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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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Sheena Iyengar
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: November 29
Professor
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
City of Toronto
Sheena Sethi
Think
Thinking
Extent
Cultural
Choice
Value
Differences
Choices
Values

More quotes by Sheena Iyengar

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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
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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
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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
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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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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
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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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Well certainly not having any choice - having your entire life dictated by others.
Sheena Iyengar
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The expansion of choice has become an explosion of choice.
Sheena Iyengar
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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
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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
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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
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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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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
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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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You know give me choices that are truly different from one another, otherwise they don't regard them as meaningful choices.
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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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
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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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Choice is more than picking 'x' over 'y.' It is a responsibility to separate the meaningful and the uplifting from the trivial and the disheartening. It is the only tool we have that enables us to go from who we are today to who we want to be tomorrow.
Sheena Iyengar