The psychology of decision-making has become a crowded literary genre, though few have tackled it as engagingly as Sheena Iyengar.
In The Art of Choosing she explores the biases and motivations that influence every choice we make, from which drink to buy to who to marry, and demonstrates that while choice may be important to people's quality of life, too much of it can be disquieting.
What sets Iyengar's book apart is her broad reach, with topics as varied as the secret of good improvisation in jazz and the disorientating effects of "liberation" on eastern Europeans.
Disappointingly, she does not confront the deeper issue of whether we have any real control over our decision-making, as suggested by some neuroscience experiments that show many of our choices may be made unconsciously. Still, this would have distracted from one of Iyengar's aims, which is to help her readers make better choices.
Book Information:
The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar
Twelve, $25.99
Anil Ananthaswamy travelled to some of the world's most extreme locations to witness first-hand the experiments physicists are undertaking in order to understand the workings of the universe. Check out this video footage of his journey - and read our review of his new book The Edge of Physicshere.
Kay et al. do some interesting experiments in which thoughts of randomness are primed in subject by a set of manipulations. They:
...supraliminally primed half the participants with randomness-related words; the other half were primed with words matched in negative valence. To assess the role of arousal, we employed a misattribution paradigm, which involved requiring all participants to swallow a pill ostensibly containing an herbal supplement. Half the participants were told that the pill sometimes induces arousal as a side effect, and half were told that the pill has no side effects. Previous work has shown that the side-effect condition leads participants to attribute the cause of any experienced arousal to this salient source. Hypothesizing that beliefs in supernatural control function, at least in part, to down-regulate the aversive arousal associated with randomness, we expected the randomness primes to increase beliefs in God, but only for those participants not given the opportunity to attribute the cause of their arousal to the ingested pill.
Their observations were that:
...participants primed with randomness-related words exhibited heightened beliefs in spiritual control compared with participants primed with negatively valenced control words. This effect disappeared when participants were given the opportunity to attribute the cause of any arousal they experienced to a pill ingested earlier in the session.
They take their data to suggest:
...that belief in supernatural sources of control, such as God and karma, may function, in part, to defend against distress associated with randomness, even when the perception of randomness is not related to traumatic events.
The psychology of decision-making has become a crowded literary genre, though few have tackled it as engagingly as Sheena Iyengar.
