“In order to choose, we must first perceive control is possible.” – Sheena Iyengar

For those who haven’t heard of the jam experiment, researchers set up two jam-tasting stalls at a luxury grocery store. One offered 6 flavours of jam to sample from, while the other offered 24. More passersby chose to stop at the wide-choice stall, and on average, people tasted two jams at either stall. In the end, however, 30% of people who stopped at the limited choice stall bought a jam: only 3% of people facing 24 options did.

Sheena Iyengar conducted this experiment in an effort to show that though small increases in choice can be a strict improvement, large amounts of choice can actually make us worse off. In her book, The Art of Choosing, she examines the idea of choice and how it affects our lives.  Choice, and even more so believing we have choice, is integral to the human experience. Even animals in zoos apparently develop neuroses in its absence, as happened to Gus, a 700 pound polar bear in New York City Zoo who started swimming endless laps in his pool. It being New York, however, they brought in a therapist and he recovered.

Our affection for choice can lead us into trouble, however. Even when having extra choices actually makes us worse off, we still pursue them, and, as Gus demonstrates, when we don’t have enough choice we can struggle psychologically. Fortunately, how much choice we have is usually a result of narratives we construct for ourselves, both when we have too few and too many. Retirees given a plant and told to care for it themselves, as opposed to being given a plant and told the nurse would care for it, showed marked health improvements despite the fact that a plant was given to them in both cases. Similarly, Japanese students believed they had made far fewer choices in a given day than American students, since the Americans counted things like brushing their teeth or hitting the snooze button as choice while the Japanese students did not.

Though filled with interesting experiments and ideas, The Art of Choosing can sometimes feel somewhat oversimplified. It is made up largely of stories and anecdotes rather than analysis, and so will appeal largely to readers who prefer that style of book. For myself, I preferred Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice as an introduction to choice, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations for self-constructed narratives, and Malcolm Gladwell if you’re looking to accumulate stories for cocktail parties. Still, if choice is something that interests you, the book is worth the read, and even more so is Iyengar’s original work on jam.

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