2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2000-2002
2008
• Hard Choices Made Easy (Columbia Ideas at Work, April 16, 2008)
• If You Lived Here, You'd Be This Guy by Now (New York Magazine, April 13, 2008)
"Amid uncertainty, a buyer will gravitate toward familiar "categorization" elements (a Vespa, a yoga mat) that say You belong here. Choose me."
• Product Customization Decisions: Order Does Matter (Columbia Ideas at Work, January 17, 2008)
• Too many choices and Natural Critical Learning Environments (Research Academy for University Learning, January 2008)
"Even if the situation is not quite that bad, we all struggle with how best to motivate our students to do their best work, or at least to keep from discouraging them. Perhaps sometimes we give them too many choices."
2007
• An Economist Goes to a Bar... (Slate Magazine, November 7, 2007)
"Men value looks; women value brains, money, and success. But do these old-fashioned stereotypes continue to hold today (if they were true to begin with)?"
• How to Make Better Choices (New Scientist Magazine, May 5, 2007)
• The Pursuit of Happiness (Columbia Ideas at Work, April 4, 2007)
• Create New Habits: The Good Constraints (Positive Psychology News Daily, March 1, 2007)
"We move around automatically. We eat automatically. We drive automatically. We judge first impressions automatically. Sometimes, we exercise on an exercise bike automatically while reading a book - with absolutely no deliberate thought to the biking. Why do we do this? Because it's easier."
• Making Things Simple: The Marketing of Complexity (The Conference Board Review, January/February 2007)
"Americans worship freedom of choice. But by giving consumers so many product choices and features and options, marketers are producing dazed and confused customers."
2006
• Some Dark Thoughts on Happiness (New York Magazine, July 10, 2006)
• The Mechanics of Choice: More Isn't Always Better (National Public Radio, April 27, 2006)
"Columbia University professor Sheena Iyengar is challenging the assumption that more is better; she argues that the more choices we have, the less happy we are."
• Choking on Choice? (Psychology Today, April 21, 2006)
"People have to pick and choose what domains they're going to maximize on," she says. "There may be people out there who try to maximize on everything and, in the process, end up making decisions that don't satisfy what they're looking for." These people will, literally, never be satisfied.
• Sprucing up the 401(k) (CFO Magazine, April 1, 2006)
• Congressional Influence Hits Home (Washington Post, February 8, 2006)
"Picky people eventually reap a big payoff, but also pay a high emotional price when they look for work."
• So Many Choices: What to do? What to do? (USA Today, January 16, 2006)
"A study by Sheena Iyengar and Wei Jiang, professors at Columbia Business School, found that as companies increased the options in 401(k) plans, participation actually fell."
2005
• How to fix your 401(k) (Fortune, December 23, 2005)
• Too Many Choices (Slate Magazine, November 22, 2005)
"The new Medicare prescription drug plan will save senior citizens billions of dollars, so why are so many of them afraid to sign up for it? ... There is now ample evidence that when you increase choice by offering more and more options, a point is reached at which paralysis rather than "freedom" is the result."
• Advisors Speak Out (Financial Planning, November 1, 2005)
• The Four-Minute Search for the Perfect Mate (Stanford GSB News, July 2005)
"Women get pickier about whom they date the more options they have. Moreover, although women say that they rate intelligence over attractiveness in their search for a mate, when they try "speed dating" physical attractiveness leads their list—outpacing intelligence, sincerity, and compatibility—to the same degree as it does for men."
• Consumer Vertigo (Reason Magazine, June 2005)
"Human minds aren't that rational. We don't ignore or forget forgone alternatives. We often fret over them. And knowing we may regret any particular decision, sometimes we simply won't choose."
• How to Choose Smarter in a World of Choice (CNN Money, May 1, 2005)
• Choice Is Good. Yes, No or Maybe? (New York Times, March 27, 2005)
"Yet even as choice is brought to bear on the nation's most pressing problems, critics point out that expanding consumers' options is not always a good idea. People, they argue, often do not know how to choose properly or they simply refuse to choose."
• Why Johnny Can't Save for Retirement (Fortune, March 8, 2005)
• Choose and Lose (New York Times, January 5, 2005)
"So whereas there is no denying that choice is sometimes good, a case must be made for the specific benefits of choice in each particular context, rather than just assuming that the more choice people have, the better off they are."
2004
• Too Many Choices? (APA Monitor on Psychology, June 2004)
"Social psychologists Sheena Iyengar, PhD, a management professor at Columbia University Business School, and Mark Lepper, PhD, a psychology professor at Stanford University, were the first to empirically demonstrate the downside of excessive choice."
• A Nation of Second Guesses (New York Times, January 22, 2004)
"Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper, psychologists at Columbia and Stanford respectively, have shown that as the number of flavors of jam or varieties of chocolate available to shoppers is increased, the likelihood that they will leave the store without buying either jam or chocolate goes up. According to their 2000 study, Ms. Iyengar and Mr. Lepper found that shoppers are 10 times more likely to buy jam when six varieties are on display as when 24 are on the shelf."
• Choice Overload Burdens Daily Life (USA Today, January 4, 2004)
"Iyengar, now at Columbia University, Rachael Elwork and I have found that as job possibilities increase, graduating college seniors report less satisfaction with the jobs they actually get."
2003
• The Fewer The Better (Society for Human Resource Management, December, 2003)
• In These 401(k)'s, Workers Do Less to Save More (New York Times, August 31, 2003)
"People who never think about investing for retirement may soon find that their bosses are stepping in – by forcing them to make decisions about the future."
• Retirement Plans Reduce Choices (Wall Street Journal, July 29, 2003)
• Figuring Out Why You Save or Don't Save (Philadelphia Inquirer, May 2, 2003)
• Why Even a Rally Won't Save You (Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2003)
"In recent weeks, the stock market has shown signs that it finally may be starting to dig out of its three-year hole. But even a sustained upturn may not be enough to salvage the retirement savings of many Americans."
2000-2002
• Iyengar Receives National Science Foundation Award for Study of Perception of Choice (Columbia News, September 9, 2002)
"Recently, President George W. Bush presented Iyengar a National Science Foundation (NSF) Early Career Award, which goes to scientists and engineers in the social sciences."
• You're on Your Own (Time Magazine, January 28, 2002)
"Choice is good. We Americans consider it a measure of our freedom and a source of our innovation and prosperity. Riches flow to the person who builds a better mousetrap--or computer mouse. Yet a grocery shopper blankly staring at hundreds of varieties of toothpaste might reasonably conclude that there can be too much of a good thing."
• Give Us Choices, Yes, But Not Too Many (New York Times, September 13, 2001)
"I used to think shopping online was great because it offered me so many more choices, but now I felt baffled by the abundance."
• Exploration of World Wide Web Tilts from Eclectic to Mundane (New York Times, August 26, 2001)
• Too Many Choices (Wall Street Journal, April 20, 2001)
• In Weird Math of Choices, 6 Choices Can Beat 600 (New York Times, January 9, 2001)
"Research subjects who were asked to select from an extensive array of alternatives, Dr. Lepper and Dr. Iyengar found, were less satisfied with their choices, found the choices themselves less attractive, and felt more frustrated and regretful than other subjects who were given only a limited number of options to choose from."
• Ditherer's Dilemma (New Scientist Magazine, February 12, 2000)
"Sheena Iyengar's research on personal choice is ground breaking and fascinating in itself."
Jonathan Karp
Twelve publisher