Sheena Iyengar Quotes

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

That's the number one thing I hear about humans. You have all these choices, so you're confused all the time, and you think so much that you're never happy.

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.

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

People of the future may suffer not from an absence of choice but from a paralysing surfeit of it. They may turn out to be victims of that peculiarly super-industrial dilemma: overchoice.

What's clarity like? Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is twitching inside your cranium like a fish on the beach. This is the opposite sensation of clarity. Yet for many people of my era, as they aged, this sensation became the dominant sensation of their lives. It was as though day-to-day twentieth century living had become an unsolvable algebraic equation.

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

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.

There is simply too much to think about.

People like definite decisions, / Tidy answers, all the little ravelings / Snipped off, the lint removed, they / Hop happily among their roughs / Calling what they can't clutch insanity / Or saintliness.

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.

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.

All new learning looks at first like chaos.

Distortion upon distortion: . . . the more one uses the mind, the more confused one becomes.

There are “well-known secrets” out there and there are people who are “so happy they could die.” Sometimes people are so sad they have to laugh and sometimes things feel so wrong, they’re right. Basically what I’m saying is, I usually don’t know what people are talking about.

All the theories mess you up inside.

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.

I have such a crowded life and crowded schedule. When people send me a link with a gadget, I'll look at it and buy it if it looks interesting, but I don't have time to check out everything I'd like to.

Overload 'em with information an' they'll kill yeh jus' to simplify things.

There has been an alarming increase in the number of things you know nothing about.

Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start- the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless.

The more I know, the less I understand

Everything is happening too fast for me to process it.

Simple it's not, I'm afraid you will find, for a mind maker-upper to make up his mind

Complexity is not a cause of confusion. It is a result of it.