150 Quotes by 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.

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.

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

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.

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?"

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.

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."

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.

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.