Columbia professor to discuss good, bad aspects of choice at NJIT March 23 talk

In the NJIT Technology and Society Forum presentation on March 23, 2011 in the Campus Center Ballroom at 2:30 p.m., Columbia University Professor Sheena Iyengar, will address the psychological and cultural challenges of choice, and suggest answers drawn from her discipline-spanning research.

Her talk, "The Obligation To Choose" will explore the complex relationship between choice and freedom, and why one doesn't always complement the other. Iyengar will explain how too much choice can overwhelm individuals and how choices are shaped by forces both obvious and subtle.

The public is invited to attend this free event.

Ivenger believes that choice is a powerful force in peoples' lives, allowing them to assert control and express individuality. Choice enables one to go from who one is today to whom one wants to be tomorrow. No wonder, then, that people tend to think of choice as an unqualified good. Yet research has shown that when individuals are faced with a large number of options or with particularly difficult decisions, the experience of choosing is often unpleasant, even traumatic.

Ivenger is the inaugural S.T. Lee Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, with a joint appointment in the department of psychology, and research director at the Jerome A. Chazzan Institute of International Business. Ivenger's research into how people perceive and respond to choice has garnered honors that include the Best Dissertation Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology in 1998 and the Presidential Early Career Award in 2002.

Popular media such as The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune and Time magazines, the BBC and National Public Radio regularly cite Ivenger's work. She recently presented her insights into the complexities of choices we make each day in her first book, The Art of Choosing.

Rescheduled from last October, Avenger is also coming to NJIT in March as the 2011 Lillian Gilbreth Colloquium speaker. In 1997, the NJIT Murray Center for Women in Technology established an annual colloquium during Women's History Month in honor of industrial engineer Lillian Muller Gilbreth, PhD, (1878-1972), one of the pioneering systems thinkers of the 20th century. An expert in motion studies, Gilbreth refocused the attention of engineers on the human element in work. Her 1911 book The Psychology of Management is the foundation on which modern industrial management theory and practice is built. In the 1940s, Gilbreth became the first female professor to teach at Newark College of Engineering.

Provided by New Jersey Institute of Technology