You know, you take a little infant and you turn on the music mobile on their crib and you find that if you give them a music mobile which turns on automatically versus a music mobile in which - if by chance their little legs or their little hands accidentally touches it - turns on they're so much more excited if by chance it turns on because they touched it, so that desire for control over their environment is... really appears from very early on and if you look at children's first words, "no, yes."

Consumers presented with six choices on an item were twice as likely to buy as consumers overwhelmed with 24 varieties of the same item.

There 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.

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.

The typical American reports making about 70 [choices] in a typical day.

About the only question that we would say and this is a big one in our lives that we would say you don't just use pure reason to decide the answer to is anything that affects your happiness, because then gut and reason answer very different questions. So gut tells you "How do I feel about this right now?"

Then, the other thing that affected my interest in choices growing up was the fact that I was going blind and that meant that there were lots of questions that constantly kept arising about how much choices I actually could have.