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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
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Sheena Iyengar
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: November 29
Professor
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
City of Toronto
Sheena Sethi
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Choosing
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Activities
Better
Letting
Way
Spending
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Older
Things
Activity
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Picking
More quotes by Sheena Iyengar
People don't put as much of an emphasis in expanding their choices, so that, you know, one of the things that I learned when I was in Japan way back in the 1990's and there were all these quarrels happening between the U.S. and Japan about allowing more American products into the Japanese market.
Sheena Iyengar
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
I didn't really give them anymore than one choice, soda or no soda. They didn't... whereas we put a lot of stock in the differences between soda.
Sheena Iyengar
We are often in society told to make decisions in one of two ways. We're either told Use your gut, just go with how you feel about it and let that guide you, or we're told to use reason - some very deliberative methodical process of pros and cons and really thinking it through.
Sheena Iyengar
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
You know, whether it be humans or animals. So even humans - before we can speak or we can understand a baby's cognition - they're already showing us signs that they want choice.
Sheena Iyengar
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
Well certainly not having any choice - having your entire life dictated by others.
Sheena Iyengar
What we share with animals is a desire for choice. It's a desire to have control over our life and a desire to live and use choice as a way in which we can facilitate our ability to live and that is something we really were born with.
Sheena Iyengar
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
In America we tell our parents to bring their child home and put him or her in a crib as they get older, children sleep in they own room not in Mom and Dad's room. What are we training them for? It's independence, because that's what being empowered is all about.
Sheena Iyengar
You know give me choices that are truly different from one another, otherwise they don't regard them as meaningful choices.
Sheena Iyengar
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
What you see determines how you interpret the world, which in turn influences what you expect of the world and how you expect the story of your life to unfold.
Sheena Iyengar
I mean it wasn't that they sat around thinking oh gosh I needed more choices in my grocery stores the way I had come to think about it as an American growing up.
Sheena Iyengar
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
So it was constantly going back and forth between these two cultures that kept raising the question, well, how important is personal freedom? And I think that has always been of interest to me.
Sheena Iyengar
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
Like, people are less likely to invest in their retirement when they have more options in their 401K plans than when they have fewer.
Sheena Iyengar
I mean can you walk to school on your own? Can you study science? Can you study math? Can you go to a normal school? Do you need to go to a special school? What is going to become of you when you grow up? Are you going to have to live on social security and SSI?
Sheena Iyengar
