Sheena Iyengar Quotes

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.

I mean we know that some choice makes you better off than no choice. Now do we get better off if we go from a lot of choice versus a few choices? And there I think the answer is much, much, much more complicated.

When people have too many choices, they make bad choices.

The more choices you have--the more options you have, the better off you are.

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

When you give people too many choices it makes them hesitate and not buy stuff.

About 60% of the people stopped when we had 24 jams on display and then at the times when we had 6 different flavors of jam out on display only 40% of the people actually stopped, so more people were clearly attracted to the larger varieties of options, but then when it came down to buying, so the second thing we looked at is in what case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam. 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.

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.

Life is choices, and they are relentless. No sooner have you made one choice than another is upon you.

People aren't able to make decisions anymore because there's too many choices within that decision.

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.

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.

When there's so much choice, it can get overwhelming and it's hard to make a choice.

The expansion of choice has become an explosion of choice.

As consumers, we are faced with hundreds of choices - and when it comes to books, thousands of choices.

I think we are living in a time where the consumer has lots of choices, whether it's coffee, newspapers or whatever it is. And there is parity in the market place, and as a result of that, the consumer is beginning to make decisions, not just on what things cost and the convenience of it.

Now it is no longer a matter of deciding what to do, but of deciding how to decide.

The more there is on offer, the more you don't want. Fifty options of cereal does not hone an epicurean expertise in the finer points of puffed rice, it murders appetite.

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.

Once the options increase, settling on one becomes harder.

A plan relieves you of the torment of choice.

The idea of choice is easily debased if one forgets that the aim is to have chosen successfully, not to be endlessly choosing.

Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented with not two or even three but dozens of choices, and you can begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order.

Some things, you just like what you like and you stick to it. Other things, you like what you like, but the things that come with celebrity or success comes more options. There's was nine, all of the sudden there's ninety-nine things to say "yes" to, which you didn't have the option to say "yes" to yesterday.

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.