Quote

The typical American reports making about 70 [choices] in a typical day.

Sheena Iyengar

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Sheena Iyengar
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: November 29
Professor
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
City of Toronto
Sheena Sethi
Reports
Choices
American
Making
Typical

More quotes by Sheena Iyengar

Image
The quality of health care continues to improve, and people are living longer, but these developments mean that we're likely to eventually find ourselves in a situation in which we're forced to make difficult choices about our parents, other loved ones, or even ourselves that ultimately boil down to calculations of worth and value.
Sheena Iyengar
Image
I could wear makeup today, and one person would say it looks bland, another would say it looks fake, and another might tell me I look really natural. Everyone is convinced their opinion is the truth, and that's what I struggle against.
Sheena Iyengar
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I mean we know that some choice makes you better off than no choice. Now do we get better off if we go from a lot of choice versus a few choices? And there I think the answer is much, much, much more complicated.
Sheena Iyengar
Image
We are sculptors finding ourselves in the evolution of choosing, not in the results of choice.
Sheena Iyengar
Image
When I was in Russia I found that I thought I was going to give these people that I was interviewing a whole bunch of choice in terms of what they could drink while we were chatting.
Sheena Iyengar
Image
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
Image
I went home and they seemed... my parents seemed normal. They didn't seem to feel like somehow they had been victims of some Nazi camp or something.
Sheena Iyengar
Image
In order to 'hold fast' to something, one must allow oneself to be held to something. That commitment may be one of the hardest things to practice in a world of so much choice.
Sheena Iyengar
Image
The key to getting the most from choice is to be choosy about choosing.
Sheena Iyengar
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
As we get older, we get better at choosing in ways that will make us happy. We do a better job at picking activities that make us happy, and at spending time with people who make us happy. We're also better at letting things go.
Sheena Iyengar
Image
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
Image
First-generation children were strongly influenced by their immigrant parents' approach to choice. For them, choice was not just a way of defining and asserting their individuality, but a way to create community and harmony by deferring to the choices of people whom they trusted and respected.
Sheena Iyengar
Image
In reality, many choices are between things that are not that much different. The value of choice depends on our ability to perceive differences between the options.
Sheena Iyengar
Image
When companies try to guess what consumers want, they essentially make the choice for consumers.
Sheena Iyengar
Image
About the only question that we would say and this is a big one in our lives that we would say you don't just use pure reason to decide the answer to is anything that affects your happiness, because then gut and reason answer very different questions. So gut tells you How do I feel about this right now?
Sheena Iyengar