Sheena Iyengar

We make choices and are in turn made by them.

In America we tell our parents to bring their child home and put him or her in a crib; as they get older, children sleep in they own room not in Mom and Dad's room. What are we training them for? It's independence, because that's what being empowered is all about.

Life hands us a lot of hard choices, and other people can help us more than we might realize. We often think we should make important decisions using just our own internal resources. What are the pros and cons? What does my gut tell me? But often we have friends and family who know us in ways we don't know ourselves.

Like the swimming rats in Richter__ experiment, we can survive for only so long without solid ground beneath our feet; if the choices aren__ real, sooner or later we will go under. It__ important, therefore, that we examine our assumptions about choice and that we openly discuss how, when and why it falls short.

At its best, choice is a means by which we can resist the people and the systems that seek to exert control over us. But choice itself can become oppressive when we insist that it is equally available to all. It can become an excuse for ignoring inequities that stem from gender or class or ethnic differences, for example, because one can blithely say, __h, but they had a choice! We all have choices.

When the options are few, we can be happy with what we choose since we are confident that it is the best possible choice for us. When the options are practically infinite, though, we believe that the perfect choice for us must be out there somewhere and that it__ our responsibility to find it. Choosing can become a lose-lose situation: if we make a choice quickly without fully exploring the available options, we__l regret potentially missing out on something better; if we do exhaustively consider all the options, we__l expend more effort (which won__ necessarily increase the quality of our final choice), and if we discover other good options, we may regret that we can__ choose them all.

The quality of health care continues to improve, and people are living longer, but these developments mean that we__e likely to eventually find ourselves in a situation in which we__e forced to make difficult choices about our parents, other loved ones, or even ourselves that ultimately boil down to calculations of worth and value.

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

Whether we do it consciously or subconsciously, we tend to organize our lives to display our identity as accurately as possible. Our lifestyle choices often reveal our values, or at least what we__ like people to perceive as our values_as we make our everyday choices, we continuously calculate not just which choices best match who we are and what we want but also how those choices will be interpreted by others. We look for cues in our social environment to figure out what others think of this or that, which can require being sensitive to the most localized and up-to-date details of what a particular choice means.

One could even argue that we have a duty to create and pass on stories about choice because once a person knows such stories, they can__ be taken away from him. He may lose his possessions, his home, his loved ones, but if he holds on to a story about choice, he retains the ability to practice choice.

For animals, the confinement of the body is the confinement of the whole being, but a person can choose freedom even when he has no physical autonomy. In order to do so, he must know what choice is, and he must believe that he deserves it. By sharing stories, we keep choice alive in the imagination and in language. We give each other the strength to perform choice in the mind even when we cannot perform it with the body.