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The Art of Choosing
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The Art of Choosing
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The Art of Choosing
Audiobook10 hours

The Art of Choosing

Written by Sheena Iyengar

Narrated by Orlagh Cassidy

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

()

Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

Every day we make choices. Coke or Pepsi? Save or spend? Stay or go?
Whether mundane or life-altering, these choices define us and shape our lives. Sheena Iyengar asks the difficult questions about how and why we choose: Is the desire for choice innate or bound by culture? Why do we sometimes choose against our best interests? How much control do we really have over what we choose? Sheena Iyengar's award-winning research reveals that the answers are surprising and profound. In our world of shifting political and cultural forces, technological revolution, and interconnected commerce, our decisions have far-reaching consequences. Use THE ART OF CHOOSING as your companion and guide for the many challenges ahead.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 1, 2010
ISBN9781600248115
Unavailable
The Art of Choosing

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Reviews for The Art of Choosing

Rating: 3.6234177215189876 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

158 ratings18 reviews

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This book, about how we choose, is a good combination of science and interesting stories. Anyone who likes science will probably think this is not really detailed enough, but for the rest of us, it give a really good understanding of the science behind what our brain does when we are faced with a decision.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Started but didn't finish - just wasn't the right time to read it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Do we really have control just because we have a choice? Is choice always good? This book explores these questions and takes many variables like culture, politics, environment, amount of choices etc. have on how one chooses and if choice is the best option. She also made it personal by including her story which is very interesting on its own. Great book on choosing.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I really enjoyed this book I've read it 3x already
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Loved the book, featured fascinating studies that gave you reasons why we do what we do
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Choose to read this book, but don't choose between too many choices. Choosing may make you happier, unless the consequence has mortal echoes. However, the choice may have already been made for you. GREAT READ!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Surprisingly insightful. After reading other books on similar topics, The Art of Choosing gave me new angles to consider. E.g., to choose to yield choice to others and categorize your choices to escape analysis paralysis. Worth reading/listening.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The authors research was amazingly put together. She was very insightful and through
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One of my favorites audiobooks in Scribd so far, absolutely a must listen.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I don't know, I just didn't really learn anything. The most exciting part was when she starts talking about the famous jam study, and how everybody seems to know about it but everybody gets it slightly wrong; and then she reveals that she should know because she's the one who actually conducted the jam study. Mind blown![The jam study offered people a taste test of 24 different jams, then repeated the experiment with only 6 jams, and found that 24 jams attracted more attention but 6 jams resulted in more sales.]
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A good readable and enjoyable introduction to the study of choice for almost any level of interest. Definitely a book where the author attempts to hide in nearby research to say unqualified political statements though (as is unfortunately typical of modern academic mass-audience writings, but at least this one actually has some substance to her, unlike most professors’ books that wander into similar territory with much less justification). First parts of the book stay mostly even-handed, but it gets progressively laid on thick bias towards the end.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It is more heavy on insight side about choices, their effects, but when it comes to wisely choose our steps or to offer advice, it chooses not to dwell on that path.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The book is really interesting. I learned a lot about choices and biases, and was quite surprised about the results of some studies. The downside was the feeling that i was readiing a series of articles than a coherent narrative by the author. May be i should read it once more to find that. Also the author was more interested in presenting the dilemmas and how people behaved in those situations rather than giving us some direction for better choices. May be it was author's intention to just present these and leave the conclusions or lessons to the reader. Overall, a good book worth reading.

    2 people found this helpful

  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I got about a quarter of the way through this, but the thing I didn't like was how some of the sections seemed a bit padded out - I wanted the author to get through some of the elementary points more quickly to get on to the interesting stuff. Maybe I'll pick this up again at some future date.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Purports to be something like Gladwell or Freakanomics--applied social science-- but it's very well padded and full of generalizations (about *all* Americans, for example, when maybe the view of new immigrants or second generation or certain ethnic sub-groups would make more sense.) There are lots of problems with jumping to conclusions from survey responses, even more assuming that respondents in different cultures and countries attach the same meanings to questions.You really have to do interviews and probe people to figure out what they feel and how strongly. Have you ever noticed that when anyone repeatedly makes comparisons with Sweden, they never mention (don't know? )that the population is less than 10 million? There are more illegal immigrants in the US than that. Wouldn't it make more sense to compare Sweden to Minnesota or the New York metro area, which has a similar population. Except 40 percent of NYC were born outside the US..For those looking personal insight a little short of self-help, Stumbling Toward Happiness is far superior. The consumer psychology and marketing bits--like how people are more likely to buy something if there aren't too many choices--is interesting and potentially useful. But you have to wade through a lot of matter and unsupported generalizations to reach it. Maybe start with the bibliography.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The author was the primary researcher on the semi-famous jam study, the one that showed that people liked having six choices more than they liked having twenty-five when sampling jam, which has various implications for marketers and others interested in influencing behavior. Other than that, I can’t say there’s much to recommend this book if you’ve already read some behavioral economics (and I have read rather a lot in the field, so much in fact that I didn’t encounter a single new result in this book, though as I thought about it I’m not sure I’ve seen them all in the same place; you might have to put together Gladwell and Sunstein & Thaler and a couple of others to get there). The most provocative part of the book comes early and its implications are not, sadly, returned to—Iyengar’s result that people adhering to strict religious constraints are on average happier than those who aren’t, despite the fact that this seems to require them to surrender choice, which modern American ideology puts at the center of the well-lived life. In the conclusion, Iyengar points out that the idea of choice can be used to justify unjust systems (she chose to stay home with the kids and thus deserves very little money, etc.); I’d have preferred to read the other book that might have been written with those endpoints, about choice and happiness and the value and meaning of both.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    All I will say is that you should choose to read this book!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    "We each develop a personal equation to account for the trajectory of life: x amount of choice, y of chance, z of destiny. […] I believe that choice -- though it can be finicky, unwieldy, and demanding -- is ultimately the most powerful determinant of where we go and how we get there."The Art of Choosing is Sheena Iyengar’s entertaining exploration of those finicky, unwieldy, and demanding aspects of choice. There’s research (expanded upon in extensive sections of endnotes and bibliography), but the “art” of the title refers to how history, culture, philosophy, psychology, and economics affect our big and small choices. For example: Are you part of an I (individualist) or We (collectivist) society? Do your politics tend toward capitalist (freedom from restriction of initiative) or socialist (freedom to enjoy equal opportunity)? Is your perception of having a choice more psychologically satisfying than your actually making the choice? Can you resist both conformity and uniqueness to choose according to your authentic self? What happens when marketers introduce faux choice through product extension or governments add sin taxes?With blurbs by Gladwell and Gawande, I was primed to enjoy this book, and I did. It’s interesting and readable, although little seems new. And though there are seven chapters, I found it difficult to define a cohesive topic for many, or an arc that develops and concludes over the chapter; I felt more adrift at sea (albeit pleasantly) than in a stream’s current. Still, I’m glad for several takeaways -- especially a reminder about how quickly we weary when choosing and Iyengar’s counter-intuitive suggestion to make the easy choices first (e.g. with a product, what features we most want) so as to winnow out, early on, later irrelevant options.(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)