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 More Quotes by Sheena Iyengar More Quotes From 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 novices know-how choices 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 easier hundred want 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 japan choices people 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 vacation ice-cream choices 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 different jam people There are times when the presence of more choices can make us choose things that are not good for us. For me the clearest example is that the more retirement fund options a person has, the less likely they are to save for their old age. Sheena Iyengar good me old-age age When you're choosing furniture for your home that's supposed to express who you are, what you are also saying is you want other people to infer what you want them to infer. What if they see something different? Wouldn't it be really depressing if you're trying to be bohemian and instead they see you as Rush Limbaugh? Sheena Iyengar saying you home people I'm a great believer in the idea of not choosing based on our taste. Sheena Iyengar our great believer taste When I was very young, my background as a Sikh-American made me aware of the tensions that underlie choice. Sheena Iyengar background choice me young
