The study found that the children of Asian background played for longer when the toy was selected, while the American children played longer when they chose for themselves. A separate population was allowed to choose a toy and allowed to play independently.

Iyengar cites a study in which children of Asian-American and Anglo-American background were supplied with a toy to play with near their mother. In contrast, she views Eastern cultures as more focused on the collective identity, where it is common to have many decisions, such as who one will marry, chosen for oneself by peers or family. She gives examples of cultures that promote individual choice, such as Europe and the United States here, people love feeling that they have total control.

Iyengar rejects this pattern, stating that the amount of choice necessary is purely individualized. For a pervasive example, she points to the United States consumerist economy, where a simple product like toothpaste will have a countless number of versions on display at a store to satisfy people’s desire for maximum choice. Yet, when there are countless factors influencing a given decision maker, one generally resorts to the question of how he or she can maximize the amount of choice. Next, Iyengar explains that the amount of choice one needs is a product of culture and other environmental factors. This theme of complexity reduction is central to her thesis. Instead, it is often better to spend energy to find the best data for informing decisions, even when that limits the number of options. Though many people feel that they want to maximize their behavioral freedom, it is not necessarily a good thing to be able to conceive of a huge number of outcomes in a given decision problem. Iyengar states that it is up to the individual to define how much choice he or she needs. She extends similar hypotheses and supported theories about human behavior, elucidating the limits of human agency. She is most famous for an experiment colloquially known as the “jam experiment,” in which she proved a hypothesis that people who are presented with an arbitrarily increasing number of options of the same type of product become less and less likely to buy anything. It is split into three main topical categories: regarding what information we search for and incorporate in a decision how we recursively take feedback from the outcomes of our decisions and how we can intelligently use this knowledge of the self to modify our own decision making. The Art of Choosing (2010) by psychologist Sheena Iyengar provides extensive coverage of a host of scientific research about how humans make decisions.

The art of choosing by sheena iyengar