Quote

When companies try to guess what consumers want, they essentially make the choice for consumers.

Sheena Iyengar

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Sheena Iyengar
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: November 29
Professor
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
City of Toronto
Sheena Sethi
Consumers
Companies
Guess
Choice
Company
Choices
Trying
Make
Essentially

More quotes by 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
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 expansion of choice has become an explosion of choice.
Sheena Iyengar
Image
I do think that there are cultural differences in the extent to which we value having more and more choice.
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
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
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
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
Well certainly not having any choice - having your entire life dictated by others.
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
The phantasmagoria, the actual experience that we try to understand and organize through narrative, varies from place to place. No single narrative serves the needs of everyone everywhere.
Sheena Iyengar
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The typical American reports making about 70 [choices] in a typical day.
Sheena Iyengar
Image
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
Image
I put out a good 10 different types of drinks for them and they just said, Oh, okay, so it's just one choice. One choice? I gave you Coke, Pepsi, Ginger Ale, Sprite. They saw that as one choice. Now why was that one choice? Because they felt, well, it was just all soda.
Sheena Iyengar
Image
We are sculptors finding ourselves in the evolution of choosing, not in the results of choice.
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