Sheena Iyengar famous 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.
-- Sheena Iyengar

#Mean #Exercise #Order

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

#Uplifting #Meaningful #Responsibility

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

#Commitment #Order #Practice

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

#Children #Motivation #Inspiration

[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

#Country #Motivation #Inspiration

The less control people had over their work, the higher their blood pressure during work hours. Moreover, blood pressure at home was unrelated to the level of job control, indicating that the spike during work hours was specifically caused by lack of choice on the job. People with little control over their work also experienced more back pain, missed more days of work due to illness in general, and had higher rates of mental illness-the human equivalent of stereotypies, resulting in the decreased quality of life common to animals reared in captivity.
-- Sheena Iyengar

#Jobs #Pain #Home

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

#Jobs #People #Get Better

The expansion of choice has become an explosion of choice.
-- Sheena Iyengar

#Choices #Expansion #Explosions

When people are given a moderate number of options (4 to 6) rather than a large number (20 to 30), they are more likely to make a choice, are more confident in their decisions, and are happier with what they choose.
-- Sheena Iyengar

#Numbers #People #Decision

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

#Art #Assessment #Appreciate

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

#Desire #Taste #Born

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

#Choices #Trying #Want

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

#Ideas #Want #Exposure

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

#Mom #Dad #School

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

#Thinking #Hands #People

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

#Lonely #Disappointment #People

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

#Trying #Needs #Narrative

What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing. —Archibald MacLeish
-- Sheena Iyengar

#Freedom #Men #Choices

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

#World #Stories #Influence

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

#Character #Expectations #Community

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

#Choices #Evolution #Results

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

#Choices #World #Interpretation

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

#Mean #Sheep #People

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

#Lying #Artist #Self

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

#Choices #Typical

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

#Reality #Differences #Choices

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

#Keys #Choices #Choosy

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

#Today #Walmart #Typical

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

#Dream #Opportunity #Answers

We do the same thing in our own lives, embracing information that supports what we already prefer or vindicates choices we previously made.After all, it feels better to justify our opinions rather than challenge them, to contemplate only the pros and relegate the cons to the back of our minds. However, if we want to make the most of choice, we have to be willing to make ourselves uncomfortable. The question is, if we are willing, how exactly do we go about fortifying ourselves against these biases?
-- Sheena Iyengar

#Feel Better #Choices #Support

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.
-- Sheena Iyengar

#Mean #Choices #Causes

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

#Creative #Environment #Process

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

#Choices #Six #Overwhelmed

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

#Mean #People #Parent

We make choices and are in turn made by them.
-- Sheena Iyengar

#Choices #Made #Turns

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

#Choices #Confusing #Feels

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

#Mom #Dad #Children

If we ask for more and more material for the construction, i.e. more and more choice, we're likely to end up with a lot of combinations that don't do much for us or are far more complex than they need to be.
-- Sheena Iyengar

#Choices #Needs #Construction

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

#Heart #Mean #People

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

#Struggle #Makeup #Fake

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

#Taken #Home #Practice