Mistress of choice

Sheena Iyengar seems the most unlikely expert on questions about choice. She cannot even choose the shade of lipstick she wears. She has been blind since she was a child, as is her sister. Her parents were second cousins and their daughters were born with a genetic condition known as retinitis pigmentosa. Iyengar says her parents didn’t necessarily regret their marriage. “My mother would say what did I do in my last life. Or what did your father do in his last life. She put the blame on God or fate,” says Iyengar. [caption id=“attachment_4299” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=" Greg Martin"] [/caption] Iyengar understood early on that her blindness would circumscribe many of her choices. But it also made her intensely interested in understanding how we choose what we choose; and whether our choices actually make us happy. Now a professor of business at Columbia University, she’s written a book about choice – The Art of Choosing. In America, in the temple of free market capitalism, choice is the ultimate god. The more choices there are the better. But Iyengar says what people don’t often realise is that culture affects choice. Take her family. She grew up in a traditional Sikh immigrant family, “the kind where you don’t take your kachha off while bathing,” she says. Her parents had an arranged marriage. She, on the other hand, met her husband at a bus stop in California. But even there, she says, she put limitations on her choice because of her cultural background. “I consciously chose to marry an Indian because I felt if I married an American my entire life would continue to be two cultures in conflict all the time,” she says. Her husband is Indian – a Tamil Brahmin. His parents were not expecting a blind Sikh daughter-in-law. But the couple was adamant. They had chosen each other. Again, culture came into play. The family astrologer told her mother-in-law the two had been married to each other in seven past lives and would marry each other seven times more. Choice is cultural, says Iyengar. Give an American ten kinds of sodas and he’ll think he has ten choices. An Asian will just want to figure out what his host wants him to choose. Members from ex-Communist countries think in terms of just one choice, difference between the brands being meaningless to them. In the West, people get fixated on the number of choices available. What’s interesting, says Iyengar is how we choose. She learned that lesson the hard way. As a student in Japan she once asked for sugar with her green tea, a social no-no. The waiter refused to give it to her. She put her foot down and insisted; it was her choice as a customer. The manager said there was no sugar. She asked for coffee. It came with two packets of sugar. At first the American customer in her was outraged. “But then I realised they were protecting me from committing the ultimate faux pas in Japan – drinking my tea incorrectly,” she says. In Japan the waiter was not circumscribing her choice; he was helping her choose correctly. She sees the same concept in action in India when women buy saris with friends. The friends act as a sort of choice committee. “They allow the collective to winnow down the options,” says Iyengar. “She is comfortable with the other women saying don’t buy that, it’s too gaudy or it might upset your mother-in-law.” A famous experiment she conducted at a grocery store in California showed that when people are given more choices, they don’t necessarily choose better. More customers bought one particular jam when they were shown a sample set of six than when they were shown a set of 24. More, it seems, can be overwhelming. “That’s why when it comes to ice cream, 50 percent Americans stick to vanilla, strawberry or chocolate,” says Iyengar. Iyengar remembers another experiment in San Francisco with Asian-American children and white children. There were three groups. One was told to choose a puzzle (say a bird) and a colored marker (say blue). The second was shown all the options but was told the teacher had chosen the bird puzzle and a blue marker for them. The third group was told their mothers had chosen the bird puzzle and the blue marker for them. The white children performed best when they were doing the choosing. “Some were even outraged when told we had asked their mothers,” chuckles Iyengar. But the Asian children however performed best when doing the puzzles their mothers had chosen. “Having their mothers choose for them was comforting,” explains Iyengar. So does being a mother who has studied the ins and outs of choice help her five-year-old son make choices? He has to choose between being American, Sikh and Tamil. “My son is being raised as an Iyengar,” she says. “We do go to the gurdwara sometimes. And he does play with a kara. But we don’t expect him to be Indian per se. He is American.” Right now, she says, given a choice, all he wants to do is go to the zoo.