In other words, as a choice architect, you can make daunting decisions feel doable.Įric Johnson, the Norman Eig Chair of Business and Director of the Center for Decision Sciences at Columbia University, is the author of The Elements of Choice: Why the Way We Decide Matters.Eric Johnson is a faculty member at the Columbia Business School at Columbia University where he is the inaugural holder of the Norman Eig Chair of Business, and Director of the Center for Decision Sciences. You can direct attention to features you think are worth prioritizing. For instance, you can present an otherwise overwhelming list of extracurricular activities in a certain order. Exploration leads to expansion.ĭo help young people make wise choices.

She could make a choice within each category or decide which category was more important, and that made the process easier.ĭon’t make all the choices for the young people in your life. They also structured the choices into categories like sports, after-school clubs, and in-school challenges. But they left some choices, such as taking Mandarin, where they didn’t know what her reaction would be. Experiments that cut the options to 30-eliminating schools that are too far away, for example-helped students make better choices.Īs for my niece, her parents wanted to present ample options without overwhelming her, so they eliminated ones they knew she wouldn’t like. It’s easy for families to feel lost and kids to end up in a school that’s a bad match. For example, New York City presents eighth graders with more than 700 different high schools in a large book and asks them to rank their top 12. Making good decisions involves choice architecture: structuring the presentation of options in a way that leads to a satisfying result. They didn’t know how to cut them down, and there were some she hadn’t considered yet that she might like a lot. They’d read about the paradox of choice-that having too many options can paralyze decision making-and thought they should limit the number of activities under consideration. Her parents wondered how they could help her. And what about all the possibilities she didn’t know about yet? She was a talented soccer, softball, and basketball player, and when she wasn’t playing sports, she was busy with a fast-growing business making and selling “slime.”Įach activity took an increasing amount of time, and she was curious to try new activities-robotics, and maybe the school newspaper.

When my niece started high school, she had a big decision to make. Today, I’ve asked Eric Johnson to share his tip of the week.

Eric johnson the elements of choice