Quote

The expansion of choice has become an explosion of choice.

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
Choice
Choices
Become
Explosion
Explosions
Expansion

More quotes by Sheena Iyengar

Image
The typical American reports making about 70 [choices] in a typical day.
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
The first thing we looked at, in what case were people more likely to be attracted to the jar or jam, so in which case are people more likely to stop when they saw the display of jams and what we found was that more people stopped when there were 24 jams.
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
I used to go to this store called Draeger's and you had a little bit of that same feeling because this was a store that offered you so many varieties, things you'd never contemplated before, you know like 250 mustards and vinegars and over 500 different kinds of fruits and vegetables, or over 2 dozen different types of water.
Sheena Iyengar
Image
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
Image
When companies try to guess what consumers want, they essentially make the choice for consumers.
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
You know give me choices that are truly different from one another, otherwise they don't regard them as meaningful choices.
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
About the only time our gut can truly outperform our reason is if we truly have developed a kind of informed intuition. So that means the chess master or someone who has really thought about it and given themselves feedback on a particular activity for at least 10,000 hours or more.
Sheena Iyengar
Image
We also don't always know what we want. And in those cases it can actually make us worse off because it's actually easier to figure out what you want and to figure out how the options differ if you have about a handful of them than if you have a hundred of them.
Sheena Iyengar
Image
So most of the time when we are confronted by more, rather than a few, choices we're often novices and so we don't really know how to differentiate these various options.
Sheena Iyengar
Image
The key to getting the most from choice is to be choosy about choosing.
Sheena Iyengar
Image
I've done a number of studies with speed dating and Match.com and what's interesting is that you know we still walk into a speed dating event, you know, thinking about what it is we're looking for in a mate and so you ask people, like women will say I'm looking for somebody who is really kind and sincere and smart and funny.
Sheena Iyengar
Image
They [people] start asking themselves Well which one is the best? Which one would be good for me? And all those questions are much easier to ask if you're choosing from six than when you're choosing from 24 and if you look at the marketplace today most often we have a lot more than 24 of things to choose from.
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
If we ask for more and more material for the construction, i.e. more and more choice, we're likely to end up with a lot of combinations that don't do much for us or are far more complex than they need to be.
Sheena Iyengar
Image
What's interesting is that the way we go about finding our marriage partners today is quite different from the way it used to be in this culture.
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