Sheena Iyengar

Sheena S. Iyengar (born November 29, 1969) is the inaugural S.T. Lee Professor of Business in the Management Division at Columbia Business School. She is one of the world's experts on choice. Her research focuses on: why people want choice, what affects how and what we choose, and how we can improve our decision-making outcomes.

Early life and education

Sheena Iyengar was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Her parents were both Sikh immigrants from Delhi. As a child, she was diagnosed with a rare form of retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited disease of retinal degeneration. By the age of 10, she could no longer read and write. By the age of 16, she needed the help of a seeing eye dog. Today, she is completely blind and relies on a cane to get around.

Despite the difficulties posed by her blindness, Iyengar pursued higher education. In 1992, she graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School and a B.A. in Psychology with a minor in English from the College of Arts and Sciences. She then earned her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Stanford University in 1997. The following year, her dissertation "Choice and its Discontents" received the prestigious Best Dissertation Award for 1998 from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology.

Academic career

Sheena Iyengar's first faculty appointment was at the Sloan School of Management at MIT from July 1997 to June 1998, where she taught Managerial Decision Making and Research Methods. In 1998, Iyengar joined the faculty at the Columbia Business School. Her principal line of research concerns the psychology of choice, and she has been studying how people perceive and respond to choice for over two decades. This work has earned her much recognition (in 2002, she was the recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Social Scientists for her studies on cultural differences in decision making) and has also attracted attention in popular media. Her research has been cited in such periodicals as Fortune and Time magazines, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, as well as on television programs such as The Today Show and The Daily Show. Her award-winning book, The Art of Choosing, which explores the mysteries of choice in everyday life, was listed in Amazon.com’s top ten books in Business & Investing of 2010 and shortlisted for the 2010 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

In 2011, Iyengar was named a member of the Thinkers50, a global ranking of the top 50 management thinkers. She was recently awarded the Dean’s Award for Outstanding Core Teaching from Columbia Business School.

Published works

• Eternal Quest for the Best: Sequential (vs. Simultaneous) Option Presentation Undermines Choice Commitment (Forthcoming 2012)
• The Discriminating Consumer: Product Proliferation and Willingness to Pay for Quality (2012)
• Perceiving Freedom Givers: Effects of Granting Decision Latitude on Personality and Leadership Perceptions (2011)
• Born to Choose: The Origins and Value of the Need for Control (2010)
• Choice Proliferation, Simplicity Seeking, and Asset Allocation (2010)
• Order in Product Customization Decisions: Evidence from Field Experiments (2010)
• Medium of Exchange Matters: What's Fair for Goods Is Unfair for Money (2010)
• The Art of Choosing (2010)
• Tragic Choices: Autonomy and Emotional Response to Medical Decisions (2009)
• The Mere Categorization Effect: How the Presence of Categories Increases Choosers' Perceptions of Assortment Variety and Outcome Satisfaction (2006)
• Gender Differences in Mate Selection: Evidence from a Speed Dating Experiment (2006)
• Doing Better but Feeling Worse: Looking for the "Best" Job Undermines Satisfaction (2006)
• How Much Choice is Too Much? Contributions to 401(k) Retirement Plans (2004)
• The Psychological Pleasure and Pain of Choosing: When People Prefer Choosing at the Cost of Subsequent Outcome Satisfaction (2004)
• When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing? (2000)
• Rethinking the Value of Choice: A Cultural Perspective on Intrinsic Motivation (1999)
• Optimism and Fundamentalism (1993)