to be tomorrow. But it does not fulfill all our needs.' Iyengar earned a B.S. In economics from Wharton, a B.A. In psychology from the University of Pennsylvania's College of Arts and Sciences, and a PhD in social psychology from Stanford University. Sheena Iyengar on the Power of Choice -- and Why It Doesn’t Always Bring Us What We Want In March 2010, Sheena Iyengar, a professor at Columbia Business School, published a book titled, The Art of Choosing. Iyengar, who is blind, says the book reflects her interest in how. Summary of The Art of Choosing Sheena Iyengar, Looking for the video? We have the summary! Get the key insights in just 5 minutes. Says researcher Sheena Iyengar.

Sheena Iyengar is the psychologist responsible for the famous jam experiment. You may have heard about it: At a luxury food store in Menlo Park, researchers set up a table offering samples of jam. Sometimes, there were six different flavors to choose from. At other times, there were 24. (In both cases, popular flavors like strawberry were left out.) Shoppers were more likely to stop by the table with more flavors. But after the taste test, those who chose from the smaller number were 10 times more likely to actually buy jam: 30 percent versus 3 percent. Having too many options, it seems, made it harder to settle on a single selection.

Wherever she goes, people tell Iyengar about her own experiment. The head of Fidelity Research explained it to her, as did a McKinsey & Company executive and a random woman sitting next to her on a plane. A colleague told her he had heard Rush Limbaugh denounce it on the radio. That rant was probably a reaction to Barry Schwartz, the author of “The Paradox of Choice” (2004), who often cites the jam study in antimarket polemics lamenting the abundance of consumer choice. In Schwartz’s ideal world, stores wouldn’t offer such ridiculous, brain-­taxing plenitude. Who needs two dozen types of jam?

“The study hardly seems mine anymore, now that it has received so much attention and been described in so many different ways,” Iyengar, a professor at Columbia Business School, writes in “The Art of Choosing.” “From the various versions people have heard and passed on,” she adds, “a refrain has emerged: More is less. That is, more choice leads to less satisfaction or fulfillment or happiness.”

Now Iyengar is having her own say about the jam experiment and the many other puzzles and paradoxes of choice. More choice is not always better, she suggests, but neither is less. The optimal amount of choice lies somewhere in between infinity and very little, and that optimum depends on context and culture. “In practice, people can cope with larger assortments than research on our basic cognitive limitations might suggest,” Iyengar writes. “After all, visiting the cereal aisle doesn’t usually give shoppers a nervous breakdown.”

A congenial writer, Iyengar is less hard-edged and ideological than Schwartz and less glib than Malcolm Gladwell, who she says encouraged her to write this book. “The Art of Choosing” should appeal to fans of both writers. It’s full of the experimental results that make for good cocktail party chatter, but it offers fewer explicit lessons. Iyengar favors exploration over conclusions. “Isn’t this interesting?” she asks, rather than “Isn’t this awful?” or “Isn’t this useful?”

Take a mundane question: Do you choose to brush your teeth in the morning? Or do you just do it? Can a habit or custom be a choice? When Iyengar asked Japanese and American college students in Kyoto to record all the choices they made in a day, the Americans included things like brushing their teeth and hitting the snooze button. The Japanese didn’t consider those actions to be choices. The two groups lived similar lives. But they defined them differently.

The daughter of Indian immigrants, Iyengar is drawn to such cross-cultural comparisons. Consider an experiment she conducted with elementary-school children in San Francisco’s Japantown. Half were what Iyengar calls Anglo Ameri­can, and half were the children of Japanese or Chinese immigrants who spoke their parents’ native language at home.

“Ms. Smith” showed each child six piles of word puzzles and six marking pens. Each pile contained one category of anagram — words about animals, food, San Francisco, etc. — and each marker was a different color. A third of the children were told to pick whichever category and marker they wanted to play with. Another third were told they should work on a specific category with a specific marker. With the final third, Ms. Smith riffled through some papers and pretended to relay instructions from the child’s mother. In the latter two cases, the category and marker were in fact the ones picked by the most recent child to select freely.

The two ethnic groups reacted differently. The Anglo kids solved the most anagrams and played the longest when they could pick their own puzzles and markers, while the Asian children did best when they thought they were following their mothers’ wishes.

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To the Anglo children, their mothers’ instructions felt like bossy constraints. The Asians, by contrast, defined their own identities largely by their relationship with their mothers. Their preferences and their mothers’ wishes, Iyengar writes, “were practically one and the same.” Doing what they thought their mothers wanted was, in effect, their first choice.

Anglos and Asians did share one important reaction: “When the choices were made by Ms. Smith, a stranger, both groups of children felt the imposition and reacted negatively.” Just because people happily comply with the choices of an intimate — or, for that matter, an authority they’ve selected themselves — does not mean they want bureaucratic strangers making their decisions. Advocates who want to use psychology experiments to justify choice-limiting public policy should keep that lesson in mind.

Iyengar began her scholarly exploration of choice with an undergraduate research project. She suspected that religiously observant people who obey lots of behavioral restrictions would feel unable to control their own lives and thus pessimistic. To test this hypothesis, she interviewed more than 600 people from nine different religions, ranging from fundamentalists to liberals. She surveyed their religious beliefs and practices, asked questions to test optimism and had them fill out a mental health questionnaire. What she found surprised her.

“Members of more fundamentalist ­­faiths experienced greater hope, were more optimistic when faced with adversity and were less likely to be depressed than their counterparts,” she writes. “Indeed, the people most susceptible to pessimism and depression were the Unitarians, especially those who were . The presence of so many rules didn’t debilitate people; instead, it seemed to empower them. Many of their choices were taken away, and yet they experienced a sense of control over their lives.”

In retrospect, the result seems obvious. Even many atheists would agree that believing that God cares about you or that your life is part of a cosmic plan can be a powerful source of hope (or, to put it pejoratively, a crutch). Meaning is as important as choice. Besides, Iyengar conducted her survey in the United States, where people are free to switch religions and often do. If keeping kosher or refraining from alcohol makes you feel constrained and helpless, you can abandon those strictures. The only people left in the restrictive groups are those who value the rules. In a modern, liberal society, religious observance does not “take away” choice. It is a choice.

Unlike “provocative” books designed to stir controversy, “The Art of Choosing” is refreshingly thought-provoking. Contemplating Iyengar’s wide-ranging exploration of choice leads to new questions: When is following custom a choice? How costly must a decision be to no longer qualify as a choice? Did Calvinism spur worldly achievement because its doctrine of predestination removed all choice about the hereafter? Do con­temporary Americans adopt food taboos like because they crave limits on an overabundance of choices?

Human beings, Iyengar suggests, are born to choose. But human beings are also born to create meaning. Choice and meaning are intertwined. We use choice to define our identities, and our choices are determined by the meanings we give them, from advertising-driven associations to personal relationships and philosophical commitments. Some meanings we can articulate, while others remain beyond words. “Science can assist us in becoming more skillful choosers,” Iyengar cautions, “but at its core, choice remains an art.”

THE ART OF CHOOSING

By Sheena Iyengar

329 pp. Twelve. $25.99

Sheena S. Iyengar (born November 29, 1969^[1][2]) is the S.T. Lee Professor of Business in the Management Department at Columbia Business School,^[3][4] widely and best known as an expert on choice.^[5][6][7] Her research focuses on the many facets of decision making, including: why people want choice, what affects how and what we choose, and how we can improve our decision making.^[4][8] She has presented TED talks on choice^[9] and is the author of The Art of Choosing (2010).^[10]

Early life and education[edit]

Iyengar was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.^[10]:xi Her parents were Sikh immigrants from Delhi,^[1]India.^[10]:xi-xii As a child, she was diagnosed with a rare form of retinitis pigmentosa,^[10]:xii an inherited disease of retinal degeneration. By the age of nine, she could no longer read.^[8] By the age of sixteen, she was completely blind,^[8] although able to perceive light.^[10]:xii She remains blind as an adult.^[7]

Iyengar’s father died of a heart attack when she was thirteen.^{[10]:xii-xiii} This change in family circumstances, and Iyengar’s loss of vision, prompted Iyengar’s mother to steer her towards higher education and self-sufficiency, saying to Iyengar: “I don't want to hear about men or boys, you've got to stand on your own two feet.”^[11]

In 1992, she graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School and a B.A. in Psychology from the College of Arts and Sciences.^[12] She then earned her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Stanford University in 1997.^[12]

For her dissertation “Choice and its Discontents,” Iyengar received the Best Dissertation Award for 1998 from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology.^[13]

Academic career[edit]

Iyengar's first faculty appointment was at the Sloan School of Management at MIT from July 1997 to June 1998.^[12] In 1998, Iyengar joined the faculty at the Columbia Business School, starting as an assistant professor.^[12] She has been a full professor at Columbia from July 2007 onward and, since November 2009, the inaugural S.T. Lee Professor of Business.^[12][13]

Her principal line of research concerns the psychology of choice, and she has been studying how people perceive and respond to choice since the 1990s.^[14] She has authored or coauthored over 30 journal articles.^[4] Her research and statements have been cited often in the print media,^[15] including by Bloomberg Business Week,^[16]CityLab,^[17]Money Magazine,^[18]The New York Times,^[14] and The Washington Post.^[19] Media appearances include The Diane Rehm Show^[20] (NPR), Marketplace^[21] (APM).

Iyengar was the recipient of the 2001 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers^[22] for, as the NSF said, “helping lead to a better understanding of how cultural, individual, and situational dimensions of human decision-making can be used to improve people's lives.”^[23] In 2011, Iyengar was named a member of the Thinkers50,^[6] a global ranking of the top 50 management thinkers.^[24] In 2012, she was awarded the Dean’s Award for Outstanding Core Teaching from Columbia Business School.^[25]

Non-academic works[edit]

In addition to the journal articles mentioned above, Iyengar has written non-academic articles, including for CNN^[26][27] and Slate,^[28] and many book chapters.^[12] She has also presented two TED talks: “The Art of Choosing” (2010) and “How to Make Choosing Easier” (2012).^[9]

The book she is most known for,^[7]The Art of Choosing (2010),^[10] explores the mysteries of choice in everyday life. It was listed third in Amazon’s top ten books in Business & Investing of 2010^[29] and was shortlisted for the 2010 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.^[30]

In the Afterword of the 2011 edition of The Art of Choosing, Iyengar distills one aspect of her work explaining and advocating for choice, arguing for people to take responsibility for their lives and not rely on a supposed fate determined by some “greater force out there.”^[10]:270 She says: “Choice allows us to be architects of our future.”^[10]:270

Personal life[edit]

Iyengar is divorced from Garud Iyengar, another Columbia University professor. She lives in New York City and shares custody of their son, Ishaan.^[14]

See also[edit]

• Choice: judgement and decision-making

The Art Of Choosing Pdf

External links[edit]

The Art Of Choosing Summary

References[edit]

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