Award-winning psycho-economist Dr Sheena Iyengar has changed the way brands and individuals think about “choices”
The experiences of immigration, of straddling diverse cultures, of embracing distinct influences within your identity have moved individuals to produce great art, literature and performances. In the case of Sheena Iyengar, however, it pushed her to study a specific subject in Psychology: Choice. Over the past two decades, her work in the field of “choice” has won her much acclaim, including a Presidential Early Career Award, made her a member in Thinkers50 (a global ranking of the top-50 management thinkers) and recently, earned her a mention as one of the world’s best B-school teachers, according to Poets and Quants.
Sheena, who has been teaching at the Columbia Business School since 1998, was raised in a traditional Sikh family in the US. At home, she was imparted a certain set of values and beliefs; at school, she was exposed to another. This diversity in cultures first led her to think about choices and their importance. At the same time, she was also dealing with a diagnosis of retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative condition of the retinas.
Speaking about those two influences on her life’s path, Sheena says, “At home, I was exposed to one set of rules about how you should be; outside, there was another set of rules. So early on, there was a question about which path to choose… And then, I was also going blind. There were no easy choices… No one knew what choices I had or what I could do.”
That early fascination with choices and the role they play in our lives was only strengthened when, in graduate school, she was introduced to the work of her mentor on human motivation. “It became very clear to me that choice was a powerful tool,” she says. Over the years, her work on choice has been the focus of two very well known TED talks: The Art Of Choosing and How To Make Choosing Easier. In The Art Of Choosing, Sheena points to various assumptions that people make about “choices” depending on the culture they come from. These assumptions include beliefs like “If a choice affects you, then you should be the one who makes it” or “the more choices you have, the more likely you are to make the best choice” or even “you must never say no to choice”.
To support her findings, she quotes research that she has conducted in places like Japan, Eastern Europe, Europe and various parts of the US. Dr Iyengar says that all of the assumptions she’s uncovered that human beings make about choices, are surprising in different ways. “On the one hand, we do think that it (making choices) is innate, something all of us have within us. But most of what we do, when we are choosing, is actually a function of our culture. It boils down to the different ways in which we are raised.”
With her work having taken her to different parts of the globe, one also wonders what she finds the most striking about how people think across cultures. After a thoughtful pause, Sheena says, “It would have to do with the fact that the way you think about men does not change (across cultures). But the way you think about women, does. In any culture, (you do think that) men have to earn, that they have to be the ‘provider’. Whereas with women, it is different…”
It is this assumption that Dr Iyengar has talked about during her stay in India. On a short, two-day trip to Mumbai, she led a discussion at the Godrej India Culture Lab on the importance of education and how it can empower a change in narrative, especially for women. “Education makes you aware of choices, it teaches you how to choose,” Sheena says. Her own narrative was influenced by her mother’s insistence on educating her and her sister, much to the surprise of relatives and friends who felt “what do the girls need a college education for”.
“My mother always told my sister and me, ‘I am not putting money away for your marriage, I am keeping it aside for your college education’,” she recounts. “For my mother, it was my masi who helped her get educated. She had a Masters in Mathematics and it made a big difference. It helped her get a job after my father died…” Back in the present, Dr Iyengar is busy working on her next book (her previous one, The Art of Choosing, was a bestseller which won several awards). After all these years of studying choice, is there anything about the subject she still wishes to know? Sheena pauses for a minute and then replies, “Well, you’re never ever really finished, are you?”
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