The Art of Choosing

How do we make choices? What goes behind any choice making process? Do you choose based on data and logic? Do you choose based on your gut? The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or MBTI categorizes people on the basis of their yardstick of making choices. To what extent is our choice making conditioned by our levels of education or the culture we have grown up in? Are there situations when people may feel relieved that they do not need to make a choice? We are continuously making choices and living with the consequences of making those choices. There are moments when we make a choice and a moment later wish that we could start again. “Choice can be a burden, but without choice, our life loses meaning”, says author Sheena Iyengar in her ground breaking book The Art of Choosing. The headlines first – I LOVED the book.
The desire to choose is a natural drive. The desire to exercise choice is even necessary for us to remain healthy. Although higher paying jobs in corporations come with greater stress and pressure, the employees in the lowest pay grade such as doormen, are more than three times likely to die from coronary heart disease than the highest grade workers. The less control people have over their work, the higher their blood pressure during work hours. It is not the actual degree of control that matters but the extent to which the people perceive themselves as having that control. So a well-paid top exec could have the same negative physiological response as the doorman.

Choice also has a cultural dimensions. In today’s global organizations, very often the HR processes reflect the cultural assumptions of the country where the company was headquartered. For example, in my previous life when I worked for an American Multinational, I had the task of explaining to employees in different countries how to craft their own Individual Development Plan. The idea was to let people craft their own destiny and make their own career choices. The employees in most Asian countries heard me out very patiently and then would ask me if they could seek their managers’ opinion about what career options they should write in the form. It is quite common in India to have the parents decide what career choices their child would pursue. In some Western cultures this would be seen to be shocking and confusing. After all, the arranged marriage as a concept still intrigues the Westerner who cannot understand how choosing a spouse can be left to others. Can we ascribe these differences to our cultural milieu?

If having options to choose from makes us happy, one would logically argue that more choice would make us happier. Barry Schwartz challenges a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz’s estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied. If the doctor looks at your tests and says, “We could do procedure ‘A’ and that would have a 40% chance of success. or else we could do procedure ‘B’ which would have a 60% rate of failure.” Chances are that you chose option A (even tho’ the probability of success is the same in both cases). With too many options to choose from, people find it difficult to choose at all. If you have 55 flavors of ice cream to choose from, that would make it really hard. Even if you make a choice, you would be dissatisfied because you would have a nagging feeling that you would have enjoyed another flavor more. We tend to imagine and exaggerate the benefits of the choices we did not make and feel less satisfied with what we have chosen. Sounds familiar?

If you could have a choice between two worlds: One in which there are fewer choices but everyone has the same access to them, and another in which there are greater choices, but some people have more than others. Which one would you choose. Sheena Iyengar tells us that countries which have a more collectivist culture choose differently from those that are individualistic.  What I like about this book is the wealth of examples on so many aspects of our lives. There are answers to questions we may have thought about on a lazy afternoon. For instance, does money buy you happiness? The answer, yes it does – but up to a certain point. People earning $100,000 or more are no more satisfied with life than those earning half of that sum. Rising income does not lead to rise in happiness even for those who earn more than $5 million. Even winning the lottery does not raise people’s long term happiness.

There are other snippets of research that anyone who has a long daily commute to work will resonate with.  Research shows that more money does not compensate for a job where you have a longer commute to suffer. We tend to enjoy something that is priced higher. That explains why ordinary wine if packaged in a new bottle may actually lead to your finding the wine superior … we are such suckers I tell you. The scope of our conscious attention is far narrower than we realize.

Sheena Iyengar looks deeply at choosing and has discovered many surprising things about it. For instance, her famous “jam study,” done while she was a grad student, quantified a counterintuitive truth about decision making — that when we’re presented with too many choices, like 24 varieties of jam, we tend not to choose anything at all. Her research has been informing business and consumer-goods marketing since the 1990s. But she and her team at the Columbia Business School throw a much broader net. Her analysis touches, for example, on the medical decision making that might lead up to choosing physician-assisted suicide, on the drawbacks of providing too many choices and options in social-welfare programs.

Here is Sheena Iyengar’s talk at TED.

This book will change the way you look at making choices. What makes the book The Art of Choosing so powerful is Sheena’s conversational tone that is so full of anecdotes, personal experiences, research insights all blended together seamlessly to create a wonderful book that is a must read. You could always choose not to – but let me say, that is a choice you will always regret!

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1. Interview: Sheena Iyengar Jean Buridan (circa 1295-1358) the French philosopher and theologian had talked about choice. An ass who is hugely hungry and thirsty and is standing at the crossroad where one roads leads to a stack of hay and the other to a pail of water. The ass dies of starvation and thirst – unable to make a choice! This anecdote is now referred to as Buridan’s Ass. (Sounds pretty personal to me). Making choices is an integral part of our lives. [...]...