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. We like to have the freedom to choose even if that means sub-optimal choices. After making a choice, when someone tells us that our choice was a wise one, we feel reassured. If people whose opinion we care for tell us continually that we made a poor choice, we get uneasy. That may result in us defending our choice or even getting upset about our choice getting questioned. We like to have options and yet when we have a very large number of options we land up feeling less satisfied with what we choose. Baskin-Robbins, the ice cream company has developed more than 1,000 flavors of ice cream to date, 100 of which are rotated through its stores in a typical year. Starbucks has 87,000 drink combinations. How should we choose and then feel happy with what we opted for? Read Sheena Iyengar's suggestions here on how to shop better.Prof Sheena Iyengar teaches at the  Columbia Business School, US. Her book The Art of Choosing made Amazon.com’s Top Ten Books in Business & Investing for 2010. Her doctoral work was from Stanford University in the area of  Social Psychology. I interviewed her on her life as an author and also as an expert in making choices.How did you go about writing the book The Art of Choosing happen? Tell us about the journey from idea to the book?Sheena Iyengar: When doing research it’s necessary to set clear parameters for your experiments and narrow your focus. So each experiment is like a single dot on the wide canvas of choice, and while those individual dots are important, if you never move back from them you only see one small piece at a time. Writing a book was my way of stepping back and seeing how those dots blend with one another to produce a full—or at least a fuller—picture.When and where do you write? How has your habit of writing changed over the years?Sheena Iyengar: My first rule for anything productivity-related is to be choosy about your choices. In writing, that translates into not having too many irrelevant items. For example, I don’t like having any distractions (so I turn off my email and my phone, and I shut the door to my office). To ensure that I will be writing, and not searching, I have all the research organized and easily accessible ahead of time—so I always do pre-writing research and organization. As for location, I like to either write at my desk at home, or in my office.How did you first get interested in studying about making choices?Sheena Iyengar: Three factors really influenced my interest in choice. The first is my bi-cultural background as a Sikh and an American. From a young age, I had to reconcile these two different worlds. At home, I was taught to emulate a good Sikh who understood the importance of knowing one’s duties and fulfilling one’s responsibilities. However, at school, I was encouraged to identify and act upon my own personal preferences. The second thing that influenced my interest in choice is the fact that I was born with retinitis pigmentosa, which left me fully blind by the age of fifteen. Growing up, there were lots of questions about what I could do: Would I be able to go to a normal school? Could I study math or science? What was I going to do when I grew up? And that meant that it was very salient to me that while choice was a tool for generating possibilities, it also had its limitations. Lastly, I chose to formally study choice in college and graduate school, because of the interests that emerged from my experiences. Underlying much of my research are questions about how we balance our duties and responsibilities to others with the pursuit of personal preference, and how we reconcile both the possibilities and limitations of choice.How do you define a choice? Is it just another term for decision making?Sheena Iyengar: Choice is more than just the exercise of picking X over Y, but the responsibility of separating the meaningful and uplifting from the trivial and disheartening. Choice is the only tool we have to go from who we are today to who we want to be tomorrow.What is the hardest choice we make as humans?Sheena Iyengar: One of the hardest things we must face every day is trying to figure out the right choice set from which we can exercise choice—that is, we must find the right set of options among which to choose. This requires self awareness, and an understanding of one’s own limits. This process of finding one’s limits was more immediate for me. My blindness brought to the forefront various limitations. Being constantly aware of my limitations helped me understand the gravity of choice.Do impulsive people make worse choices than those who seek more information and take time weighing options?Sheena Iyengar: The only question that our emotions can answer accurately is “What do we want right now?” but it doesn’t answer “What do we want tomorrow?” and that’s why it is unreliable. Most of the time, we should use reasoned analysis for making our decisions. The only thing that should be left to whims and emotions is the stuff that is truly uncertain.Could choice that is logically better leave us feeling unhappy? How should we deal with that?Sheena Iyengar: Happiness is the one thing you can never predict. What reasoned analysis can give you is information on what ought to make you happy, not what will make you happy. Your best guess in life is to go “What ought to make you happy” and remember that the happy people are not the ones who get what they want, but want what they get.Do we get better at choosing between options over the years? Does repetition improve our skills?Sheena Iyengar: The best way to improve your choosing abilities is to cultivate informed intuition. Take a minute and think about someone who is very successful in at least one aspect of his or her life. How do you think this person became so successful? I would argue that he or she is an expert at choosing. When people who are experts in a particular field make snap judgments, they are accurate because they’re based on extensive practice and feedback.  You see, merely doing something over and over again is not sufficient to develop informed intuition. Repetition and practice must be accompanied by consistent feedback about whether or not past judgments matched up with the facts and outcomes. This information can then be used to improve future choices. Informed intuition offers the best of both reason and intuition.Is it true that the more self aware we are, the more comfortable we are about not regretting what we choose?Sheena Iyengar: When we’re self aware, we are more conscious of when our regrets are due to our own choices and when they are due to forces outside of our control. In the long run, we can use this knowledge to make better choices. See my explanation above on informed intuition.What tips would you offer to parents to teach their children to make better choices?Sheena Iyengar: We have historically not done a good job in teaching our children how to choose because we assume that it’ll either occur to us naturally or that we will simply learn it through personal experience or observing others. Given how complex the choosing world has become, it’s critical today that as parents, we think carefully about how to teach our children the art of choosing. And what’s most important to that art, is the recognition that choice is effortful, that in order to get the most from choice you have to understand it both for its possibilities and its limitations. If we teach our children that a few choices made everyday carefully can transform their lives. That’s what parents should focus on.-------------------Buy the book Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar by clicking hereMy review of Art of Choosing is hereSheena Iyengar's CV is here