As people, as consumers, how do we choose? Sheena Iyengar has built a career around this question, and in her new book tells us what she has learnt.
In one of the experiments Sheena Iyengar conducted on choice, she thought she knew what the results would be. Groups of children were taken into a room full of toys; some were allowed to pick and choose as many of the toys as they wanted, some were given just two or three. Both had equal playing time. It seemed obvious that the children who were given choice over what they could play with would be happier.
As Iyengar, a scientist, researcher and philosopher on choice, narrates, this was not so. The human mind welcomes choice; we want to believe that we are in control of our destiny, that what we do, who we live with, what we buy and wear, are all in tiny ways meaningful. But here is one of the paradoxes of choice: we cannot handle too much of it. Faced with multiple choices, our minds react with confusion and even withdrawal — it’s easier to choose when the options are limited.
In a book packed with insights and truly useful research, this is just one of Iyengar’s key findings. What makes The Art of Choosing stand out from the endless flood of self-help books, How To Be Happy manuals and Malcolm Gladwell imitations, is not just the quality of Iyengar’s research, or the vibrancy of her writing — it’s the practical, but deeply philosophical, bent of mind that’s at work here.
“The great artist Michelangelo claimed that his sculptures were already present in the stone, and all he had to do was carve away everything else. Our understanding of identity is often similar: beneath the many layers of shoulds and shouldn’ts that cover us, there lies a constant, single, true self that is just waiting to be discovered... And the tool with which we unearth the pièce de résistance is none other than choice.”
But choice doesn’t signify the same thing across different cultures, and one of the most fascinating parts of The Art of Choosing is the manner in which Iyengar invokes her personal understanding of the two cultures she knows best. Early on, she writes of the ways in which her blindness — and her attitude to her condition — shaped her life. She grew up in America, which she saw as a culture that had the importance of personal choice as the “bright, shining thing at its center”, the daughter of first-generation Sikh immigrants who nurtured their Indian roots and heritage.
“I could have thought of my life as already written... or as a series of accidents beyond my control. However, it seemed much more promising to think of it in terms of choice, in terms of what was still possible and what I could make happen.” These differences in cultural choice are fascinating — and can be seen in readers’ responses to The Art of Choosing across the world.
More From This Section
Americans are beguiled by Iyengar’s findings that more choice can be restrictive. Indian readers were, initially, drawn to the power of Iyengar’s personal story, which was read as a ‘success story’ of someone with disabilities triumphing against the odds — even though Iyengar spends relatively little space on describing either her own life or her own dilemmas.
In her studies of the difference in attitudes between West Berliners and East Berliners, Iyengar found that West Berliners consistently thought in terms of ‘freedom from’, while East Berliners thought in terms of ‘freedom to’. This is a massive, and key, difference. Buddhism, to pick one belief system at random, might be considered a way of looking for ‘freedom from’ — freedom from attachment, from wrong desire. But a deeper understanding of Buddhism might also lead you to an examination of ‘freedom to’ — what is it appropriate for us to want, what do our wants tell us about ourselves, how do we exercise meaningful choices about our lives?
From the ways in which we exercise choice in the marketplace (we have less in the way of options than we think) or our choice of partners (arranged versus ‘love’ marriages) to the crucial choice of our political and ideological beliefs, our lives can be seen as a constant and constantly evolving set of choices. Far more than most of the art of happiness books available these days, The Art of Choosing will make you think about how to live a good life.
Our beliefs, even about our own powerlessness or our independence, shape our identities far more strongly than we realise. Facing, as Iyengar phrases it, “a future of ever-expanding choice”, we need road maps. The Art of Choosing is going to be one of the most influential books in this field for years to come.
THE ART OF CHOOSING
Author: Sheena Iyengar
Publisher: Hachette
Pages: 329
Price: Rs 499
