The Art of Choosing [Hardcover]

I had high expectations for this book. Sheena Iyengar's research on choice is well known and often quoted, and I was looking forward to this exposition of her ideas. The book is OK, and will be a worthwhile read for those with a deep interest in choice theory and decision making; however, I personally found the book to be less valuable than other books on this subject.

More specifically:

On the positive side, the book is well researched and is particularly strong when discussing cultural differences regarding choice and decision making. It is loaded with a large number of anecdotes and research studies.

On the negative side, after having read the book, I had a hard time outlining the key points or recalling a handful of particularly powerful examples. Despite the author's frequent references to the importance of a "narrative," I struggled to find the narrative in the book.

In a nutshell, when reading this book I felt as though I would have learned a lot if I'd had the opportunity to spend a semester in one of the author's classes, benefitting from a rich give and take of ideas and arguing the interpretations of the various research findings and personal perspectives. However, not enough of that experience came through in the book -- the studies and examples were mostly ones I had read many times before, and the integrating "theory of the case" was not strongly presented.

For discussions of decision making as it relates to economic or business choices, I found "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely of Duke and "The Winner's Curse" by Richard Thaler of Princeton to be more valuable than "The Art of Choosing." For consumer choice research and issues, Barry Schwartz's "The Paradox of Choice" remains the standard. To swim in the evolution of decision theory as it struggled to integrate its joint heritage in psychology and economics, "Choices, Values, and Frames" by Dan Kahneman and Amos Tversky is the place to look. On the subject of intuitive decsion making, Malcom Galdwell's "Blink" is exceptionally well written and a joy to read.

Ten years ago Malcolm Gladwell released "The Tipping Point" and ushered in a whole bunch of books on what new psychological research has told us about ourselves. Publishers are unwilling to take risks, so there have been many similar books since that time. Thankfully, most of them are as well-researched and written as Gladwell's book.

The latest, and definitely one of the best, is Sheena Iyenga's book, "The Art of Choosing." This book explodes the ideas we have about choice. Did you know that the U.S.A. is the place where choice is valued most highly? In Japan, for instance, people are far more likely to be told where to work and what to wear. Sheena's parents (both Sikhs) had an arranged marriage in India, and there are pictures of the wedding day. Sheena's mother seems to me to be the most beautiful woman in the world (no wonder her husband is laughing at his good fortune).

I knew two Indian programmers that had arranged marriages, but these days the men are in the U.S.A. Relatives back in India contact the parents of suitable women and, in the few weeks of the men's vacation, they go on dates with their "girlfriends," and if all goes well they date some more, until they finally find a compatible partner. This goes against the Western dream of finding a lifetime companion on your own. Apparently millions of people throughout the world manage to find someone, but the spouse is often a co-worker, a co-student, or just one of a circle of friends. We would be shocked if we weren't allowed to choose whoever we wanted to, yet in the current Indian version the women are already expecting to move abroad and to have a nerdy but well-paid husband.

Examples like this proliferate through the book. The new CEO of Coca-Cola in the 1980s had a problem with his senior vice-presidents who thought the company was doing well because they had 45 percent of the soft drink market. He asked them, "What proportion of the liquid market - not just the soft drink market - do we have?" That turned out to be only two percent. The resulting change in the world view of the company led Coca-Cola to increase sales revenue by thirty-five times in just over ten years.

The most famous of Sheena's experiment was the 1995 Jam study, conducted in Draeger's Supermarket in San Francisco. The store was known for its huge selection of every kind of food and food product it offered - 20,000 bottles of wine, 150 kinds of vinegar, and 3,000 cookbooks. Sheena wondered whether the choice was too great so she set up a sample Wilkins Jam taste station which offered either twenty-four or six samples. Anyone who sampled was given a dollar-off coupon for any flavor of the jam.

To the surprise of most people, those who sampled one of the six samples of jam were six times more likely to buy jam than those who tried one of the twenty-four flavors (the six samples were included in the twenty-four). So it seems that there is such a thing as "too much choice."

In the final chapter Sheena discusses choice when the options are limited and either one is bad. Do you take the operation that runs the risk of a five percent chance of dying, or stay with your illness even though it will kill you in the end? There are plenty more mind-challenging things throughout the book, and in the epilogue Sheena talks about seeing S.K. Jain, one of India's famous astrologers, and asks his opinion of her book. Jain says, "This book will far exceed your expectations."

I have to agree with Jain. This book far exceeded my own expectations, and I'm sure it will do the same for you. When you consider that Sheena is blind, I find amazing that she's managed to do all this with her life, and write about it as well. So be artful and choose this book. You won't regret it.

This book covers everything (culture, environment, politics, economy, psychology, religion, history etc) that affects choices. It covers all types of choices from big to small. Everything written in this book is supported by first hand research by the Author herself or someone else Author is able to quote clearly. Her knowledge of the subject is very deep and thorough. Its a hard to put down book. Most valuable message I got from the book - Having less/no choices is not always bad and having lots of choices is not always good. THIS BOOK DOES NOT LECTURE ON HOW TO MAKE CHOICES. It helps you understand and makes you aware of what affects choices.