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
age choose clearest example fund good less likely options presence retirement save
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.
based believer great
I'm a great believer in the idea of not choosing based on our taste.
When I was very young, my background as a Sikh-American made me aware of the tensions that underlie choice.
bohemian choosing express furniture home infer instead people saying supposed trying
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?
far likely material
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.
people jam flavor
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.
growing-up mean thinking
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.
ice-cream japan tea
When Japanese went to Hawaii they would go straight and buy the same thing that they would buy in Japan. They just got it cheaper, which they liked. And so they would still eat the red bean ice cream or the green tea ice cream, but they didn't really take advantage of the variety and it wasn't clear that they cared.
vacation ice three
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?"
japan people choices
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.
want hundred figures
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.
choices novices various
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.
stars numbers long
A chess master can keep track of more choices than the number of stars in the galaxy within an instant, but these are people that have truly learned and mastered the choices that they have and how to deal with those choices over a very, very long period of training, so essentially what they're really doing is ruling out all the irrelevant choices and only zeroing in on the most relevant, useful choices at the moment.
track choices fundamentals
Once the jazz musician learns all the fundamentals they can keep track of a lot of choices in an instant.