Sheena Iyengar Quotes

When we speak of choice, what we mean is the ability to exercise control over ourselves and our environment. In order to choose, we must first perceive that control is possible.

We have the ability to create choice by altering our interpretations of the world.

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.

Choice is the only tool we have that enables us to go from who we are today to who we want to be tomorrow.

Balancing hopes, desires and an appreciating of the possibilities with a clear-eyed assessment of the limitations: that is the art of choosing.

The key to getting the most from choice is to be choosy about choosing.

The typical American reports making about 70 [choices] in a typical day.

I pick what are my priorities and I limit those priorities to less than five in my life and really in those particular areas put in the energy to try to make good choices.

Choosing is a creative process, one through which we construct our environment, our lives, ourselves.

The expansion of choice has become an explosion of choice.

What leads us astray is confusing more choices with more control. Because it is not clear that the more choices you have the more in control you feel. We have more choices than we've ever had before.

Consumers presented with six choices on an item were twice as likely to buy as consumers overwhelmed with 24 varieties of the same item.

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.

So gut tells you "How do I feel about this right now?" It doesn't tell me how I feel about it tomorrow or even a few minutes from now. It just tells me how I'm feeling right now.

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.

You know if they said kindness or funniness was really most important to them then they will be more likely to say yes to the person that they thought was kind and funny.

We make choices and are in turn made by them.

We are sculptors finding ourselves in the evolution of choosing, not in the results of choice.

A clear right answer and the opportunity to change the options? This is the chooser’s dream.

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.

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.

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.

There is a different attitude about, you know, how much differentiation there needs to be between our options and how many choices do I need to have in order to make a choice.

I do think that there are cultural differences in the extent to which we value having more and more choice.

Once the jazz musician learns all the fundamentals they can keep track of a lot of choices in an instant.

Like, people are less likely to invest in their retirement when they have more options in their 401K plans than when they have fewer.

Well certainly not having any choice - having your entire life dictated by others.

If you truly have expertise - and expertise can be say a chess master who has really mastered something or an artist or a musician of some sort you know if you give a jazz musician.

We either put out 6 different flavors of jam or 24 different flavors of jam and we looked at 2 things. First, in what case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam?

You know give me choices that are truly different from one another, otherwise they don't regard them as meaningful choices.

A person of “good character” was one who acted in accordance with the expectations of his community

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.

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

Knowledge should be a public good, and I want my ideas to have as much exposure as possible.

Now to what...? How we teach people to make choices and the things they're going to make choices over - that is culturally learned.

The typical Walmart today offers you 100,000 products.

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.

Too many choices can overwhelm us and cause us to not choose at all. For businesses, this means that if they offer us too many choices, we may not buy anything.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Also if they choose from more options than fewer options they're less satisfied with what they choose and that is true whether they're choosing chocolates or which job offer to accept.