The art of choosing | Sheena Iyengar | TED

Today, I'm going to take you

around the world in 18 minutes.

My base of operations is in the U.S.,

but let's start at the other end of the map,

in Kyoto, Japan,

where I was living with a Japanese family

while I was doing part of my dissertational research

15 years ago.

I knew even then that I would encounter

cultural differences and misunderstandings,

but they popped up when I least expected it.

On my first day,

I went to a restaurant,

and I ordered a cup of green tea with sugar.

After a pause, the waiter said,

"One does not put sugar in green tea."

"I know," I said. "I'm aware of this custom.

But I really like my tea sweet."

In response, he gave me an even more courteous version

of the same explanation.

"One does not put sugar

in green tea."

"I understand," I said,

"that the Japanese do not put sugar in their green tea,

but I'd like to put some sugar

in my green tea."

(Laughter)

Surprised by my insistence,

the waiter took up the issue with the manager.

Pretty soon,

a lengthy discussion ensued,

and finally the manager came over to me and said,

"I am very sorry. We do not have sugar."

(Laughter)

Well, since I couldn't have my tea the way I wanted it,

I ordered a cup of coffee,

which the waiter brought over promptly.

Resting on the saucer

were two packets of sugar.

My failure to procure myself

a cup of sweet, green tea

was not due to a simple misunderstanding.

This was due to a fundamental difference

in our ideas about choice.

From my American perspective,

when a paying customer makes a reasonable request

based on her preferences,

she has every right to have that request met.

The American way, to quote Burger King,

is to "have it your way,"

because, as Starbucks says,

"happiness is in your choices."

(Laughter)

But from the Japanese perspective,

it's their duty to protect those who don't know any better --

(Laughter)

in this case, the ignorant gaijin --

from making the wrong choice.

Let's face it: the way I wanted my tea

was inappropriate according to cultural standards,

and they were doing their best to help me save face.

Americans tend to believe

that they've reached some sort of pinnacle

in the way they practice choice.

They think that choice, as seen through the American lens

best fulfills an innate and universal

desire for choice in all humans.

Unfortunately,

these beliefs are based on assumptions

that don't always hold true

in many countries, in many cultures.

At times they don't even hold true

at America's own borders.

I'd like to discuss some of these assumptions

and the problems associated with them.

As I do so, I hope you'll start thinking

about some of your own assumptions

and how they were shaped by your backgrounds.

First assumption:

if a choice affects you,

then you should be the one to make it.

This is the only way to ensure

that your preferences and interests

will be most fully accounted for.

It is essential for success.

In America, the primary locus of choice

is the individual.

People must choose for themselves, sometimes sticking to their guns,

regardless of what other people want or recommend.

It's called "being true to yourself."

But do all individuals benefit

from taking such an approach to choice?

Mark Lepper and I did a series of studies

in which we sought the answer to this very question.

In one study,

which we ran in Japantown, San Francisco,

we brought seven- to nine-year-old Anglo- and Asian-American children

into the laboratory,

and we divided them up into three groups.

The first group came in,

and they were greeted by Miss Smith,

who showed them six big piles of anagram puzzles.

The kids got to choose which pile of anagrams they would like to do,

and they even got to choose which marker

they would write their answers with.

When the second group of children came in,

they were brought to the same room, shown the same anagrams,

but this time Miss Smith told them

which anagrams to do

and which markers to write their answers with.

Now when the third group came in,

they were told that their anagrams and their markers

had been chosen by their mothers.

(Laughter)

In reality,

the kids who were told what to do,

whether by Miss Smith or their mothers,

were actually given the very same activity,

which their counterparts in the first group

had freely chosen.

With this procedure, we were able to ensure

that the kids across the three groups

all did the same activity,

making it easier for us to compare performance.

Such small differences in the way we administered the activity

yielded striking differences

in how well they performed.

Anglo-Americans,

they did two and a half times more anagrams

when they got to choose them,

as compared to when it was

chosen for them by Miss Smith or their mothers.

It didn't matter who did the choosing,

if the task was dictated by another,

their performance suffered.

In fact, some of the kids were visibly embarrassed

when they were told that their mothers had been consulted.

(Laughter)

One girl named Mary said,

"You asked my mother?"

(Laughter)

In contrast,

Asian-American children

performed best when they believed

their mothers had made the choice,

second best when they chose for themselves,

and least well when it had been chosen by Miss Smith.

A girl named Natsumi

even approached Miss Smith as she was leaving the room

and tugged on her skirt and asked,

"Could you please tell my mommy

I did it just like she said?"

The first-generation children were strongly influenced

by their immigrant parents'

approach to choice.

For them, choice was not just a way

of defining and asserting

their individuality,

but a way to create community and harmony

by deferring to the choices

of people whom they trusted and respected.

If they had a concept of being true to one's self,

then that self, most likely,

[was] composed, not of an individual,

but of a collective.

Success was just as much about pleasing key figures

as it was about satisfying

one's own preferences.

Or, you could say that

the individual's preferences were shaped

by the preferences of specific others.

The assumption then that we do best

when the individual self chooses

only holds

when that self

is clearly divided from others.

When, in contrast,

two or more individuals

see their choices and their outcomes

as intimately connected,

then they may amplify one another's success

by turning choosing

into a collective act.

To insist that they choose independently

might actually compromise

both their performance

and their relationships.

Yet that is exactly what

the American paradigm demands.

It leaves little room for interdependence

or an acknowledgment of individual fallibility.

It requires that everyone treat choice

as a private and self-defining act.

People that have grown up in such a paradigm

might find it motivating,

but it is a mistake to assume

that everyone thrives under the pressure

of choosing alone.

The second assumption which informs the American view of choice

goes something like this.

The more choices you have,

the more likely you are

to make the best choice.

So bring it on, Walmart, with 100,000 different products,

and Amazon, with 27 million books

and Match.com with -- what is it? --

15 million date possibilities now.

You will surely find the perfect match.

Let's test this assumption

by heading over to Eastern Europe.

Here, I interviewed people

who were residents of formerly communist countries,

who had all faced the challenge

of transitioning to a more

democratic and capitalistic society.

One of the most interesting revelations

came not from an answer to a question,

but from a simple gesture of hospitality.

When the participants arrived for their interview,

I offered them a set of drinks:

Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite --

seven, to be exact.

During the very first session,

which was run in Russia,

one of the participants made a comment

that really caught me off guard.

"Oh, but it doesn't matter.

It's all just soda. That's just one choice."

(Murmuring)

I was so struck by this comment that from then on,

I started to offer all the participants

those seven sodas,

and I asked them, "How many choices are these?"

Again and again,

they perceived these seven different sodas,

not as seven choices, but as one choice:

soda or no soda.

When I put out juice and water

in addition to these seven sodas,

now they perceived it as only three choices --

juice, water and soda.

Compare this to the die-hard devotion of many Americans,

not just to a particular flavor of soda,

but to a particular brand.

You know, research shows repeatedly

that we can't actually tell the difference

between Coke and Pepsi.

Of course, you and I know

that Coke is the better choice.

(Laughter)

For modern Americans who are exposed

to more options and more ads associated with options

than anyone else in the world,

choice is just as much about who they are

as it is about what the product is.

Combine this with the assumption that more choices are always better,

and you have a group of people for whom every little difference matters

and so every choice matters.

But for Eastern Europeans,

the sudden availability of all these

consumer products on the marketplace was a deluge.

They were flooded with choice

before they could protest that they didn't know how to swim.

When asked, "What words and images

do you associate with choice?"

Grzegorz from Warsaw said,

"Ah, for me it is fear.

There are some dilemmas you see.

I am used to no choice."

Bohdan from Kiev said,

in response to how he felt about

the new consumer marketplace,

"It is too much.

We do not need everything that is there."

A sociologist from

the Warsaw Survey Agency explained,

"The older generation jumped from nothing

to choice all around them.

They were never given a chance to learn

how to react."

And Tomasz, a young Polish man said,

"I don't need twenty kinds of chewing gum.

I don't mean to say that I want no choice,

but many of these choices are quite artificial."

In reality, many choices are between things

that are not that much different.

The value of choice

depends on our ability

to perceive differences

between the options.

Americans train their whole lives

to play "spot the difference."

They practice this from such an early age

that they've come to believe that everyone

must be born with this ability.

In fact, though all humans share

a basic need and desire for choice,

we don't all see choice in the same places

or to the same extent.

When someone can't see how one choice

is unlike another,

or when there are too many choices to compare and contrast,

the process of choosing can be

confusing and frustrating.

Instead of making better choices,

we become overwhelmed by choice,

sometimes even afraid of it.

Choice no longer offers opportunities,

but imposes constraints.

It's not a marker of liberation,

but of suffocation

by meaningless minutiae.

In other words,

choice can develop into the very opposite

of everything it represents

in America

when it is thrust upon those

who are insufficiently prepared for it.

But it is not only other people

in other places

that are feeling the pressure

of ever-increasing choice.

Americans themselves are discovering

that unlimited choice

seems more attractive in theory

than in practice.

We all have physical, mental

and emotional (Laughter) limitations

that make it impossible for us

to process every single choice we encounter,

even in the grocery store,

let alone over the course of our entire lives.

A number of my studies have shown

that when you give people 10 or more options

when they're making a choice, they make poorer decisions,

whether it be health care, investment,

other critical areas.

Yet still, many of us believe

that we should make all our own choices

and seek out even more of them.

This brings me to the third,

and perhaps most problematic, assumption:

"You must never

say no to choice."

To examine this, let's go back to the U.S.

and then hop across the pond to France.

Right outside Chicago,

a young couple, Susan and Daniel Mitchell,

were about to have their first baby.

They'd already picked out a name for her,

Barbara, after her grandmother.

One night, when Susan was seven months pregnant,

she started to experience contractions

and was rushed to the emergency room.

The baby was delivered through a C-section,

but Barbara suffered cerebral anoxia,

a loss of oxygen to the brain.

Unable to breathe on her own,

she was put on a ventilator.

Two days later,

the doctors gave the Mitchells

a choice:

They could either remove Barbara

off the life support,

in which case she would die within a matter of hours,

or they could keep her on life support,

in which case she might still die

within a matter of days.

If she survived, she would remain

in a permanent vegetative state,

never able to walk, talk

or interact with others.

What do they do?

What do any parent do?

In a study I conducted

with Simona Botti and Kristina Orfali,

American and French parents

were interviewed.

They had all suffered

the same tragedy.

In all cases, the life support was removed,

and the infants had died.

But there was a big difference.

In France, the doctors decided whether and when

the life support would be removed,

while in the United States,

the final decision rested with the parents.

We wondered:

does this have an effect on how the parents

cope with the loss of their loved one?

We found that it did.

Even up to a year later,

American parents

were more likely to express negative emotions,

as compared to their French counterparts.

French parents were more likely to say things like,

"Noah was here for so little time,

but he taught us so much.

He gave us a new perspective on life."

American parents were more likely to say things like,

"What if? What if?"

Another parent complained,

"I feel as if they purposefully tortured me.

How did they get me to do that?"

And another parent said,

"I feel as if I've played a role

in an execution."

But when the American parents were asked

if they would rather have had

the doctors make the decision,

they all said, "No."

They could not imagine

turning that choice over to another,

even though having made that choice

made them feel trapped,

guilty, angry.

In a number of cases

they were even clinically depressed.

These parents could not contemplate

giving up the choice,

because to do so would have gone contrary

to everything they had been taught

and everything they had come to believe

about the power

and purpose of choice.

In her essay, "The White Album,"

Joan Didion writes,

"We tell ourselves stories

in order to live.

We interpret what we see,

select the most workable

of the multiple choices.

We live entirely by the imposition

of a narrative line

upon disparate images,

by the idea with which we have learned to freeze

the shifting phantasmagoria,

which is our actual experience."

The story Americans tell,

the story upon which

the American dream depends,

is the story of limitless choice.

This narrative

promises so much:

freedom, happiness,

success.

It lays the world at your feet and says,

"You can have anything, everything."

It's a great story,

and it's understandable why they would be reluctant

to revise it.

But when you take a close look,

you start to see the holes,

and you start to see that the story

can be told in many other ways.

Americans have so often tried to

disseminate their ideas of choice,

believing that they will be, or ought to be,

welcomed with open hearts and minds.

But the history books and the daily news tell us

it doesn't always work out that way.

The phantasmagoria,

the actual experience that we try to understand

and organize through narrative,

varies from place to place.

No single narrative serves the needs

of everyone everywhere.

Moreover, Americans themselves

could benefit from incorporating

new perspectives into their own narrative,

which has been driving their choices

for so long.

Robert Frost once said that,

"It is poetry that is lost in translation."

This suggests that

whatever is beautiful and moving,

whatever gives us a new way to see,

cannot be communicated to those

who speak a different language.

But Joseph Brodsky said that,

"It is poetry

that is gained in translation,"

suggesting that translation

can be a creative,

transformative act.

When it comes to choice,

we have far more to gain than to lose

by engaging in the many

translations of the narratives.

Instead of replacing

one story with another,

we can learn from and revel in

the many versions that exist

and the many that have yet to be written.

No matter where we're from

and what your narrative is,

we all have a responsibility

to open ourselves up to a wider array

of what choice can do,

and what it can represent.

And this does not lead to

a paralyzing moral relativism.

Rather, it teaches us when

and how to act.

It brings us that much closer

to realizing the full potential of choice,

to inspiring the hope

and achieving the freedom

that choice promises

but doesn't always deliver.

If we learn to speak to one another,

albeit through translation,

then we can begin to see choice

in all its strangeness,

complexity

and compelling beauty.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Bruno Giussani: Thank you.

Sheena, there is a detail about your biography

that we have not written in the program book.

But by now it's evident to everyone in this room. You're blind.

And I guess one of the questions on everybody's mind is:

How does that influence your study of choosing

because that's an activity

that for most people is associated with visual inputs

like aesthetics and color and so on?

Sheena Iyengar: Well, it's funny that you should ask that

because one of the things that's interesting about being blind

is you actually get a different vantage point

when you observe the way

sighted people make choices.

And as you just mentioned, there's lots of choices out there

that are very visual these days.

Yeah, I -- as you would expect --

get pretty frustrated by choices

like what nail polish to put on

because I have to rely on what other people suggest.

And I can't decide.

And so one time I was in a beauty salon,

and I was trying to decide between two very light shades of pink.

And one was called "Ballet Slippers."

And the other one was called "Adorable."

(Laughter)

And so I asked these two ladies,

and the one lady told me, "Well, you should definitely wear 'Ballet Slippers.'"

"Well, what does it look like?"

"Well, it's a very elegant shade of pink."

"Okay, great."

The other lady tells me to wear "Adorable."

"What does it look like?"

"It's a glamorous shade of pink."

And so I asked them, "Well, how do I tell them apart?

What's different about them?"

And they said, "Well, one is elegant, the other one's glamorous."

Okay, we got that.

And the only thing they had consensus on:

well, if I could see them, I would

clearly be able to tell them apart.

(Laughter)

And what I wondered was whether they were being affected

by the name or the content of the color,

so I decided to do a little experiment.

So I brought these two bottles of nail polish into the laboratory,

and I stripped the labels off.

And I brought women into the laboratory,

and I asked them, "Which one would you pick?"

50 percent of the women accused me of playing a trick,

of putting the same color nail polish

in both those bottles.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

At which point you start to wonder who the trick's really played on.

Now, of the women that could tell them apart,

when the labels were off, they picked "Adorable,"

and when the labels were on,

they picked "Ballet Slippers."

So as far as I can tell,

a rose by any other name

probably does look different

and maybe even smells different.

BG: Thank you. Sheena Iyengar. Thank you Sheena.

(Applause)