Quotes by Sheena Iyengar

About Sheena Iyengar:

Sheena S. Iyengar is the inaugural S.T. Lee Professor of Business in the Management Division at Columbia Business School and the Faculty Director of the Eugene Lang Entrepreneurship Center. She is known for her research on choice, culture, and innovation.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Balancing hopes, desires and an appreciating of the possibilities with a clear-eyed assessment of the limitations: that is the art of choosing.

Sheena Iyengar

Whether we do it consciously or subconsciously, we tend to organize our lives to display our identity as accurately as possible. Our lifestyle choices often reveal our values, or at least what we’d like people to perceive as our values…as we make...

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 love...

Sheena Iyengar

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...

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 ab...

Sheena Iyengar

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 abou...

Sheena Iyengar

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 ineq...

Sheena Iyengar

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 ...

Sheena Iyengar

We make choices and are in turn made by them.

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

Sheena Iyengar

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.

Sheena Iyengar

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 tomorro...

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

When companies try to guess what consumers want, they essentially make the choice for consumers.

Sheena Iyengar

The expansion of choice has become an explosion of choice.

Sheena Iyengar

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

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

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

Author Bio

  • NameSheena Iyengar
  • DescriptionProfessor at Columbia Business School.
  • AliasesSheena Sethi
  • BornNovember 29, 1969
  • CountryCanada
  • ProfessionWriter