>> hinojosa: every day we make dozens of choices-- what to eat, what to buy, what to do. our guest today is one of the world's foremost experts on how we decide-- social scientist and author sheena iyengar. i'm maria hinojosa. this is one on one. sheena iyengar, you are the author of the book the art of choosing. and thank you for choosing to be with us. >> thank you for having me here today. >> hinojosa: so your book starts out basically where you lay out two narratives of your own personal history. you were born in canada, parents are from india, the sikh religion, and you basically say, "here's one story of how my life

could be seen, more like a victim, and here's another story of how my life could be seen, which is a life of extraordinary possibilities and choice." and you basically say you want us all to think about how we choose the narrative of our own life. because how we choose to see ourselves says everything about kind of how we do end up seeing ourselves. am i right? >> yes. if i were to ask you, you know, "why are you here-- what is it that ended up making you do what you to today?" you along with anyone else, if you were to answer that question, you could give me any one of three versions of that story. you could tell me how you were destined to be here. you could tell me how there was some fortunate event that led you to be here, some chance event. or you could tell me the story of how you chose to be here. and i think that it's probably

accurate to say that any of those stories might be true, or at least not falsifiable. but i think there's something special when you tell the story of your life in terms of choice, because when you tell the story of your life in terms of choice, it gives everything you say and do some greater meaning, and it also enables you to think about the possibilities, the ways that you can take control of your life. because unlike fate and chance, choice is really the only thing we have in our life that enables us to go from who we are today to whom we want to be tomorrow. >> hinojosa: but your own personal story is so amazing in the sense that in the sikh religion, there's not a lot of choices that you are given. so because there are a lot of people who don't know a lot about the sikh beliefs-- and i didn't, as i read more and more about your own story-- lay it

out for us. >> well, you know, it's an entirely different model of life from the american model of life. so when you are born as a sikh, you know, you're born into a particular religious set of rituals. and so when i was growing up i used to go to the sikh temple, the gurdwara, on friday night, on saturday night, and most of sunday. and there's lots of different things you're supposed to follow. you know, you take the advice of your elders, you do what your parents tell you to do, you dress conservatively, you wear a steel bracelet on your right arm at all times, you never cut your hair, you are not allowed to ever take off your underwear. that's supposed to be a symbol of being able to control any sexual impulses. and so, for example, when i was growing up, you had to keep your underwear on even when you were taking a shower. >> hinojosa: i was wondering if you were going to bring that up. i said, "i'm not going to ask sheena about that, because it's a little..." but you write... >> i always thought that was so, you know, weird when i was growing up. and, you know, my parents'

marriage, for example, was arranged, and in fact most of the aunties and uncles... you know, everybody's marriage was arranged. it was a rare event that anybody chose, quote-unquote, their spouse. and that was considered a bit odd, to do something like that. and your career was very much selected by, you know, the advice of your parents or the elders in the household. and that was really the way the sikh lifestyle was. >> hinojosa: not a lot of choice. a lot of things predetermined for you, decided by people... >> certainly not a lot of personal choice. there was choosing going on, but it was not a lot of personal choice, in that if you were to make a choice, that was something that was earned. that was something that came as a function of age and experience, so to speak. whereas as an american, when i was growing up, you were constantly told you were supposed to make the choices in life, you were supposed to decide what you were going to wear and how you... >> hinojosa: but let's step back for one second so people realize you were born in canada, but then your parents moved to new york, and you were being raised

in queens. >> yes. >> hinojosa: and when you're being raised... now, something happens to you when you're a young girl that you didn't quite understand. you started bumping into a lot of things, walls. >> yes. >> hinojosa: and things like that. and when your parents finally took you to the doctor, it turned out that you were actually going blind. >> yes, i was born with retinitis pigmentosa. >> hinojosa: and what was that like? i've read that your parents didn't really want you talking about the fact that you were blind. >> yes. you know, i think they didn't quite know what to make of it, you know? and there certainly was this fear that in society they would somehow get pitied or labeled in some way. you know, remember, i said we went to gurdwara friday night, saturday night, and all day sunday. they didn't want people to be staring at them. so i did spend a good portion of my childhood trying to, you

know, not let people know. so i almost had two lives, where in the gurdwara you were always trying to hide it, and in school you were, of course, labeled as the one that had the special needs. >> hinojosa: what was that like for you, to know that, you know, this is who you are, and yet you weren't really being allowed to kind of choose how you dealt with the fact that you were blind? >> well, it was certainly difficult to pretend. i mean, it was certainly, at times, stressful. >> hinojosa: i can't even imagine what that is like. >> well, you do start to develop some interesting tricks, which actually have helped me over the years. >> hinojosa: for example? >> well, now i can't get away with them, but for example, if i would drop something i would pretend as if i didn't hear it, so that somebody else would notice and pick it up. >> hinojosa: oh. >> and i did pick up a lot of tricks that actually do still help me. i did develop skills on sensing

wind and knowing when there was a turn, because of the wind change, or when there was a building because of the wind change. i mean, it did force me to develop certain skill sets that i probably would not have developed otherwise. >> hinojosa: so you basically say that when you were growing up, you were living, you say, two lives. >> mm-hmm. >> hinojosa: at least two lives. i mean, speaking two languages, right? two cultural languages, and actually, if you add blindness, that would be almost a third one, right? >> yeah, i guess you could say that. i do think as a blind person you end up becoming cognizant of the different kind of... set of issues and lifestyle that... you know, there is the sort of sighted world versus the blind world, i suppose. >> hinojosa: but if you came from a background where choice was something that was not encouraged, necessarily, or certainly not... you know, it's not as if your choice is the freedom of the sikh people.

no, no, no, it's not like that. so why did you end up being fascinated with the art of choosing? >> well, i think it was because of the fact that, you know, i think had i been born just an american, or been born just a sikh and grown up in india, i don't think i would have been. because then you know what's, quote, the right way of thinking, because you don't have to debate about it. and whereas because i was growing up in two different cultures simultaneously, and i was imbibing both, as an impressionable child growing up, it wasn't obvious to me which one i was supposed to follow. you know, whereas for my parents, they could be more clear in the head and say, "well, no, the american way is clearly wrong." and the americans were very sure that the indian way was clearly wrong. i mean, how dare somebody choose who i marry? i mean, americans always thought that was horrific. but for me, both systems sort of

made sense, you know? i saw my parents, i saw my aunts and uncles. they didn't look like they were horrific marriages. and i saw my american friends' parents, and they didn't look like awful marriages either. so then you were sort of thinking to yourself, "oh, okay, so how am i supposed to choose? what's the correct way to make this choice?" and i think it was that internal conflict that essentially... because i had to constantly engage in that conflict, that got me interested in choice. when i actually started to do research, i think i was just naturally drawn to the questions about choice. >> hinojosa: sheena, let's talk a little bit about how people choose, depending on their culture or even their... where they come from, their countries. how does it differ? so, for example, choice in, let's say, america, versus, let's say, choice in a latin american country versus choice in a predominantly muslim country.

>> mm-hmm. you know, we... from the moment we're born, we're taught how to think about choice. and we're taught this explicitly and implicitly in our culture. so, you know, say, as an american, i'm always... it's always really funny when you go to the grocery store and you see these moms asking their two-year-old kids, "and what kind of cereal would you like, honey?" >> hinojosa: but we're told that we're... you know, as parents in this country, we are told... >> absolutely. >> hinojosa: ..."give your children that choice, make them into good choosers." >> yes. and we ask our children at the age of four, "what do you want to be when you grow up?" and it's not that we're saying that we trust your choice. we're saying implicitly, "we understand you're going to change your mind." but we're saying, you know, "look, these are the kinds of things you need to learn to know. you need to know what kind of cereal you want, you need to know and figure out who you're going to grow up to be, and what you're going to do."

now, by contrast, when you go to other cultures, that's not always the message that they're given. so, you know, say, in many collectivist cultures, whether they be in latin american culture, asian cultures, whether it be japan or china or india, there the message is, you know, "you've got to respect your parents," or, "you need to respect your god." and, you know, your parents should be thought of as the ones that are the main decision makers, at least until you are equipped and experienced enough to be able to take on that quote-unquote responsibility, right? so for example, you know, kids are not asked in india or china or japan, "what are you going to be when you grow up?" it's understood that your parents are going to help make that decision. >> hinojosa: but there's a big trust element there, right? >> yes. >> hinojosa: and trust is central. >> yes, i think so. >> hinojosa: so... >> and in fact, it's interesting

you mentioned trust, and you also asked me about latin americans. when you look at employees... i did a big study with citibank employees. and we looked at... so say for example if you compare latino employees in mexico, brazil, argentina, versus asian employees, taiwan, singapore, hong kong, et cetera, versus americans, and you look at in which condition are they most likely to perform well, americans perform best when they feel their manager is giving them choice, is empowering them to make decisions, giving them autonomy. that's very important to americans. latinos, i mean, it's not a bad thing, they're not getting mad or upset if their manager says, you know, "you can decide when you take your vacation, when you do your breaks, how you get your job done." what matters to them most is if they feel their manager cares about them. is this manager somebody they can trust, that they have good rapport with? that is more important than whether they get choice or no

choice. and similarly, with asians, what you see is that for them it's not whether they get choice. if anything, they want direction. they want to feel that their manager knows what's going on, can give them direction and guidance to make sure that the job gets done well. so they're all headed for the same end goal, which is we want to do our job well. but the way they feel that you get there is through very different processes. >> hinojosa: i think about something my mother told me. my mom was born in mexico, married at 17 to my father, and for the first part of her life was a housewife. and i remember my mom saying to me... i guess i must have been, you know, a young professional, just finding my way in the world, clearly not on the path to get immediately married. and she just said, "ay, majita, you know, i worry so much about the young women today in america. you have so many choices, so

many things to choose from." she's like, "i didn't have any choices. i knew what was going to happen." and she said, "sometimes i see that you're so worried about the decisions you're going to make. ay, majita, i'm so sad." she was almost like, "it's rough having so many things to choose from." and i was kind of like... yeah, i understood her perspective, in the sense that, yeah, it's hard, you know? i mean, sometimes in america we have too much to choose from. and that's something that you kind of have spent a lot of time looking at. >> absolutely, yes. i'm... you know, i started that research kind of by accident. i was looking at cultural differences between asian and anglo american children, because i felt that, well, you know, as an asian you're taught the benefits of having others choose, whereas as an american you're taught the benefits of choosing for yourself. and so i began to look at asian

and anglo american children, and i was trying to show, or wanted to test the hypothesis, anyway, that asian children didn't care as much about choice. and i brought these kids into a room, and they were little kids, and i gave them either a situation where they had lots of toys to choose from, or just one toy. and i couldn't get anybody to play with the toys when they had a lot of choices to choose from. and i couldn't get it. i was like, "wait a minute. everybody's supposed to love choice. at least the americans are." and i kept adding more and more choice. i figured i was just giving them the wrong set of toys, we weren't giving them exciting enough toys. and i kept giving them more and more toys. and finally i just decided to give them six toys. and that's when i began to see the difference between... at least for americans, where for the american kids, if they had a choice of six, they were more motivated, and they played more than if they were just simply told what toy to play with. and that was what really got me

started in thinking about whether there were some negative consequences to offering people more and more and more choice. >> hinojosa: and when you put that down in writing in a book, the art of choosing, oh, my gosh. there was, you know, "just wait a second. what is sheena iyengar saying? she is saying that in america, where we value having the freedom of choice about everything..." and sheena in her experiment is saying, "give people too many things to choose from, and they become overwhelmed." and you were called lots of different things. but some people said, "you are criticizing the heart of who we are as americans." >> yes. in fact i think it was rush limbaugh that referred to me as a "pointy headed intellectual that didn't know the first thing about the marketplace." >> hinojosa: and what do you say to that? i mean, were you taken aback a little bit by the criticism when you were just saying, "look, i'm a social scientist, i conducted experiments..." you know, the jam problem. people may have heard about the

jam problem, which is your experiment of putting jams in a supermarket, and whether or not people would choose a preferred jam, and if they had too many choices, they ended up perhaps not ending up buying one of the jams. but if you gave them three choices, then they would usually say, "out of these three, i can see which one i like, and i think i'm going to go buy it." >> yeah. i mean, to be honest with you, when i first ran the experiment, i didn't have an agenda. i didn't have a particular ideology that i was trying to promote. i just ran the study, and i was just as surprised as anybody else was. and then when rush limbaugh went out there and critiqued me, and a lot of people kind of got scared by the finding, and then there were other people that sort of identified it as the problem of the century, i have to admit, i was taken aback, because i hadn't realized the implications of it. and it's only as i've been doing more and more studies over the years and looking at the consequences of offering people more choice, and i have to say,

other colleagues... it's now become a whole industry of research, looking at the effects of offering people more choice. it's only as time has gone by that i've realized this is a much bigger problem than just choosing jam. >> hinojosa: what is the bigger problem? >> well, i think the recent book freedom by jonathan franzen does a really good job ofblem, i think, in our life-- that we've essentially... because we can... we have the, quote, right to do whatever we want at any point in time, that we have lost sight of having that formula or even a criteria by which to judge how we're supposed to live. and that makes it really complicated. how are we supposed to know what we want? how are we supposed to know whether what we have chosen is what we should have chosen, what will do us well in the long run? and that at times makes us depressed. >> hinojosa: is there a sense

that... the moment in history that we're living in this country right now, there is so much uncertainty about everything. >> yes. >> hinojosa: i mean, everything. and therefore... and there are so many different ways in which, you know, if you're unemployed, how are you going to do this, you know, establishing a new career. i mean, we are overwhelmed with a kind of a crisis, and then lots of possibilities. and you say that it can be depressing. >> it can be depressing, yes. because i think in the end, while it seems really motivating, this ability to have a blank sheet of paper and jot down every single line and every single letter and comma, you know, in terms of the story of our life, that is more motivating in theory than in practice. because that can be quite paralyzing when you realize you have to write every single letter and dot every single i.

in a sense, having at least some basic script to work off of, so that you have some certainty, some sense of stability or a rudder, is actually more motivating in practice. >> hinojosa: and you also found that in terms of religions, conservative orthodox religions, you actually found that even though they are more rigid in terms of how people live their lives, that actually people who come from those more conservative fundamentalist religious perspectives are actually happier. >> they are. you know, and i have to admit i was surprised by that research, too. you know, i had grown up sikh, and i was looking for freedom. there was no doubt about that when i went to college-- i was looking for freedom. and the first thing i did was cut my hair. >> hinojosa: i was going to say, the first thing you did was cut your hair. and it was... >> it was not good. i think... you know, my mom didn't talk to me for quite some time after that.

>> hinojosa: how much time? >> i don't even remember, so... i try to block such things out of my memory bank. but... and i've certainly had a number of cousins that were disowned for the same sin. but, you know, so i was doing this study, and i assumed that religion would actually be negative in terms of our well being, that it would actually make us more depressed. because after all, it was taking away your freedom. but i found the opposite. and, you know, what that then, in a sense, led me to start thinking about and researching, was this idea that having some set of rules and guidelines, as long as you can buy into them and believe in them, can actually help create a sense of certainty, some stability, reduces some amount of ambiguity. and that frees up your mind, it frees up your... you know, your efforts, to just focus on a few choices that you can do well at. >> hinojosa: so what you write

is that in your research you've actually found that if you have people who are suffering from a very severe illness, their choice to look at this in a positive way, or to believe that they can overcome maybe even a terminal illness, actually makes a big difference in their lives-- in the length of their lives, and in how they live those lives. how can we learn... and i know everybody's saying, "well, i want to know how to do that." how do you learn how to think positive and make positive choices when maybe you're not feeling so positive, and you don't feel like the choices are all positive ones? how do you learn how to be a person who makes choice from a positive place? >> well, i guess it goes back to how we started when we were talking about fate, chance and choice, right? you could interpret your illness as being about destiny, "it's now time for me to die," chance,

"i got unlucky, so it's over now," or in terms of choice. and you think about it in terms of choice, that means, "okay, this is a bad lot. here are the bad things. here are the things i can't control. but what are the things that i can do which will give me control?" and if you direct your mind towards the things that you can control, that you can choose, then it can improve your mood. >> hinojosa: control is a central part of this, right? believing that you have the ability to control something of the environment around choice. >> yes. and, you know, i don't want to confuse people when i say... on the one hand i'm saying, "look, too much choice is bad," on the other hand i'm saying, "you'd better see your life in terms of choice." and what i mean there is that what's most important is the belief that you have control. and what gives you that belief is by having choice that you can

understand, that you can take control over. if you have choices that you don't understand, that you don't know how to deal with, that actually makes you feel less in control. so what's key here is the feeling of control. >> so how can we learn, sheena, to become effective choosers? >> i recently wrote an afterword for my book to give people tips on how they can become more effective at using some of the things i talked about in the book. so if i would say there was one thing you had to choose in order to become a more effective chooser, that's to become more choosy about choice, about when you make a choice. so... >> hinojosa: about when. >> about when. and when are those moments that you are going to put in the effort to make a choice? i think we have to become more choosy about that. one of the things that i have my students do, typically on the last day of class, is i have them jot down all the things that are important to them.

and they can make that list, i tell them, as long as they want. they can say, oh, work-life balance, making a lot of money. whatever they want, they can jot it down. then i tell them, "now, cross off everything other than the top five that you absolutely under no condition, circumstances, can live without. of course, at that point they want to negotiate with me and make it seven or nine or ten. and i always stick to my guns-- it has to be no more than five. and once you get to those five, that is your compass. that's your compass for knowing only choices related to those things that are really, really at the top of your priority list, are the ones that you will put the effort of making a really informed choice. because choice is not purely fun. it's an effortful activity, and we should recognize it as such. to get the most out of choice, you should be putting effort into that. >> hinojosa: well, sheena, thank you for letting us understand

that we can make a lot of choices about how we move forward. it's been a beautiful interview. thank you so much for joining us. >> thank you. >> continue the conversation at wgbh.org/oneonone.

- [voiceover] funding for overheard with evan smith is provided in part by mfi foundation, improving the quality of life within our community. also by hillco partners, a texas government affairs consultancy, and by the alice kleberg reynolds foundation. - i'm evan smith. he's an iconic emmy award winning and academy award nominated documentary filmmaker whose credits include the civil war, baseball, and jazz. his latest film for pbs is jackie robinson. he's ken burns. this is overheard. let's me honest. this is about the ability to learn about the experience of not having been taught properly. how would you avoid it? what has befallen other nations in africa? and you could say he made his own bed, but you cause him to sleep in it. you saw a problem and over time took it on. let's start with the sizzle before we get to the steak.