Most of the time, when we're confronted by an abundance of choices, it's because we're novices and don't know how to differentiate between them.
Question: Americans today have an abundance of choices. Is
that a good thing?Sheena Iyengar: Well certainly not
having any choice--having your entire life dictated by others... You
know, like, none of us would choose--no matter where we are in the
world--would choose to you know become a member of Orwell's "Nineteen
Eighty-Four" world, but how much choice is really the question. I mean
we know that some choice makes you better off than no choice. Now do we
get better off if we go from a lot of choice versus a few choices? And
there I think the answer is much, much, much more complicated. If you
truly have expertise--and expertise can be say a chess master who has
really mastered something or an artist or a musician of some sort you
know if you give a jazz musician... Once the jazz musician learns all
the fundamentals they can keep track of a lot of choices in an instant.
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. 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. 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.
Question: Americans today have an abundance of choices. Is
that a good thing?Sheena Iyengar: Well certainly not
having any choice--having your entire life dictated by others... You
know, like, none of us would choose--no matter where we are in the
world--would choose to you know become a member of Orwell's "Nineteen
Eighty-Four" world, but how much choice is really the question. I mean
we know that some choice makes you better off than no choice. Now do we
get better off if we go from a lot of choice versus a few choices? And
there I think the answer is much, much, much more complicated. If you
truly have expertise--and expertise can be say a chess master who has
really mastered something or an artist or a musician of some sort you
know if you give a jazz musician... Once the jazz musician learns all
the fundamentals they can keep track of a lot of choices in an instant.
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. 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. 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.
