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.”

“When the options are few, we can be happy with what we choose since we are confident that it is the best possible choice for us. When the options are practically infinite, though, we believe that the perfect choice for us must be out there somewhere and that it’s our responsibility to find it. Choosing can become a lose-lose situation: if we make a choice quickly without fully exploring the available options, we’ll regret potentially missing out on something better; if we do exhaustively consider all the options, we’ll expend more effort (which won’t necessarily increase the quality of our final choice), and if we discover other good options, we may regret that we can’t choose them all.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I'm a great believer in the idea of not choosing based on our taste.”

“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.”

“At its best, choice is a means by which we can resist the people and the systems that seek to exert control over us. But choice itself can become oppressive when we insist that it is equally available to all. It can become an excuse for ignoring inequities that stem from gender or class or ethnic differences, for example, because one can blithely say, “oh, but they had a choice! We all have choices.”

“The expansion of choice has become an explosion of choice.”

“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.”

“Like the swimming rats in Richter’s experiment, we can survive for only so long without solid ground beneath our feet; if the choices aren’t real, sooner or later we will go under. It’s important, therefore, that we examine our assumptions about choice and that we openly discuss how, when and why it falls short.”

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

“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.”

“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.”