Ballet Slippers or Adorable?
For the course we are asked to view a TED talk given by Dr. Sheena Iyengar (2010). In the talk she presents a summary of her findings regarding her study of choice. From soda to healthcare, she explores how different cultures view choice. Her focus is on explaining three assumptions that Americans have about choice: that people should make their own choices, that more options leads to better decisions, and that having a choice should never be declined. She also tells us an anecdote that led to another study of hers. This is where the title of the post comes from. To that end, it's important to note that Dr. Iyengar is blind. But first, the assumptions.
The first assumption we have is that people should make their own decisions. To study this assumption she invited Anglo-American children and Asian-American children to perform some exercises involving anagrams. She found that the two demographics had differing levels of performance based on who they believed to have chosen the anagrams they were to work on. The Anglo-American children performed better when they believed that they had made their own choice. The Asian-American children performed better when they believed their mothers had chosen for them. In reality, each subgroup within the demographics were performing the same exact tasks. So, how does this assumption about choice impact leadership in a business environment. To me, it's about the illusion of having a choice. If you approach an employee with three tasks that are of equal importance to you, and they perform their best work on the one they chose, then you have leveraged the power of choice. All three tasks will get done, and the employee must work to stay employed, so the feeling that they have a choice is really more of an illusion. That feeling of power over their destiny makes them feel empowered and gives them a sense of ownership, potentially resulting in higher quality work in a shorter time span.
The next assumption is that more choices make for better decisions. Dr. Iyengar talks about interviews she had with citizens of former soviet countries. Before the interviews started she would offer them a soda from a selection of seven choices. A subject remarked at the lack of choices and she asked for him to explain his reasoning. Instead of seeing seven different sodas, he saw it as one choice: soda. When she started including juice and water, they perceived there to be more choices. Ultimately, a lot of the interview subjects thought the number of product varieties they now had, were superfluous. People can feel overwhelmed by choice, like Dr. Iyengar's example of cola. She mentioned that studies showed people can't tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi (and probably RC Cola...is that still a thing?). So, why inundate people with unnecessary choices? How does this apply in a business leadership environment? Dr. Iyengar mentions a study that found that people make worse choices, the more options there are. If a leader wants to get the best from their people, they should consider narrowing the number of options in a decision down to a minimum.
The last assumption is that one should never pass up the opportunity to choose. Dr. Iyengar mentions a study of parents who lost children to the same unfortunate birth defect. Some were from France and some from America. In France, the parents relied upon the doctors to make the decision to remove their children from life support, which led to their passing. American parents made that decision on their own. The French parents had a lower occurrence of negative feelings a year after their child's passing. The American parents, despite their higher occurrence of negative feelings, couldn't imagine the idea of someone else making the decision to take their child off of life support. As a leader it's important to recognize when to withhold a decision making opportunity, and when to encourage one. It can mean the difference between alienating your employees and empowering them.
You've gotten this far and you still don't know the source of the title. At the end of the talk, the host asks Dr. Iyengar if her blindness has impacted her research. She told of an experience she had at a salon. When asked what shade of nail polish she wanted, she didn't know. Two stylists recommended two different nail polishes. One recommended one called ballet slippers, the other recommended one called adorable. They each used different words to describe them. She decided to use them to conduct a study. She peeled the labels off of them and asked people to describe the color of the polish. Half of her respondents accused her of putting the same polish in both bottles. In other words, the difference was so slight, most people couldn't tell them apart. This says something about the confirmation bias that people carry around. In some cases, if they're told two things are different, regardless of whether they actually are, they may very well believe it.
