Sheena Iyengar
Sheena Iyengar
Sheena S. Iyengaris the inaugural S.T. Lee Professor of Business in the Management Division at Columbia Business School. She is one of the world's experts on choice. Her research focuses on: why people want choice, what affects how and what we choose, and how we can improve our decision-making outcomes...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
Date of Birth29 November 1969
CountryUnited States of America
desire taste born
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.
ideas want exposure
Knowledge should be a public good, and I want my ideas to have as much exposure as possible.
trying needs narrative
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.
choices trying want
When companies try to guess what consumers want, they essentially make the choice for consumers.
feel-better choices support
We do the same thing in our own lives, embracing information that supports what we already prefer or vindicates choices we previously made.After all, it feels better to justify our opinions rather than challenge them, to contemplate only the pros and relegate the cons to the back of our minds. However, if we want to make the most of choice, we have to be willing to make ourselves uncomfortable. The question is, if we are willing, how exactly do we go about fortifying ourselves against these biases?
mom dad children
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.
numbers people decision
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.
people jam flavor
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?
jobs people get-better
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.
creative environment process
Choosing is a creative process, one through which we construct our environment, our lives, ourselves.
thinking hands people
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.
feelings tomorrow minutes
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.
keys choices choosy
The key to getting the most from choice is to be choosy about choosing.
jobs pain home
The less control people had over their work, the higher their blood pressure during work hours. Moreover, blood pressure at home was unrelated to the level of job control, indicating that the spike during work hours was specifically caused by lack of choice on the job. People with little control over their work also experienced more back pain, missed more days of work due to illness in general, and had higher rates of mental illness-the human equivalent of stereotypies, resulting in the decreased quality of life common to animals reared in captivity.