science

Sheena Iyengar

Sheena Iyengar is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Sheena Iyengar rather than just read about it. In short: Sheena S. Iyengar is a Canadian born academic who is the S.T.

Key takeaways

Sheena Iyengar belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Sheena Iyengar to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Sheena Iyengar from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Sheena S. Iyengar is a Canadian born academic who is the S.T. Lee Professor of Business and Chair of The Management Department at Columbia Business School, and founder of a startup called Think Bigger Innovation. She is best known as an expert on choice, particularly for her "Jam Study." Her research focuses on the many facets of decision making, including: why people want choice, what affects how and what people choose, and how decision making can be improved. She has presented TED talks on choice with over 7 million views and is the author of The Art of Choosing (2010) and Think Bigger: How To Innovate (2023). She is the recipient of numerous honors, including two Axiom Business Book Awards and The Thinkers50 Innovation award.

Early life and education Iyengar was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Her parents were immigrants from Delhi, India. As a child, she was diagnosed with a rare form of retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited disease of retinal degeneration. By the age of nine, she could no longer read. By the age of sixteen, she was completely blind, although able to perceive light. She remains blind as an adult. Iyengar's father died of a heart attack when she was thirteen. This change in family circumstances, and Iyengar's loss of vision, prompted Iyengar's mother to steer her towards higher education and self-sufficiency, saying to Iyengar: "I don't want to hear about men or boys, you've got to stand on your own two feet." In 1992, she graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a BS in economics from the Wharton School and a BA in psychology from the College of Arts and Sciences. She then earned her PhD in Social Psychology from Stanford University in 1997. For her dissertation "Choice and its Discontents," Iyengar received the Best Dissertation Award for 1998 from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology.

Career Iyengar's first faculty appointment was at the Sloan School of Management at MIT from July 1997 to June 1998. In 1998, Iyengar joined the faculty at the Columbia Business School, starting as an assistant professor. She has been a full professor at Columbia from July 2007 onward and, since November 2009, the inaugural S.T. Lee Professor of Business. Iyengar's principal line of research concerns the psychology of choice, and she has been studying how people perceive and respond to choice since the 1990s. She has authored or coauthored over 30 journal articles. Her research and statements have been cited in print media, including by Bloomberg Business Week, CityLab, Money Magazine, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Media appearances include The Diane Rehm Show (NPR) and Marketplace (APM). Iyengar was the recipient of the 2001 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers for, as the NSF said, "helping lead to a better understanding of how cultural, individual, and situational dimensions of human decision-making can be used to improve people's lives." In 2011, Iyengar was named a member of the Thinkers50, a global ranking of the top 50 management thinkers. In 2012, she was awarded the Dean's Award for Outstanding Core Teaching from Columbia Business School.

Non-academic works

Iyengar has written non-academic articles, including for CNN and Slate, and book chapters. She has presented two TED talks: "The Art of Choosing" (2010) and "How to Make Choosing Easier" (2012). Iyengar is best known for her 2010 book The Art of Choosing, which explores the mysteries of choice in everyday life. It was listed third in Amazon's top ten books in Business & Investing of 2010 and was shortlisted for the 2010 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. In the Afterword of the 2011 edition of The Art of Choosing, Iyengar distills one aspect of her work explaining and advocating for choice, arguing for people to take responsibility for their lives and not rely on a supposed fate determined by some "greater force out there." She says: "Choice allows us to be architects of our future." In 2023, Iyengar published her second book titled Think Bigger: How to Innovate. She founded a start-up based on her methodology, Think Bigger Innovation, that embeds AI into ideation and choice mapping in a product that helps businesses solve complex problems and innovate.

Personal life Iyengar is divorced from Garud Iyengar, another Columbia University professor, with whom she has one child.

References

External links

Official website List of media coverage from official website Columbia Business School directory entry

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Sheena Iyengar

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Sheena Iyengar claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Sheena Iyengar before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Sheena Iyengar ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Sheena Iyengar

In research: Sheena Iyengar appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Sheena Iyengar in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Sheena Iyengar is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 21st-century American psychologists, 21st-century American women, American Sikhs, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Sheena Iyengar outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Sheena Iyengar in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Sheena Iyengar means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Sheena Iyengar out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Sheena Iyengar in simple terms?

Sheena S. Iyengar is a Canadian born academic who is the S.T.

Why does Sheena Iyengar matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Sheena Iyengar?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Sheena Iyengar.