The Art Of Choosing: The Decisions We Make Everyday of our Lives, What They Say About Us and How We Can Improve Them

by Sheena Iyengar

When we speak of choice, what we mean is the ability to exercise control over ourselves and our environment. In order to choose, we must first perceive that control is possible. The rats kept swimming despite mounting fatigue and no apparent means of escape because they had already tasted freedom, which—as far as they knew—they had attained through their own vigorous wriggling efforts. The dogs, on the other hand, having earlier suffered a complete loss of control, had learned that they were helpless. When control was restored to them later on, their behavior didn’t change because they still could not perceive the control. For all practical purposes, they remained helpless. In other words, how much choice the animals technically had was far less important than how much choice they felt they had.

Neurons in the striatum, for example, respond more to rewards that people or animals actively choose than to identical rewards that are passively received. As the song goes, “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly,” and we all gotta choose.

The desire to choose is thus a natural drive, and though it most likely developed because it is a crucial aid to our survival, it often operates independently of any concrete benefits. In such cases, the power of choice is so great that it becomes not merely a means to an end but something intrinsically valuable and necessary. So what happens when we enjoy the benefits that choice is meant to confer but our need for choice itself is not met?

These and countless other stories reveal that the need for control is a powerful motivator, even when it can lead to harm. This isn’t only because exercising control feels good, but because being unable to do so is naturally unpleasant and stressful. Under duress, the endocrine system produces stress hormones such as adrenaline that prepare the body for dealing with immediate danger.

Such responses are survival-enhancing for short-term situations in the wild because they motivate an animal to terminate the source of stress and regain control. But when the source of stress is unending—that is, when it can’t be fled or fought—the body continues its stressed response until it is exhausted. Animals in a zoo still experience anxiety over basic survival needs and the possibility of predator attacks because they don’t know that they’re safe. Physically, remaining in a constant state of heightened alert can induce a weakened immune system, ulcers, and even heart problems. Mentally, this stress can cause a variety of repetitive and sometimes self-destructive behaviors known as stereotypies, the animal equivalent of wringing one’s hands or biting one’s lip, which are considered a sign of depression or anxiety by most biologists.

The less control people had over their work, the higher their blood pressure during work hours. Moreover, blood pressure at home was unrelated to the level of job control, indicating that the spike during work hours was specifically caused by lack of choice on the job. People with little control over their work also experienced more back pain, missed more days of work due to illness in general, and had higher rates of mental illness—the human equivalent of stereotypies, resulting in the decreased quality of life common to animals reared in captivity.

The study suggests that minor but frequent choice making can have a disproportionately large and positive impact on our perception of overall control, just as the accumulation of minor stresses is often more harmful over time than the stress caused by a few major events. More profoundly, this suggests that we can give choice to ourselves and to others, along with the benefits that accompany choice. A small change in our actions, such as speaking or thinking in a way that highlights our agency, can have a big effect on our mental and physical state.

In his book Individualism and Collectivism, cultural psychologist Harry Triandis notes that individualists “are primarily motivated by their own preferences, needs, rights, and the contracts they have established with others” and “give priority to their personal goals over the goals of others.” Not only do people choose based on their own preferences, which is itself significant given the number of choices in life and their importance; they also come to see themselves as defined by their individual interests, personality traits, and actions; for example, “I am a film buff” or “I am environmentally conscious.” In this worldview, it’s critical that one be able to determine one’s own path in life in order to be a complete person, and any obstacle to doing so is seen as patently unjust. Modern individualism has its most direct roots in the Enlightenment of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, which itself drew on a variety of influences: the works of Greek philosophers, especially Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; René Descartes’ attempt to derive all knowledge from the maxim “I think, therefore I am”; the Protestant Reformation’s challenge to the central authority of the Catholic Church with the idea that every individual had a direct line to God; and scientific advances by such figures as Galileo and Isaac Newton that provided ways to understand the world without recourse to religion. These led to a new worldview, one that rejected the traditions that had long ruled soc...

The founding fathers of the United States were heavily influenced by Enlightenment philosophy, in particular John Locke’s arguments for the existence of universal individual rights, and in turn incorporated these ideas into the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. The signing of the Declaration of Independence coincided with another milestone in the history of individualism: Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, which argued that if each person pursued his own economic self-interest, society as a whole would benefit as if guided by an “invisible hand.”

But in fact the construct of individualism is a relatively new one that guides the thinking of only a small percentage of the world’s population. Let’s

Greater wealth is associated with greater individualism at all levels, whether we compare nations by GDP, or blue-collar and upper-middle-class Americans by annual income. Higher population density is associated with collectivism, as living in close proximity to others requires more restrictions on behavior in order to keep the peace. On the other hand, greater exposure to other cultures and higher levels of education are both associated with individualism, so cities aren’t necessarily more collectivist than rural areas. People become slightly more collectivist with age as they develop more numerous and stronger relationships with others, and just as important, they become more set in their views over time, meaning they will be less affected than the younger generations by broad cultural changes.

The idea of love marriage went hand in hand with the rise of individualism in Western society: The Book of Common Prayer was itself a product of the English Reformation.

It turned out that for all the American employees except Asian Americans, the more choice they thought they had, the higher they scored on all measures of motivation, satisfaction, and performance.

In my conversations with people from East Berlin, I’ve observed that rather than being grateful for the increasing number of opportunities, choices, and options that they have available to them in the marketplace, they are suspicious of this new way of life, which they increasingly perceive as unfair. A survey in 2007 showed that more than one in five Germans would like to see the Berlin Wall put back up. A remarkable 97 percent of East Germans reported being dissatisfied with German democracy and more than 90 percent believed socialism was a good idea in principle, one that had just been poorly implemented in the past. This longing for the Communist era is so widespread that there’s a German word for it: Ostalgie, a portmanteau of Ost (east) and Nostalgie (nostalgia).

One man I spoke with summed up the shift quite succinctly: “In the Soviet Union you had money but couldn’t buy anything. Now you can buy anything but don’t have any money.”

Recent studies have even found a stronger correlation between parents’ income and their children’s income in the United States than in Western European countries such as Sweden and Germany, showing that success in the United States is based slightly less on effort and more on the circumstances of one’s birth.

Though I am blind, I regularly use the language of the sighted to better communicate in this visually driven world. I “see,” I “watch,” I “look.” With the help of descriptions provided by family, friends, and colleagues, I am able to make my way through the world of the sighted. I am able to write this book and, I hope, make vivid what I have never seen. As I am in a small minority, you might say I have little choice in the matter, but my life is both easier and richer as a result of my fluency in “visual speak.” I have access to the dominant language and experience of the sighted, and because I have this access, I can better convey my own experience.

Numerous studies have found, for example, that asking people to write an essay that disagrees with their personal beliefs—say, in support of a tax increase that they oppose—causes them to later become more favorable to the position they argued for.

The job searchers’ willingness to alter their priorities allowed them to adjust their expectations in response to their realistic options, but it also created a conflict between their initial priorities and their later ones. The more successfully they were able to resolve this conflict, by creating a false but consistent story about their values in the life-defining category of “career,” the better off they were. Those who recalled their past preferences less accurately were happier with the jobs they accepted. These protective illusions prevented them from recognizing their inconsistency, allowing them to choose in accordance with their latest priorities rather than feeling obligated to the ones they had outlined earlier in the process.

We tend to have a better memory for things that excite our senses or appeal to our emotions than for straight facts and dry statistics.

Of course, you can’t become an expert at everything, so how should you improve your overall ability to choose? The key is to employ your reflective system to sort through your use—or misuse—of heuristics. Ask yourself how you arrived at a particular preference: Were you overly influenced by a vivid image or anecdote? Did you discard an option too quickly because it was framed as a loss? Is it possible you imagined a trend or pattern that doesn’t really exist? Try to find reasons not to choose what you’re immediately drawn to. Gather evidence against your own opinion. Though you won’t always be able to engage in extensive reflection before you make a choice, it’s worth your while to reconsider the choice later on. You may not be able to change it, but if you discover that you made an error, you can avoid repeating the mistake in the future.

For the most part, people earning $100,000 are no more satisfied with life than those earning half that sum. Other studies have found that this trend—rising income without an attendant rise in reported happiness—holds true even for Americans who earn more than $5 million per year.

A study by Daniel Kahneman and colleagues found that commuting is by far the most unpleasant part of the average person’s day, and spending even an extra 20 minutes in transit is one-fifth as harmful to your well-being as losing your job.

boots.” Ever notice that Santa’s suit is the exact same red as the label for Coke? That’s not a coincidence: The Coca-Cola Company holds a patent on the color.

Stanford professor Jon A. Krosnick conducted a recent series of studies on the 2000 presidential elections in Ohio, North Dakota, and California. These three states all rotate ballot order, allowing researchers to measure how many people vote for a candidate when his name is first on the ballot versus lower down. They found significant benefits for whoever came first, whether Bush, Gore, Buchanan, or Nader. The largest effect was an incredible nine-and-a-half-point advantage for Bush in California, and the average benefit across all candidates and states was 2 percent.

The typical supermarket, which carried 3,750 different items in 1949, now boasts some 45,000 items.

Chances are that quite a few other companies could benefit from reducing the amount of choice they offer customers. Though this may seem risky, it is favored by a growing body of evidence. Since the publication of the jam study, I and other researchers have conducted more experiments on the effects of assortment size. These studies, many of which were designed to replicate real-world choosing contexts, have found fairly consistently that when people are given a moderate number of options (4 to 6) rather than a large number (20 to 30), they are more likely to make a choice, are more confident in their decisions, and are happier with what they choose.

The amount of choice we can handle depends partly on the characteristics of the options on offer. When we choose frequently and can choose multiple items, as mentioned above for the Long Tail, no single choice is very important, so it’s not necessary to fully evaluate them. As a result, 100 mp3s, for example, won’t be nearly as overwhelming as 100 mp3 players. It seems, then, that we can get by fairly well for certain kinds of choices. But for the many other decisions that we’re asked to make in the face of nearly endless options, how can we save ourselves from being driven to distraction, even madness, by the noise?

This study shows that people can learn to choose from more options, but they’re less likely to drown if they start off in the shallows and then slowly move toward the deep, all the while building their skills and their nerve. A large choice pool of 56 paint colors isn’t as overwhelming when it occurs near the end of the choosing process, by which point we have a much clearer vision of the whole car. If we generally know what kind of car we want to buy—sporty, sophisticated, family-friendly—this provides additional structure that simplifies the choosing task by eliminating some options and highlighting others. We should, therefore, focus first on the dimensions that are easiest to choose from, whether because they offer fewer options or because we already know what we want, and let these choices guide us through the more difficult dimensions.

And though we’d like to believe otherwise, one of the main concerns in the previous era of medicine—that we’d choose poorly if given the opportunity—was not unfounded. For instance, physician and medical decision-making scholar Peter Ubel points out in his book Free Market Madness that many parents in the 1970s resisted vaccinating their children for polio because of the risk of contracting the disease from the vaccine itself. Since the chance of this happening was only 1 in 2.4 million (far lower than the chance of an unvaccinated person contracting polio), any medical professional would have encouraged vaccination. But probability is cold comfort when that 1 in 2.4 million is your child; some parents must have been so afraid of making their children ill by choosing to vaccinate, thereby becoming causal agents, that they preferred the far riskier option of doing nothing. This is just one example of how our well-known tendency to give more weight to the potential harms of action than to those of inaction can get us into trouble.

Studies have found that a 10 percent increase in alcohol tax results in an average 3 to 4 percent drop in consumption. That’s quite impressive considering that the alcohol tax is generally quite low—only pennies on the gallon for beer in some states. In the case of cigarettes, for which the tax can exceed $2 per pack, a 10 percent tax increase could produce a consumption drop of up to 8 percent, according to an analysis by Nobel laureate Gary Becker and his colleagues. What’s more, these effects are heightened in groups that have more to lose from smoking and drinking, such as teenagers and pregnant women. And the percentage decrease in consumption is usually lower than the percentage increase in tax, resulting in more tax dollars overall for the government to spend as it sees fit. But how do the consumers footing the bill feel about these taxes?

The SnūzNLūz alarm clock is a nifty little gadget if you’re a chronic oversleeper. Every time you hit the snooze button, the clock automatically connects to your bank account through the Internet and donates $10 or more of your money to a preselected charity. Its creators recommend that for maximum effect you choose an organization you despise (an “anti-charity”): Try the NRA if you favor strong gun control laws, or PETA if you have a closet full of fur coats.