When out on your weekly shop at the supermarket and you come to jam on your list, how many types would you like to choose from? As many as possible?

Professor Sheena Iyengar, the S. T. Lee Professor of Business Columbia University, wanted to find out. Well not about you personally, you understand, but about us generally. And she has. It’s part of her new book, The Art of Choosing.

Her research showed that more than 6 types confuse us and we end up not buying any at all.
I heard her talk last week on Radio 4 explaining our inability to exploit the choices that both government and retailers think we want. Her reasons were interesting and have significance to educators.

Our first difficulty with too much choice is that we simply can’t compare the varieties sufficiently well in order to identify the important characteristics. Or to put it another way, their value to us.
And as a result of that failure, of course, we can’t prioritise.

So in order to be an effective consumer, we need to be able to compare and prioritise. These skills should therefore feature in schools’ citizenship lessons.

So, which Graphic Organisers help us compare? For more than two items, we’re better off with a Table. The items are on one axis and the features on the other. Simple.

But for two items, you can’t beat a Double Bubble. This Graphic Organiser is essentially the same as a Venn diagram but better suited to teaching students the whole process of comparing. This starts with two separate Single Bubbles that capture the characteristics of the two items to be compared.
Having established that, the two Single Bubbles are brought together into a Double Bubble. Only now do we make the comparison. The middle, joined bubbles are the shared, common features while the outer bubbles are the discrete characteristics that differentiate the two items.

If, however, you know the two features that are most important to you when choosing a jam, say, price and taste, then a Crossed Continua might be a better bet. The end result will also provide you with a priority list based on positions in the favoured quadrant.

If you don’t use the Crossed Continua, which gives you ranking, then the Diamond Ranking method works well. Simply arrange the items compared into a diamond shape, moving them around to check on your thinking until you arrive at a satisfactory order.

You must be thinking this just a tad too elaborate a process for choosing jam. Yes, of course. But for other more significant choices, the conversation generated by such a visual, kinesthetic and shared process increases reasoning and decreases reactive impulses. Just the thing for developing our citizens of tomorrow.

In another article I’ll show how Graphic Organisers can bring about more informed political choices.

Reference:
Iyengar, S.,(2010,) The Art of Choosing, Hachette
See Professor Iyengar talking at the TEDxEast conference at http://www.columbia.edu/~ss957/