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April 2, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:19
1630 'The Art of Choosing' - Freedomain Radio Interviews Dr Sheena Iyengar
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Hi, everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I have on the show Dr.
Sheena Iyengar, who is the inaugural S.T. Lee Professor of Business in the Management Division at Columbia Business School and the Research Director at the Jerome Chazan Institute of International Business.
She is considered one of the world's experts on choice, and not just because she has chosen to be on this show, but I'm sure that there are other things as well.
So thank you so much, Sheena, for taking the time to have a chat today.
Thank you so much for having me here today.
The first thing that struck me about your book, and a book by Sheena's just been released, called The Art of Choosing.
And I thought that the word art was very, very interesting.
It's not the science of choosing.
It's not the satanic mystery of choosing.
It is the art of choosing.
I know that you're trained quite a bit in social psychology and the sciences.
When you were coming up with the title, was that something that popped into your mind as the most apt description?
Did it take you a while to find it?
Oh, that's a great question.
What was the choosing process for the title?
I thought that would be kind of meta, but still worth looking into.
You know, that turned out to be a very difficult choice.
Because it turned out there were so many different opinions that different people had about what the title of the book should really be.
And I ended up collecting, I must have gotten together about a thousand different title options.
And, you know, this one actually, I'm proud to say that this was one of my choices.
It wasn't one of the ones chosen by the publisher.
I actually was the one who chose this title or proposed this title, really, because the publisher is the one who chooses ultimately what's going to be the title of your book.
And I chose this because I thought, I proposed this because I really thought it was apt for the description of the book, because it's not just, you know, choosing ultimately It's not just the science.
Science does help you make choices, helps you align the odds.
But in the end, when you have to make that choice, there's an art.
And the way I think about it, and everybody would have a different definition perhaps of what is the art of choosing.
In my mind, the art of choosing is the balancing of our hopes, expectations, and an appreciation of the possibilities with a clear-eyed assessment of the limitations.
Right, right, okay.
Now, one of the things that I have gotten out of your work is, and of course, as the expert, correct me wherever I go astray, but it would seem to me that choice is subject to the Aristotelian mean, in that you obviously, to have too little choice is a depressant, and to have too much choice, option paralysis, seems to be sort of a paralytic.
And yet, Throughout cultures throughout the world there are cultures that value more choice, there are cultures that value less choice.
There doesn't seem to be any culture that values no choice and there's no culture that imagines we're perfectly free.
But would you say that in your research on choice around the world that this Balance between too little and too much, which I think is where the art comes from, because I think that's what Aristotle was talking about in his philosophy, that there's an art to living, which is the balancing, not looking for too much or looking to too little.
Would that be a reasonable way to approach some of your work?
Oh, sure. Absolutely.
Were there any cultures that you found very surprising in their delineation of choice as very foreign to some of the choices that you had when you were growing up?
Well, I grew up as a Sikh in an American society.
So my parents were Sikhs.
I was constantly going back and forth between two very different ideas about choice, different models of how you were supposed to live your life.
So as a Sikh, you were constantly being told about your duties and responsibilities.
And there were lots of rules and rituals about how you lived your life, you know, like you didn't cut your hair and you followed the five Ks, which are, you know, the five core principles of Sikhism.
And usually lots of things were essentially prescribed by your parents or the elders.
So like, for example, my parents had their marriage arranged.
They met each other on their wedding day and usually your careers and things like that are pretty much prescribed by the elders or the people that are more experienced in their guidance.
Whereas in American culture, I was constantly being told about the fact that I should be choosing everything and that I should decide how I was going to dress and how I was going to do my hair and what I was going to be when I grew up.
And the idea that anybody else would decide whom I would marry just seemed really horrific to them.
And it was very clear going back and forth between these two cultures that there was a real disconnect between The idea of how important was it for you to be the one making all your choices?
And to what extent should you choose versus allow other people to choose?
Who is the better, the wiser person to make the choices?
So in Indian culture, it was, well, clearly the experience mattered.
And in American culture, it was, well, but you're the one who's going to get affected by this choice.
So you're in the best position to know what you want.
Right. And I think one of the things that struck me as well was if you choose to go against what some people would consider a somewhat restrictive culture, it's true that you can then choose who to marry, you can choose to cut your hair, you can choose to do a number of other things, but your choices within that culture become very restricted because there can be problems with ostracism or like your choices to act freely within that culture get restricted.
And everybody looks at the increases in liberty, but not the diminishment of choice within the culture, if that makes any sense.
Yes. And not only that, even when you do live in this world of lots and lots of choice and you are free to choose whatever it is you want, it's not that that freedom comes without constraints.
It does come with burdens.
I mean, every time you make a choice, you bear the consequences.
Yeah, that is very true.
And it's something that some people rebel against.
And it's also interesting, of course, that where there is a plethora of choice, such as in the dating and marriage, I guess, quote, market in North America, there doesn't seem to be a sort of correspondent increase in The success of the marriages.
I think I read somewhere the other day that in Manhattan, 70% of marriages last less than five years.
And of course, this is a place where some of the greatest choice in the world is.
And of course, arranged marriages, which a lot of people would consider to be, you know, archaic and so on, have significantly greater degrees of success if we just talk about the longevity of the marriage.
And of course, for the stability of the children, that's very important.
It's an interesting question.
People always ask me the question of, well, what's the difference in happiness rates of love versus arranged marriages?
And, you know, that's clearly a very difficult question to answer because they're based on very different notions of what they expect out of a marriage, right?
Because, you know, essentially, when you think of arranged marriage, it's kind of like family, you know, like you don't pick who your parents are.
That model is not one of choice.
You know, this is my parent.
I don't really like them.
They drive me nuts when they do blah blah blah or I really like them.
It doesn't really matter whether you like them or you don't like them.
You have to love them and you have to put up with them and you're stuck with them and they're stuck with you and you deal.
Right? That's essentially our model with our parents and our siblings.
And think of arranged marriage is now expand that to your spouse.
Right. And you will learn to adapt.
You will learn to adjust. You know, depending on who's chosen, you may like them more, you may like them less, but you'll deal, right?
But in the case of a love marriage, we're saying that here's a family member that you can choose.
And now when that becomes a family member that you can choose, it's just the dynamics change because I've chosen, because I've chosen, therefore it's somebody that I better like.
And I better get along with and I should be happy with.
So the expectation in love marriage is that I'm going to be happy and this is going to be this wonderful connection between the two of us because it's a chosen connection.
And the happiness of the marriage then is judged by this sort of intimate connection, the extent to which you feel and sense the presence of this connection.
And whereas the arranged marriage model, it's just based on, well, you know, were they a good spouse?
And did they do their duties?
And did they take good care of me?
You know, just like you would with your parent.
You know, were they a good parent?
Did they raise me well?
Did they look out for me?
Et cetera. So they become very different expectations.
Now, if you take those two different expectations and now you bring them to the day of their marriage, you do find that the arranged marriages on the first day of their wedding You know, they're not particularly excited or, you know, enthusiastic.
You know, they're like, they're okay.
When you look at the love marriage, they're ecstatic.
They're really expected a lot.
Now you follow them for the next 10 to 15 years and you ask them, you know, how happy are you?
And you find that the arranged marriage The members of the arranged marriages are expressing greater satisfaction.
Now, keep in mind, they do have different criteria by which they're judging the satisfaction, but they are getting more and more satisfied as the years go on.
Whereas the love marriage, who is judging satisfaction by, again, a different criteria, but they are getting worse.
They're getting less and less satisfied as the years go on because, you know, they actually have to worry about the practical details, perhaps, in the marriage, right?
You know, arranged marriage is built on the notion I'm going to align the resumes, they're going to be compatible, and because they're compatible, they will over time develop a fondness for each other.
They're going to have fewer things to fight about because they've already made sure that they agree on how to raise kids, what food to eat, what language to speak, what religion they're going to have.
Whereas with the love marriage model, it's believed that the love part will conquer all.
And then you get married and then It may conquer all or it may come under a lot of fire when you suddenly have to decide, well, what values do I want to actually raise my children by and what values do I want my house to run by?
Right, yeah. I mean, there are certain practicalities that love is sort of a circle into a square hole, trying to figure out what values your children are going to raise with.
It's not really a question of, do we love each other enough to agree?
Because there are legitimate differences that do need to be worked out, which culture does a fairly efficient, though not always good, job of working out ahead of time.
I think love marriages, because it's built on choice, does have a lot more pressure on it, in a sense, than does arranged marriage, because they have more to fight about.
Right. Right, because they're both bringing their expectations and their responsibility for the choice in there and feel the need to stick it out.
Although I guess you could say that if there is an expectation of higher happiness, then there's less of a capacity to weather the rough patches, so to speak, whereas if there is a fit through culture and arrangement, there is that sense that we're in it for the long haul and only under a great extremity could there be a break.
Well, sure, because the model of a love marriage is essentially built on choice, that is its premise, whenever choice necessarily has along with it the idea of exit and entry.
And if you have something that's built on destiny, which is what arranged marriage is built on, there's no such thing as choice over exit and entry.
This is it! Right, right.
I was also curious the degree to which, I mean, the approach that I think most people who are into at least Greek or Western philosophy, people who are into philosophy or who have some knowledge of psychology would say that choice is diminished in the absence of self-knowledge.
So when we're talking about choices in marriage, a lot of people, if they don't examine themselves or try to learn about the sources of their own thoughts and feelings, will end up reproducing choices that are templates, photocopied templates, in a sense, from history.
Like, I turned out I married a woman who was just like my mom, kind of thing, because there's a lack of self-knowledge.
In your research and your travels, have you found cultures that focus on choice not being picking something primarily external, but choice as arising out of a deep knowledge of self?
Well, the Americans' preoccupation with choice as being a self-exploration is fairly I mean, they're probably the most extreme on that dimension of any culture.
I mean, they certainly inherited it to some extent from the UK, and certainly if you see the most individualist societies really are UK, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, if you look at the actual measures of that.
You know, I suppose the articulation of the idea that you decide who you are and that who you are should be a self-exploration not based on social constraints or social pressures.
I mean, that came out of certainly John Stuart Mill on the British side and then Emerson in his essay on self-reliance in the US side.
And I think that really changed the landscape in terms of the way people think about who they are.
Right, right. And I think you see that much less in other cultures.
And that's true even as you go south in Europe and particularly when you go into more religious societies, you go into Asia, you go into Latin America, more Catholic societies, you know, people are more likely in those cultures to not get so bagged down in self-reflection as a way to determine what your choices are and look more to the external world to help them decide what is the right, the quote, right choice to be made.
Yeah, and in the balance between delayed versus instant gratification, which is in many ways the challenging fulcrum when it comes to choice.
We can't always defer gratification, but we also can't always seize the moment.
It's true that in more conformist cultures, I think, you can be guaranteed that if you conform in those cultures, the long-term gratification will be there.
For sure, because no culture is going to disapprove of conformity to its standards.
So, in a sense, if you roll the dice and go with your own particular preferences, you may get, in a sense, a greater gratification in the long run, but you certainly are passing up a sure route to gratification, which is acceptance by the dominant culture.
Sure. I completely agree with that.
It's always risky to go with what your personal preferences are.
Right, right. Now, I just wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I will put links to the book, which I do highly recommend, but I was very interested and was reading up on some of your more academic papers, and one that you released recently, which I thought was very, very interesting, was the degree to which,
when rewards are distributed, that people perceive it as more egalitarian If there is an unequal distribution of, sorry, they consider it worse if there's an unequal distribution of money than if there's an unequal distribution of goods.
So what we find is that if people are asked, what's the fairest way to divvy up money?
They believe that money should be divvied up by merit.
And by the way, we found no cultural differences on us.
We've actually done this in about nine different countries.
And we find that if there is, say, a bonus to be offered, a financial bonus to be offered, people all across the globe pretty much believe that that bonus should be divvied up by merit.
Whoever contributed more should get more of it.
Contributed more to creating a scenario in which we would have this extra pot of money.
Now, on the other hand, you give them a present.
And that present could be any commodity.
It could be computer tech support.
It could be bottles of champagne, like luxury items.
It could be credit card points that you could use at a particular mall.
Any kind of commodity.
That, now, people believe that the fairest way to distribute that is to give it to everyone equally.
Right. The paper that I read obviously had some great explorations of it and, of course, the highly challenging, for me at least, mathematics of it.
Did you have any theories, or I'm sure you do, of course, as to what you think drives that in particular?
So that's actually one of the things we're trying to study now, is why do people think of money differently?
Because what we found in that paper is that you can not only get a difference between the way people think of money versus the way people think of other goods, but if you take another good, say credit card points, and now you make credit card points act like money, then again you get the same effect for credit card points that you get for money.
So there's something special about money.
And this thing that's special about money might be because it's fungible, right?
Money is the only thing that, you know, truly can go up or down.
It's monotonic. It's not this concrete thing like a commodity.
It could be that, but we think it's more than that, that money has come to play a social role in our society that goes beyond simply its Utility as a medium of exchange.
A thought that struck me was that it sort of reminded me, when I was a kid, that if my mother wanted to give my brother a treat that for some reason she didn't want to give to me, then she'd wait until I went to bed as the younger brother, and then she would give it to my brother.
And so, in a sense, that bonus was hidden from me.
And I think money has that capacity that is harder to see.
If you're handing out bottles of champagne, if you give two to one and none to somebody else, that's a much more public and visible show of merit, or lack of merit.
Whereas money, in a sense, is just And so there's not that same comparison that's public?
Yeah, that could very well be a part of it, absolutely.
Now there's, I think, some interesting studies that you cite at the beginning of that paper where you talk about the degree to which people become less cooperative when primed with money terms.
If you recall that, if you could talk a little bit about that, I thought that was very interesting.
Oh, yes. So, yes, that's the other thing we find that, I mean, the experiments are, you know, sort of your traditional prisoner dilemma type experiments.
They're not that interesting, but think of those as your classic prisoner dilemma game.
And the question is, will you try to cooperate or will you screw your opponent?
And what you find is that if I prime you to think about money, you don't cooperate.
You defect.
You don't want to help the other guy out.
If I prime you, though, to think in terms of commodity, then you do cooperate.
And this is all part of a series of different projects that I'm doing that look at what are the social effects of money.
Money doesn't just serve as a medium of exchange.
It actually affects our behaviors in a whole host of ways.
It affects our morals in a whole host of ways.
Well, yeah. I mean, what I was thinking about when I was reading that was when you're looking at a money-less society, you would, I think, generally be looking at a relatively small, probably farming community where you You wouldn't really need money.
You may have some trade in kind, you know, chicken for eggs kind of thing, but you wouldn't have money per se.
And so for human beings in that environment, cooperation, I think, makes the most sense.
But when you're working in a more complex or economically advanced society where you have money, There's more chance for accumulation and you can gain more through accumulation than you could necessarily through cooperation.
Whereas I think with the small money-less society, that wouldn't be the case.
And it's always struck me that it seems like human beings have these parallel, almost moral identities that can fit into a wide variety of cultures.
And we can sort of, you know, when we're in that sort of small Town culture will do it one way, and then we get to sort of the big city finance culture will do it in a different way, but that seems to be parallel within our minds.
Well, you don't even have to go that far.
If you look at...
So in my book, one of the things I talk about are some of the comments that ex-communists talk about.
So I actually did a lot of interviews in Eastern Europe and Russia.
And when you ask the people there They often want to go back to the communist system.
And when you try to uncover what is it that's making them nostalgic, like even in Berlin, most East Berliners want to go back to the old system.
And when you try to uncover what is it that they're nostalgic about, the common refrain is, well, you know, in the old days, everybody had the same houses.
Everybody had the same furniture.
When you got to watch the store, you had the choice between whether you wanted the color TV or the black and white TV, and you made the choice and that was it.
So on the one hand, they're talking about how they had simpler choices to make, but the other thing that they're also talking about in a very serious way is that the fabric of society was different.
That in those days, They didn't have to worry about comparing themselves with their neighbors based on their possessions, and that that was something that suddenly changed in their society when capitalism came in.
But in the old days, they would just hang out with each other, just chat with each other, just, you know, socialize about the meaning of life, so to speak.
But then, when capitalism came in, the haves and the have-nots became so It was abundantly obvious to them that now that became a source of tension, a source of comparison, a source of stress.
It just literally changed their way of living.
Right. You don't feel like you're falling behind in a sense if nobody's pulling ahead economically.
Sure. Do you think, out of your book and out of your work as a whole, I think that there are some public policy implications in some of your work around distribution of goods versus money.
Are there any guides to living that you could synthesize?
I know it's a tough thing to ask, but sort of guides to living that you could synthesize out of your study of choice about the way that you approach choices and the factors that you try to balance when you try to make a challenging choice?
I would say that the biggest thing that I try to do in terms of choice in my life is I really try to be choosy about when I choose.
Because there's so many different things out there that you could choose now, ranging from my eye color to my career to how to raise my family to marriage.
It's just so many things.
What jam I spread on my toast.
I really try to be very choosy about what I'm going to choose.
I limit myself to no more than five different domains.
I think of every choice as an effortful activity.
I think that it will be pleasant, but I also think of it as effortful.
I think of it as something that in order for me to really be able to align the odds, so to speak, I'm going to have to do a lot of work.
I'm really not going to do that.
For me, I really limit it to about maybe four areas in my life.
Other than that, I just find very simple heuristics for choosing or let somebody else choose.
I won't invest.
I think that is quite wise and it certainly is something that I've noticed that just about everything that I make a choice about I think of it as an isolated thing, like I make this choice and then move on, but of course choice tends to multiply, right?
So if you buy an iPad or an iPhone or whatever, then suddenly you have a bunch of choices about how to run it, what applications to put on it, what it's going to do for you, that each particular choices, they tend to be like those fireworks, that they explode and then more explode and more explode.
And I think it's important to recognize the snowball effect of choice so that you can avoid that whole snowball simply by not choosing earlier on, if that makes sense.
Absolutely. Well, that's it for my questions.
I really, really do appreciate your time and I would highly recommend The Art of Choosing by Dr.
Iyengar, which is a very fascinating read and I think will give people pause about the worship of choice and particularly the focus on the choice that is outside the self.
I mean, I'm still trying to hammer home the point to my listeners for the most part that Self-knowledge, I think, leads to greater choice than anything you can pursue externally.
And I really wanted to thank you for putting the book out to help people recognize that choice is a balance and that it's worthwhile to be patient with choice and sometimes even to reject choice in favor of peace of mind.
Thank you so much for having me here today.
All right. Take care. Bye-bye.
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