BOOK REVIEW-THE ART OF CHOOSING

By CHRISTOPHER F. CHABRIS

Most people, when they decide to get married, face seemingly momentous choices, leaving aside the small matter of who their mate will be. The wedding itself is a blizzard of decision-making ordeals. Where should the ceremony be? Who should perform it? What month, what day of the week, what time? Who should be invited? What music should be played? Not least: What kind of wedding cake? The effort to make all these choices can be overwhelming and the cause of many toxic arguments. There must be better way.
And of course there is. In "The Art of Choosing," Sheena Iyengar, a professor at Columbia Business School, recounts the story of her immigrant parents' wedding. Her family is Sikh, and the ceremony took place in India according to a strict, traditional script that had been handed down through generations. There was little for the participants to choose between. In fact, the husband and wife were chosen for each other by their families and did not even meet until their wedding day. Nothing like what most American couples go through.
Which marriage system is better? So-called love marriages—the romantic, Western kind—are increasingly common in India, though not always to good effect. Ms. Iyengar discusses a study suggesting that Indians who married for love were indeed more in love with their spouses at the outset of their married lives, but their ardor gradually cooled, whereas Indians who married by arrangement grew to love each other more as time went on. At the 10-year point, the "love couples" were considerably less in love than the arranged couples—to the extent that love can be measured by a questionnaire. Three-quarters of today's Indian college students, the author notes, say that they would marry someone they didn't love, but only 15% of Americans feel the same way.
Such differences may be part of a pan-Asian cultural pattern: Ms. Iyengar once asked Japanese and American students to compose a list of decisions they would be happy to let someone else make for them. The Japanese were willing to let others decide what they ate, when they woke up in the morning and what they did at work; most of the Americans only wanted the circumstances of their own death removed from their control. Insisting on the freedom to choose may be admirably principled but not in the end the best strategy for contentment: The followers of fundamentalist religions, which tend to impose more rules and restrictions on individual choice and behavior, report being happier than members of liberal churches or atheists.
Ms. Iyengar tries to make sense of such findings in "The Art of Choosing." Weaving together personal stories, a range of cultural references and the data of experimental psychology, she explores the science of choice and especially the ways in which our common-sense beliefs about choice might not line up with the conclusions of research. At least one cherished belief comes under heavy assault: the idea that more choice is always better.
Ms. Iyengar stumbled on this topic when she was studying motivation in 3-year-old children. She thought that giving them lots of different toys to play with and switch among would make them happier, but it turned out that forcing them to choose just one toy and stick with it resulted in more enthusiastic play. She tried adding more and fancier toys and running the experiment again, but she couldn't make the paradoxical result go away, so she decided to believe that it was real and explore it further.
One of her next experiments, known now as the "jam study," has become a modern classic. In a Palo Alto, Calif., supermarket known for its exceptionally vast range of products, she set up two different booths offering shoppers the chance to sample various unusual preserves. One booth offered 24 different options; the other only six. You would think that, with more choices in the first booth, more shoppers who stopped there would find a flavor they liked and go on to buy a jar. But the opposite happened: People tried more samples and bought a lot more jam at the booth with six varieties.
There are at least two interesting points to take away from this kind of research, both of them good news for people involved in product design, sales and marketing. First, the number (and presentation) of the options we are given can have an effect on what we choose and how satisfied we feel with our decision. Second, we go through life largely unaware that we are surrounded by manipulations of the choices we make.
The people who stopped at the 24-jam booth didn't say: "Please take away most of these options so I can more easily make a decision." They simply felt overwhelmed and less willing to make any choice at all. The same feeling can arise in people who are offered an array of detailed investment options or in college students who must choose four or five classes from among the hundreds listed in the course catalog. In these situations, perhaps some strategy for choice, established in advance, could help discipline the decision-making process by focusing it on a manageable set of options.
As she tours the science of choice, Ms. Iyengar takes care to be provocative rather than prescriptive. Still, "The Art of Choosing" has an instructive point: It is possible to make better choices just by being more aware of the forces that affect our choices, how the choices we make affect our well-being and how we use choice to express and create our own identities. There is no simple solution to choice-overload, but that's not Ms. Iyengar's fault. Human choice has not yet been corralled by a grand unified theory. Given the complexity of the brain and the busy world we live in, it probably never will.
Mr. Chabris is a psychology professor at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y.