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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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Sheena Iyengar
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: November 29
Professor
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
City of Toronto
Sheena Sethi
Culturally
Learned
Teach
Choices
Going
Make
Things
People

More quotes by Sheena Iyengar

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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
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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
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The typical American reports making about 70 [choices] in a typical day.
Sheena Iyengar
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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
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When companies try to guess what consumers want, they essentially make the choice for consumers.
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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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
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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
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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
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I do think that there are cultural differences in the extent to which we value having more and more choice.
Sheena Iyengar
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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
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The expansion of choice has become an explosion of choice.
Sheena Iyengar
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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
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Once the jazz musician learns all the fundamentals they can keep track of a lot of choices in an instant.
Sheena Iyengar
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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
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The key to getting the most from choice is to be choosy about choosing.
Sheena Iyengar
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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
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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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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
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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