Now to what...? How we teach people to make choices and the things they're going to make choices over - that is culturally learned.
Sheena IyengarToo 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 IyengarThere is a different attitude about, you know, how much differentiation there needs to be between our options and how many choices do I need to have in order to make a choice.
Sheena IyengarI think that too ended up affecting a lot of the different research questions that I later asked was really was about well to what extent... How do we balance choice as possibility and choice as limitations?
Sheena IyengarIn fact, even in that store Draeger's they had 348 different kinds of jam actually in the jam aisle. And what we found over about, say, 10 years of research is that as the number of choices actually increase people are less likely to make a choice and sometimes they do this even when it's really bad for them.
Sheena Iyengar