These how-to books reflect a much deeper engagement with choice in the university system—an engagement that spans a startling number of academic departments. The Society for Judgment and Decision Making, for example, is an interdisciplinary group that has existed since 1980 and publishes a journal called, unsurprisingly, Judgment and Decision Making. A typical issue is filled with a mix of business school professors, psychologists, statisticians, economists, and neuroscientists writing on subjects that range from “Would You Rather Be Injured by Lightning or a Downed Power Line?: Preference for Natural Hazards” to “Why Are Gainers More Risk Seeking?” The wide range of authors and subjects is perhaps unavoidable. As William Goldstein and Robin Hogarth put it in their survey Research in Judgment and Decision Making nearly twenty years ago:

JDM [Judgment and Decision Making] research is not “paradigmatic.” There is no single, universally endorsed, overarching theoretical framework that researchers use to organize and guide their efforts. Rather, there are a number of schools of thought that identify different issues as interesting and deem different methods as appropriate. In addition, the situation is complicated by the fact that these schools overlap and interact.

“Overlap and interact” may be putting it mildly: The idea of choice is so vast, and its contours so uncertain, that mapping any portion of it requires tools ranging from the practical (the computer, for most academics) to the vanishingly abstract. So when, for example, Shane Frederick, a professor of marketing at Yale, publishes an article entitled “Time Preference and Personal Identity” in Time and Decision, it seems perfectly natural for that article to include a lengthy discussion of the philosopher Derek Parfit’s conception of the self. By the same token, when Richard Holton, a philosopher at Oxford, writes an article entitled “The Act of Choice,” that essay depends on citations of experiments by a squadron of psychologists and neuroscientists. Choice is large, it seems, and it contains multitudes.