Chaos reigns. Confusion abounds. Information overload how can I cope? It isn’t the theme of a new Woody Allen movie. It is the real life world in which we all have to make choices about what we buy, how we dress and what information we really need to know. It is also the specialty of our next Forum speaker and author of The Art of Choosing.

Through entertaining and illuminating stories and examples, Dr. Sheena Iyengar shows how complex our decision-making processes truly are. Are more choices enabling or crippling? Does careful planning always help us make better decisions? How do our environments affect our preferences? Her examination of consumers’ choices exposes the psychological realities that drive the marketing world.

Sheena Iyengar, Ph.D. is the inaugural S.T. Lee Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, with a joint appointment in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University. She is also Director of the Global Leadership Matrix (GLeaM) initiative and Research Director at the Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business at Columbia Business School.

Dr. Iyengar earned a doctorate in Social Psychology at Stanford University. She has a BA in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and a dual BS degree in economics from the Wharton School of Business. She won the Presidential Early Career Award for Social Scientists. She was a Whitebox Advisors Visiting Scholar at the Yale School of Management International Center for Finance.

Her book The Art of Choosing won the Gold Medal in General Business/Economics from Axiom Business Book Awards. It was a Top Ten Business and Investing Books of 2010 at Amazon.com. It was on the Best Business Book of The Year Shortlist 2010 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs. She is a Fellow of The Society for Personality and Social Psychology, a Fellow of the TIAA-CREF Institute and an Academic Member of the Behavioral Finance Forum.