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.<br /><br />Question: Americans today have an abundance of choices. Is <br />that a good thing?Sheena Iyengar: Well certainly not <br /> having any choice--having your entire life dictated by others... You <br />know, like, none of us would choose--no matter where we are in the <br />world--would choose to you know become a member of Orwell's "Nineteen <br />Eighty-Four" world, but how much choice is really the question. I mean <br />we know that some choice makes you better off than no choice. Now do we <br /> get better off if we go from a lot of choice versus a few choices? And <br /> there I think the answer is much, much, much more complicated. If you <br />truly have expertise--and expertise can be say a chess master who has <br />really mastered something or an artist or a musician of some sort you <br />know if you give a jazz musician... Once the jazz musician learns all <br />the fundamentals they can keep track of a lot of choices in an instant. <br /> A chess master can keep track of more choices than the number of stars <br />in the galaxy within an instant, but these are people that have truly <br />learned and mastered the choices that they have and how to deal with <br />those choices over a very, very long period of training, so essentially <br />what they're really doing is ruling out all the irrelevant choices and <br />only zeroing in on the most relevant, useful choices at the moment. So <br />most of the time when we are confronted by more, rather than a few, <br />choices we're often novices and so we don't really know how to <br />differentiate these various options. We also don't always know what we <br />want. And in those cases it can actually make us worse off because it's <br />actually easier to figure out what you want and to figure out how the <br />options differ if you have about a handful of them than if you have a <br />hundred of them. <br /><br />Question: Americans today have an abundance of choices. Is <br />that a good thing?Sheena Iyengar: Well certainly not <br /> having any choice--having your entire life dictated by others... You <br />know, like, none of us would choose--no matter where we are in the <br />world--would choose to you know become a member of Orwell's "Nineteen <br />Eighty-Four" world, but how much choice is really the question. I mean <br />we know that some choice makes you better off than no choice. Now do we <br /> get better off if we go from a lot of choice versus a few choices? And <br /> there I think the answer is much, much, much more complicated. If you <br />truly have expertise--and expertise can be say a chess master who has <br />really mastered something or an artist or a musician of some sort you <br />know if you give a jazz musician... Once the jazz musician learns all <br />the fundamentals they can keep track of a lot of choices in an instant. <br /> A chess master can keep track of more choices than the number of stars <br />in the galaxy within an instant, but these are people that have truly <br />learned and mastered the choices that they have and how to deal with <br />those choices over a very, very long period of training, so essentially <br />what they're really doing is ruling out all the irrelevant choices and <br />only zeroing in on the most relevant, useful choices at the moment. So <br />most of the time when we are confronted by more, rather than a few, <br />choices we're often novices and so we don't really know how to <br />differentiate these various options. We also don't always know what we <br />want. And in those cases it can actually make us worse off because it's <br />actually easier to figure out what you want and to figure out how the <br />options differ if you have about a handful of them than if you have a <br />hundred of them.
