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I'm doing Ask the Author over at the SPN roundtable. I'm very pleased to have been asked!
Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing: The author was the primary researcher on the semi-famous jam study, the one that showed that people liked having six choices more than they liked having twenty-five when sampling jam, which has various implications for marketers and others interested in influencing behavior. Other than that, I can’t say there’s much to recommend this book if you’ve already read some behavioral economics (and I have read rather a lot in the field, so much in fact that I didn’t encounter a single new result in this book, though as I thought about it I’m not sure I’ve seen them all in the same place; you might have to put together Gladwell and Sunstein & Thaler and a couple of others to get there). The most provocative part of the book comes early and its implications are not, sadly, returned to—Iyengar’s result that people adhering to strict religious constraints are on average happier than those who aren’t, despite the fact that this seems to require them to surrender choice, which modern American ideology puts at the center of the well-lived life. In the conclusion, Iyengar points out that the idea of choice can be used to justify unjust systems (she chose to stay home with the kids and thus deserves very little money, etc.); I’d have preferred to read the other book that might have been written with those endpoints, about choice and happiness and the value and meaning of both.
Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing: The author was the primary researcher on the semi-famous jam study, the one that showed that people liked having six choices more than they liked having twenty-five when sampling jam, which has various implications for marketers and others interested in influencing behavior. Other than that, I can’t say there’s much to recommend this book if you’ve already read some behavioral economics (and I have read rather a lot in the field, so much in fact that I didn’t encounter a single new result in this book, though as I thought about it I’m not sure I’ve seen them all in the same place; you might have to put together Gladwell and Sunstein & Thaler and a couple of others to get there). The most provocative part of the book comes early and its implications are not, sadly, returned to—Iyengar’s result that people adhering to strict religious constraints are on average happier than those who aren’t, despite the fact that this seems to require them to surrender choice, which modern American ideology puts at the center of the well-lived life. In the conclusion, Iyengar points out that the idea of choice can be used to justify unjust systems (she chose to stay home with the kids and thus deserves very little money, etc.); I’d have preferred to read the other book that might have been written with those endpoints, about choice and happiness and the value and meaning of both.
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