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Making Right Choices: Art or Science?

Science can assist us in becoming more skillful choosers, but at its core, choice remains an art

Published: Dec 9, 2010 06:52:35 AM IST
Updated: Dec 7, 2010 04:11:28 PM IST

Decision-making, at its heart, involves a series of choices. Neuropsychologists tell us that the human brain can comfortably deal with only a limited number of alternatives (seven plus or minus two, according to a number of studies). Fields like decision theory were developed to help humans organize their thinking so that alternative actions could be arrayed according to their attractiveness, expressed in quantitative terms.

Recently, brain-scan technology has enabled researchers to associate choice and decision-making with various parts of the brain. This may be why choice comes up frequently as a favorite subject of authors interested in explaining rational or irrational behavior. We have covered the topic in our previous discussions of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice--which advises decision-makers to "choose when to choose; satisfice more and maximize less; make your decisions nonreversible; regret less; control expectations; and learn to love constraints in order to cope with uncertainty and avoid depression."

Now the genre includes another book, which has made several Top Ten of 2010 lists: Sheena Iyengar's The Art of Choosing. In it, Iyengar explores choices we make as consumers of products and services, many of which she has observed in her numerous experiments. Her definition of choice is "the ability to exercise control over ourselves and our environment. In order to choose, we must first perceive that control is possible."

She concludes that:
    * Choice is desirable, but only up to a point. Beyond that, it becomes confusing to a decision-maker.
    * Choice on the job can have varying effects on our health, depending in part on our need for choice.
    * Choice is often influenced by the way alternatives are presented and by the people presenting them, even when the merit of one alternative is clearly superior to others.
    * A natural aversion to loss leads us to make irrational choices that minimize it.
    * Choices may be expressly made to enable us to conform to the behaviors or perceptions of others (as in 360-degree evaluations) in relation to our perceptions of ourselves.
    * The order in which we encounter options affects our choice (the first and last interviewed in hiring, for example, have an advantage, explaining why "traditional interviews are actually one of the least useful tools for predicting an employee's future success").
    * The importance of choice varies from one culture to another, particularly between "individualist" (where it is more important) and "collectivist" societies. This means that no one approach to organizing and motivating people works well globally.
    * Choice is especially difficult when it is between two roughly equally good or bad alternatives, which is often the case that managers confront.

The rapidly growing number of alternatives in our lives is a particular challenge for those wishing to make good choices. What are we to do? We can put Schwartz's advice to work. We can trust some decisions to our educated mental "reflexes," as Gladwell suggests. Iyengar adds that, as individuals, we can relax our need for control over choice processes and make more and more choices automatically or out of habit. As managers of companies, we can limit product or service alternatives or provide incentives in order to facilitate customer choice with fewer regrets.

According to Iyengar, "… choosing helps us create our lives. We make choices and are in turn made by them. Science can assist us in becoming more skillful choosers, but at its core, choice remains an art."

Is choosing really an art? Or is it, or can it become, a science? What do you think?

[This article was provided with permission from Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.]

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  • Pro.g Balakrishnan

    Choice is more an art than science . Iyengar perception is reasonable indeed

    on Jan 21, 2011