100+ Sheena Iyengar Quotes On Happiness, Friendship And Change

Professor Sheena Iyengar is a professor of Business at Columbia University. She is an expert in the field of choice and decision making, and has written several books on the subject. She is widely considered to be one of the most influential thinkers in the field of behavioral economics. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Sheena Iyengar on love, happiness, life.

Top 10 Sheena Iyengar Quotes

1. 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.
2. Choice is the only tool we have that enables us to go from who we are today to who we want to be tomorrow.
3. Balancing hopes, desires and an appreciating of the possibilities with a clear-eyed assessment of the limitations: that is the art of choosing.
4. The key to getting the most from choice is to be choosy about choosing.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. Now to what...? How we teach people to make choices and the things they're going to make choices over - that is culturally learned.
9. Once the jazz musician learns all the fundamentals they can keep track of a lot of choices in an instant.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• When companies try to guess what consumers want, they essentially make the choice for consumers.
• The typical American reports making about 70 [choices] in a typical day.
• The typical Walmart today offers you 100,000 products.
• A clear right answer and the opportunity to change the options? This is the chooser’s dream.
• We are sculptors finding ourselves in the evolution of choosing, not in the results of choice.
• A person of “good character” was one who acted in accordance with the expectations of his community
• Knowledge should be a public good, and I want my ideas to have as much exposure as possible.
• We have the ability to create choice by altering our interpretations of the world.
• The expansion of choice has become an explosion of choice.

Sheena Iyengar Quotes About Life

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

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

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

When I do have choice I try to be very picky about... or shall I say choosey about when I choose. I don't automatically decide that I must be the one to choose or that it's important for me to make every choice in my life. — 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

Sheena Iyengar Quotes About Choice

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

I put out a good 10 different types of drinks for them and they just said, "Oh, okay, so it's just one choice." One choice? I gave you Coke, Pepsi, Ginger Ale, Sprite. They saw that as one choice. Now why was that one choice? Because they felt, well, it was just all soda. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't know if I approach choice any differently than the sighted people do, but what I am very cognizant of is that choice does have limits and because of that I really try to take advantage of the domains in which I do have choice. — Sheena Iyengar

Sheena Iyengar Quotes About Choices

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. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sheena Iyengar Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

When Japanese went to Hawaii they would go straight and buy the same thing that they would buy in Japan. They just got it cheaper, which they liked. And so they would still eat the red bean ice cream or the green tea ice cream, but they didn't really take advantage of the variety and it wasn't clear that they cared. — Sheena Iyengar

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. — 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

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

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

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

I've done a number of studies with speed dating and Match.com and what's interesting is that you know we still walk into a speed dating event, you know, thinking about what it is we're looking for in a mate and so you ask people, like women will say "I'm looking for somebody who is really kind and sincere and smart and funny." — 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

People were actually 6 times more likely to buy a jar of jam if they had encountered 6 than if they encountered 24, so what we learned from this study was that while people were more attracted to having more options, that's what sort of got them in the door or got them to think about jam, when it came to choosing time they were actually less likely to make a choice if they had more to choose from than if they had fewer to choose from. — 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

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

My child's first word was "more," but and it's all about, "I want." "I'm going to tell you what I want and what I don't want." It's about my desire to express my preferences. And that is really innate. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So for decisions about happiness you essentially need at least both and probably even more than that, you probably also need to do analysis that doesn't involve yourself to get at the answer of what will make you happy in 10 years. — 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

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

Are you going to be able to shave your legs? Are you going to be able to get married? So it was constantly thinking about both choice in terms of possibilities - I mean because choice is the thing that is supposed to enable you to be whatever it is you want to be - and yet, at the same time you have to think about choice in terms of its limitations. — 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

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

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

[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

I think of choosing as a... both a fun and an effortful activity and I think of choice as something that in order for you to really get what you want out of it you have to put a lot into it and so I'm only willing to do that for a few different things and for the rest I really just try to either satisfy, come up with a simple rule or let somebody else make the choice. — 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

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

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

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

I was living, growing up in a very traditional household and yet at the same time I was going to school in the United States where I was taught the importance of personal preference, so at home it was all about learning your duties and responsibilities whereas in school it was all about well you get to decide what you want you want to eat. — 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

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

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

Life Lessons by Sheena Iyengar

1. Professor Sheena Iyengar teaches us the importance of making informed decisions and understanding the power of choice. She encourages us to recognize the impact of our decisions and to take ownership of them.
2. Sheena Iyengar also stresses the importance of understanding the consequences of our choices, and how they can shape our lives.
3. Finally, she emphasizes the importance of taking responsibility for our decisions and learning from our mistakes.