Sheena Iyengar Quotes & Sayings

We tend to have a knee-jerk negative response to anything that seems to want or have control over us. — Sheena Iyengar

One day I went to the manager and I asked him whether his model was working and he said, "Well, haven't you seen how many customers we have in this store?" And yes indeed I had. I mean it was definitely attracting a lot of customers, even attracting tourist buses that would land up at this store and people would go through the store and marvel at all the options, even sometimes take photographs of the various aisles. — 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

And guys will say looks matter, but they'll also say things like "Well, she should be smart and kind." And you know those are ... so the typical responses and if you give them just a few options, like five or six, then they will rate them on the very characteristics that they said were really important to them. — Sheena Iyengar

People will make worse financial decisions for them if they're choosing from a lot of options than if they're choosing from a few options. If they have more options they're more likely to avoid stocks and put all their money in money market accounts, which doesn't even grow at the rate of inflation. — Sheena Iyengar

Recall Aesop's fable of the fox and the grapes. After trying in vain to reach the grapes, the fox gives up and wanders away, muttering, "They were probably sour anyway." The fox's change of heart is a perfect example of a common strategy we instinctively use to reduce dissonance. When we experience a conflict between our beliefs and our actions, we can't rewind time and take back what we've already done, so we adjust our beliefs to bring them in line with our actions. If the story had gone differently, and the fox had managed to get the grapes, only to discover they were sour, he would have told himself that he liked sour grapes in order to avoid feeling that his effort had been a waste. — Sheena Iyengar

I think I was always informally thinking about choice from when I was a very young child because I was born to Sikh immigrant parents, so I was constantly going back and forth between a Sikh household and an American outside world, so I was going back and forth between a very traditional Sikh home in which you had to follow the Five K's. — Sheena Iyengar

[Americans] think that choice, as seen through the American lens, best fulfills an innate and universal desire for choice in all humans. Unfortunately, these beliefs are based on assumptions that don't always hold true in many countries, in many cultures. — 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

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

Recommendations and categorization are both useful features to seek out when trying to make a difficult decision, because they can benefit our choices in two ways. They make the decision in question easier by allowing us to borrow the knowledge of experts or crowds, and they also help us to develop our own expertise more rapidly than we would if we chose without assistance. Learning what others consider good and relevant provides us with a general overview of a given field, catalyzing our understanding of it and the development of our preferences within it. — Sheena Iyengar

Whether we do it consciously or subconsciously, we tend to organize our lives to display our identity as accurately as possible. Our lifestyle choices often reveal our values, or at least what we'd like people to perceive as our values ... as we make our everyday choices, we continuously calculate not just which choices best match who we are and what we want but also how those choices will be interpreted by others. We look for cues in our social environment to figure out what others think of this or that, which can require being sensitive to the most localized and up-to-date details of what a particular choice means. — 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

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 ... — Sheena Iyengar

If you have the feeling of choice, if you feel free, you will be better off. And when I say better off I mean that if people feel they have control over their lives, they call in for fewer sick days from work. They have a lesser probability of having a heart attack or stroke. They live longer. They're happier. — Sheena Iyengar

About the only time our gut can truly outperform our reason is if we truly have developed a kind of informed intuition. So that means the chess master or someone who has really thought about it and given themselves feedback on a particular activity for at least 10,000 hours or more. — Sheena Iyengar

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

It's easy to assume people are conforming when we witness them all choosing the same option, but when we choose that very option ourselves, we have no shortage of perfectly good reasons for why we just happen to be doing the same thing as those other people; they mindlessly conform, but we mindfully choose. This doesn't mean that we're all conformists in denial. It means that we regularly fail to recognize that others' thoughts and behaviors are just as complex and varied as our own. Rather than being alone in a crowd of sheep, we're all individuals in sheep's clothing. — Sheena Iyengar

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

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. — Sheena Iyengar

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

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

Erich Fromm in his 1941 book "Escape from Freedom", about the nature of one of our culture's most cherished values. Fromm argues that freedom is composed of two complementary parts. A common view of freedom is that it means "freedom from the political, economic, and spiritual shackles that have bound men," which defines it as the absence of others forcibly interfering with the pursuit of our goals. In contrast to this "freedom from," Fromm identifies an alternate sense of freedom as an ability: the "freedom to" attain certain outcomes and realize our full potential. "Freedom from" and "freedom to" don't always go together, but one must be free in both senses to obtain full benefit from choice. A child may be allowed to have a cookie, but he won't get it if he can't reach the cookie jar high on the shelf. — Sheena Iyengar

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

The saying goes that history repeats itself; personal histories do the same. We can gather the lessons of others' lives through observation, conversation, and by seeking advice. We can use the automatic system to find out who the happy people are, and the reflective system to evaluate how they got to be that way. Pursuing happiness need not be a lonely endeavor. In fact, throwing in our lot with others may be a very good way of coping with the disappointments of choice. — Sheena Iyengar

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

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

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

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

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

Changing our behavior purely for the sake of appearances may seem to conflict with the need to be authentic and consistent, but in many ways it is actually a result of those needs. After all, resolving the tension between standing out from the crowd and becoming isolated requires finding our niche in the world. But what would happen if we weren't accepted in the place where we felt we belonged? For others to see us as a "poseur" or as "delusional" would be painful. Even worse, what if they were right? The social consequences and self-doubt that follow when our self-perceptions conflict with how others see us can be just as destabilizing to our identity as conflicts between our own self-perceptions and actions. — Sheena Iyengar

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

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. — Sheena Iyengar

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. — Sheena Iyengar

One could even argue that we have a duty to create and pass on stories about choice because once a person knows such stories, they can't be taken away from him. He may lose his possessions, his home, his loved ones, but if he holds on to a story about choice, he retains the ability to practice choice. — Sheena Iyengar

The great artist Michelangelo claimed that his sculptures were already present in the stone, and all he had to do was carve away everything else.
Our understanding of identity is often similar: Beneath the many layers of shoulds and shouldn'ts that cover us, there lies a constant, single, true self that is just waiting to be discovered. — Sheena Iyengar

We all make assumptions about the world - based on individual experience and cultural background - that affect our judgment of how that balance should look — 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

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

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

But in public school i learned that it was not only natural but desirable that i should make my own decisions. it was not a matter of cultural background or personality or abilities; it was simply what was true and right — Sheena Iyengar

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

Being a Sikh meant having to do what Mom and Dad said, and going to temple, and Mom and Dad choosing who I would marry. But going to an American school taught me that I was the one who's supposed to make those choices. — Sheena Iyengar

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

When I was very young, my background as a Sikh-American made me aware of the tensions that underlie choice. — 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

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

When you lie about yourself, is it to appear closer to or farther away from the middle of the bell curve? — Sheena Iyengar

People who perceive the negative experiences in their lives as the result of uncontrollable forces are at a higher risk for depression than those who believe they have control — 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

For animals, the confinement of the body is the confinement of the whole being, but a person can choose freedom even when he has no physical autonomy. In order to do so, he must know what choice is, and he must believe that he deserves it. By sharing stories, we keep choice alive in the imagination and in language. We give each other the strength to perform choice in the mind even when we cannot perform it with the body. — Sheena Iyengar

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

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

So on the one hand in school you're teachers are constantly telling you that you can be whatever it is you want to be as long as you put your mind and heart to it, and yet at the same time I was also getting the clear message of, well, what can you do really? — Sheena Iyengar

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

A clear right answer and the opportunity to change the options? This is the chooser's dream. — Sheena Iyengar

Why is choice powerful, and where does its power come from? Do we all choose in the same way? What is the relationship between how we choose and who we are? Why are we so often disappointed by our choices, and how do we make the most effective use of the tool of choice?
How much control do we have over our everyday choices? How do we choose when our options are practically unlimited? Should we ever let others choose for us, and if yes, who and why? — Sheena Iyengar

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

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

Rather than trying to trick ourselves, we can teach ourselves, avoiding temptation until the act of avoidance itself becomes habitual and automatic. III. — Sheena Iyengar

You know, or three kinds of ice cream bars and you'd see this and like this ... okay they could clearly benefit from some more choices and I remember having these discussions with the Japanese because they you know they often like to go to Hawaii for vacation because it was definitely much cheaper for them and I would ask them, "So when you go to Hawaii, you know do eat all these other things?" — Sheena Iyengar

It's always a thrilling experience to go into a place that offers you a lot of choice. You know it's like it reminds you of when you're a kid and you go to the amusement park and whether it be Disneyworld or Six Flags you know that thrilling moment when you first enter and you know you've got all these possibilities for the day and it's really a ... it's a wonderful feeling. — Sheena Iyengar

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. — Sheena Iyengar

When heuristics don't yield the results we expect, you'd think we would eventually realize that something's wrong. Even if we don't locate the biases, we should be able to see the discrepancy between what we wanted and what we got, right? Well, not necessarily. As it turns out, we have biases that support our biases! If we're partial to one option - perhaps because it's more memorable, or framed to minimize loss, or seemingly consistent with a promising pattern - we tend to search for information that will justify choosing that option. On the one hand, it's sensible to make choices that we can defend with data and a list of reasons. On the other hand, if we're not careful, we're likely to conduct an imbalanced analysis, falling prey to a cluster of errors collectively known as confirmation biases. — 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

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

You know, like, none of us would choose - no matter where we are in the world - would choose to you know become a member of Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" world, but how much choice is really the question. — Sheena Iyengar

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

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

The higher the exposure a product receives and the greater its perceived social acceptability, the more people will buy it, which in turn further increases its exposure and acceptability. — 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

Personal happiness is always a very serious matter. — Sheena Iyengar

In fact, even in that store Draeger's they had 348 different kinds of jam actually in the jam aisle. And what we found over about, say, 10 years of research is that as the number of choices actually increase people are less likely to make a choice and sometimes they do this even when it's really bad for them. — Sheena Iyengar

First-generation children were strongly influenced by their immigrant parents approach to choice. For them, choice was not just a way of defining and asserting their individuality, but a way to create community and harmony by deferring to the choices of people whom they trusted and respected. — Sheena Iyengar

You get to decide how you're going to look and what you're going to be when you grow up and when people learned that my parents actually had an arranged marriage people thought that was the most horrific thing on earth. I mean how could anybody allow their marriage of all things to be prescribed by somebody else? — 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

The typical Walmart today offers you 100,000 products. — Sheena Iyengar

What affected people's health most in these studies wasn't the actual level of control that people had in their jobs, but the amount of control they perceived themselves as having. — 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

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

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. — Sheena Iyengar

Reason tells me, when I do the pros and cons analysis, how I should feel about it right now and how I should feel about it in 10 years from now and so that the only ... — Sheena Iyengar

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. — Sheena Iyengar

I mean we might even go to war as to whether we love Coke or Pepsi and our whole identity is wrapped up in that choice. You know, for the Russians they felt that these minor differences between these various sodas was just hyped up and irrelevant. — Sheena Iyengar

A chess master can keep track of more choices than the number of stars in the galaxy within an instant, but these are people that have truly learned and mastered the choices that they have and how to deal with those choices over a very, very long period of training, so essentially what they're really doing is ruling out all the irrelevant choices and only zeroing in on the most relevant, useful choices at the moment. — Sheena Iyengar

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

When you're choosing furniture for your home that's supposed to express who you are, what you are also saying is you want other people to infer what you want them to infer. What if they see something different? Wouldn't it be really depressing if you're trying to be bohemian and instead they see you as Rush Limbaugh? — 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

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? — 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

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

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

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

This is at a time when you know most of us drank tap water, so I used to go to this store and examine all the varieties and we used to marvel at all the choices out there, but I found that I rarely bought anything and I kind of thought that was kind of curious. I mean, they had things that the other grocery stores didn't have and yet I never bought anything. — Sheena Iyengar

The resulting action is based on informed intuition, or as he calls it, "superthought." In jazz, superthought goes beyond determining the "right" answer: It allows one to see new possibliities where others see only more of the same, and to construct the rate "useful combination." Perhaps we can superthink our way through choice by learning the fundamentals of its composition, and then using the knowledge to create more music where there might otherwise by only noise. Insisting on more when one already has a great deal is usually considered a sign of greed. In the case of choice, it is also a sign of the failure of the imagination, which we must avoid or overcome if we wish to solve our multiple choice problem. — Sheena Iyengar

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

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

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. — Sheena Iyengar