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

Restrictions do not necessarily diminish a sense of control, and freedom to think and do as you please does not necessarily increase it. The resolution of this seeming paradox lies in the different narratives about the nature of the world—and our role within it—that are passed down from generation to generation. We all want and need to be in control of our lives, but how we understand control depends on the stories we are told and the beliefs we come to hold. Some of us come to believe that control comes solely through the exercise of personal choice. We must find our own path to happiness because no one will (or can) find it for us. Others believe that it is God who is in control, and only by understanding His ways and behaving accordingly will we be able to find happiness in our own lives. We are all exposed to different narratives about life and choice as a function of where we’re born, who our parents are, and numerous other factors.

greater choice can lead to greater regret is the very fact that it does increase the potential benefits of choosing well, even as it makes the process of choosing more difficult. When the options are few, we can be happy with what we choose since we are confident that it is the best possible choice for us. When the options are practically infinite, though, we believe that the perfect choice for us must be out there somewhere and that it’s our responsibility to find it. Choosing can then become a lose-lose situation: If we make a choice quickly without fully exploring the available options, we’ll regret potentially missing out on something better; if we do exhaustively consider all the options, we’ll expend more effort (which won’t necessarily increase the quality of our final choice), and if we discover other good options, we may regret that we can’t choose them all. This dilemma can occur for choices from the mundane, like picking a restaurant, to the highly significant, like whom to marry or what career to pursue.