Sheena Iyengar – Author Biography
Early Life
Sheena Iyengar was born in Toronto, Canada, to Sikh immigrant parents from India, and raised in New Jersey. Blind from a degenerative eye condition since her teens, she navigated the world — and her research — with unusual determination. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania and her PhD in social psychology from Stanford University.
Career
Iyengar is the S.T. Lee Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, where she has spent her career studying choice: how people make decisions, what makes choice motivating or paralyzing, and how culture shapes our relationship to choosing. Her famous “jam study” — showing that shoppers presented with 24 varieties of jam were less likely to buy than those offered 6 — became one of the most cited findings in behavioral science and the empirical anchor for the idea of “choice overload.” Her book The Art of Choosing (2010) wove together research, memoir, and cultural observation into a wide-ranging exploration of choice as the defining activity of modern life. It was praised as one of the best business books of the year. Her later work, including Think Bigger (2023), extends her research into innovation and decision-making.
Major Works
Iyengar’s major works are The Art of Choosing (2010) and Think Bigger: How to Innovate (2023), alongside influential academic papers on choice and culture.
Writing Style and Themes
Iyengar writes with a researcher’s precision and a memoirist’s warmth, blending laboratory findings with stories from her own life — growing up between Indian and American cultures, navigating blindness, choosing a career. Her central theme is the paradox of choice: we cherish the freedom to choose, yet too much choice overwhelms us, and the meaning of choice itself varies across cultures. Her work is a humane corrective to the assumption that more options always mean more freedom.
Legacy
Sheena Iyengar’s research on choice overload reshaped marketing, product design, and public policy — the “jam study” is taught in business schools worldwide. The Art of Choosing remains one of the defining popular books on decision science, and her voice, as a blind woman of color in a field long dominated by neither, brought a distinctive perspective to behavioral science.
