BOOK OF THE DAY: The Art of Choosing,By Sheena Iyengar Little, Brown; 329 pp; £12.99

DOES ANYTHING so define our lives as the choices we make? From the trivial to the profound, our lives have effectively become an accumulation of decisions – we are confronted with choice-making at every turn, whether it’s the dozens of flavours in an ice-cream parlour or choosing the person we marry.

In many ways, choice – what it is and how we do it – is a rather abstract topic, but Sheena Iyengar goes a long way towards removing that layer of abstraction so that we can more clearly perceive how we choose.

Iyengar is a social psychologist at the Columbia business school in New York, and her fascination with the choices we make is shaped by her own experiences. Born to Indian Sikh parents whose marriage was arranged, Iyengar was raised in New York, and was thus expected to adhere to a culture that stressed the importance of duty while growing up in another culture that defined itself by personal liberty. She began to lose her sight at a very young age, the result of an inherited condition, further accentuating the stark choices she had to make.

Some of Iyengar’s research has already passed into conventional wisdom – her famous jam experiment tested people’s decision-making processes by offering two tasting booths of jam at a grocery store, one with a wide choice of jams and another with a narrow range. The table with the wider selection sold less, demonstrating cognitive problems posed by too much choice.

The principle was explored in depth in Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice(2004), one of a number of books over the past few years to examine our decision making. Others include Nudge(2008) by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, which focused on the potential benefits for public policy by manipulating people's choices; and Malcolm Gladwell's Blink(2005), which brought Iyengar's work to prominence – it was Gladwell who encouraged the professor to write this book.

It is well established that a sense of autonomy, that is, the perception of control over one’s own choices, is closely linked with our mental and even physical wellbeing – take away the ability to choose, and the feelings of helplessness that result can be extremely deleterious to our health. Various experiments with everybody from babies to the elderly residents of care homes has demonstrated the importance of a sense of autonomy.

Our notions of personal choice, and how our lives are circumscribed by those choices, are best demonstrated by the question regularly asked of every child: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” But Iyengar convincingly demonstrates that the level of personal freedom implied in that question is culturally determined – her own parents had no choice over whom they married, and during her time in Japan she observed how the weight of family and social expectations served to limit people’s life choices.

Of course, the benefits of unfettered choice has become an incontestable pillar of capitalism, and in the US is closely associated with the promise of individual liberty enshrined in the constitution. To be free is to be able to make unrestricted choices about your life. If you are the sum of your choices, restricting those choices necessarily curtails your freedom.

Her personal style and anecdote-heavy narration makes for an immensely readable book, one that addresses a potentially nebulous topic and delivers a treatment that is as much modern philosophy as social science.

Davin O’Dwyer is a freelance journalist