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We are sculptors finding ourselves in the evolution of choosing, not in the results of choice.

Sheena Iyengar

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Sheena Iyengar
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: November 29
Professor
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
City of Toronto
Sheena Sethi
Sculptors
Choosing
Findings
Finding
Evolution
Choice
Results
Choices

More quotes by Sheena Iyengar

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Then, the other thing that affected my interest in choices growing up was the fact that I was going blind and that meant that there were lots of questions that constantly kept arising about how much choices I actually could have.
Sheena Iyengar
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When Japanese went to Hawaii they would go straight and buy the same thing that they would buy in Japan. They just got it cheaper, which they liked. And so they would still eat the red bean ice cream or the green tea ice cream, but they didn't really take advantage of the variety and it wasn't clear that they cared.
Sheena Iyengar
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The key to getting the most from choice is to be choosy about choosing.
Sheena Iyengar
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I think that too ended up affecting a lot of the different research questions that I later asked was really was about well to what extent... How do we balance choice as possibility and choice as limitations?
Sheena Iyengar
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We began to look at Why is that? And a large part of that has to do with the fact that when people have a lot of options to choose from they don't know how to tell them apart. They don't know how to keep track of them.
Sheena Iyengar
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What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing. —Archibald MacLeish
Sheena Iyengar
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Most of the time you should use reason, there is no doubt about that because gut often makes us susceptible to lots of different biases, particularly if what you're deciding is something that you really, that expertise can be brought to bear on it, there is a way in which you can align the odds, so then you should really use reason.
Sheena Iyengar
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Now to what...? How we teach people to make choices and the things they're going to make choices over - that is culturally learned.
Sheena Iyengar
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You know give me choices that are truly different from one another, otherwise they don't regard them as meaningful choices.
Sheena Iyengar
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Now if you expand their choice set. Say you give them 20 different speed dates, everything goes out the window. Everybody starts choosing in accordance with looks because that becomes the easiest criteria by which to weed out all the options and decide So who am I going to say yes to?
Sheena Iyengar
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My child's first word was more, but and it's all about, I want. I'm going to tell you what I want and what I don't want. It's about my desire to express my preferences. And that is really innate.
Sheena Iyengar
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So for decisions about happiness you essentially need at least both and probably even more than that, you probably also need to do analysis that doesn't involve yourself to get at the answer of what will make you happy in 10 years.
Sheena Iyengar
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The typical American reports making about 70 [choices] in a typical day.
Sheena Iyengar
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I don't know if I approach choice any differently than the sighted people do, but what I am very cognizant of is that choice does have limits and because of that I really try to take advantage of the domains in which I do have choice.
Sheena Iyengar
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We're born with the desire, but we don't really know how to choose. We don't know what our taste is, and we don't know what we are seeing.
Sheena Iyengar
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Well certainly not having any choice - having your entire life dictated by others.
Sheena Iyengar
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When people are given a moderate number of options (4 to 6) rather than a large number (20 to 30), they are more likely to make a choice, are more confident in their decisions, and are happier with what they choose.
Sheena Iyengar
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Life hands us a lot of hard choices, and other people can help us more than we might realize. We often think we should make important decisions using just our own internal resources. What are the pros and cons? What does my gut tell me? But often we have friends and family who know us in ways we don't know ourselves.
Sheena Iyengar
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Choice is more than picking 'x' over 'y.' It is a responsibility to separate the meaningful and the uplifting from the trivial and the disheartening. It is the only tool we have that enables us to go from who we are today to who we want to be tomorrow.
Sheena Iyengar
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What we found was that of the people who stopped when there were 24 different flavors of jam out on display only 3% of them actually bought a jar of jam whereas of the people who stopped when there were 6 different flavors of jam 30% of them actually bought a jar of jam.
Sheena Iyengar